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600 BCE
LAO-TZU (ALSO LAOZI, LIVED BETWEEN THE 6TH AND 4TH CENTURY BCE)
Urged individuals to achieve a state of wu wei, freedom from desire, an early staple tenet of Buddhist tradition thereafter. -
551 BCE
CONFUCIUS (551–479 BCE)
Developed a belief system focused on both personal and governmental morality through qualities such as justice, sincerity, and positive relationships with others. -
428 BCE
PLATO (428-348 BC)
Plato maintains a virtue-based eudaemonistic conception of ethics. That is to say, happiness or well-being (eudaimonia) is the highest aim of moral thought and conduct, and the virtues (aretê: 'excellence') are the requisite skills and dispositions needed to attain it. -
384 BCE
ARISTOTLE (384-322 BC)
The highest good and the end toward which all human activity is directed is happiness, which can be defined as continuous contemplation of eternal and universal truth. -
469
SOCRATES (469-399 BC)
For Socrates psychological good outweighs material good and that virtue is a psychological good of the first importance. -
JOHN LOCKE (1632–1704)
Established the method of introspection, focusing on one’s own emotions and behaviors in search of a better understanding of the self. -
DAVID HUME (1711–77)
Hume argued against moral absolutes, instead positing that our ethical behavior and treatment of others is compelled by emotion, sentiment, and internal passions, that we are inclined to positive behaviors by their likely desirable outcomes. -
JOHN STUART MILL (1806–73)
"Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain." -
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844–1900)
Favored perspectivism, which held that truth is not objective but is the consequence of various factors effecting individual perspective; -
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE (1905–80)
Argued that the existence of free will is in fact evidence of the universe’s indifference to the individual, an illustration that our freedom to act toward objects is essentially meaningless and therefore of no consequence to be intervened upon by the world.
