Timeline of Major Ethical Philosophies

John Rawls and others

1921 BCE

John Rawls’ magisterial A Theory of Justice especially has sparked interest in Kant’s ethical and political thinking. His idea is that principles of justice are based on the notion of a hypothetical contract to which reasonable individuals would agree from a position in which substantive facts about the good are not known. In this way Rawls argues that the priority of rules of justice over may be justified independently of utilitarian concerns with the good.

Existentialist Ethics

1905 BCE

Existentialist ethics,originating in the work of kierkegaard,Heidegger and developed by Jean Paul Sartre.
The Existentialist ethics focuses on doctrine of radical human freedom and responsibility. The existentialist typically argued from an assumption of radical freedom to the conclusion that values are subjective rather than objective they are ultimately created by free choice.

Analytic philosophy

1873 BCE

G.E Moore (1873-1958)- the one who set the meta-ethical agenda.
Principia Ethical-Moore argues against naturalistic ethical theories that attempt to identify goodness with some natural property such as being pleasurable or being desired. Logical positivist-embraced a theory of linguistic meaning called the principles of verification. It says in the principles that a sentence is strictly meaningful only if it expresses something that can be confirmed or discomfirmed by empirical observation.

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 BCE

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) criticism of conventional moral codes revolves around his notion of slave morality. Slave morality, which corresponds closely to the Judeo-Christian moral code with its focus on duty and self-sacrifice. Slave morality is the outcome of weak people’s coming to regard the qualities of the naturally strong as evil, and transforming their own resentment into current conceptions of morality, which have greatly debilitated human life.

G.W.F. Hegel

1770 BCE

G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) claimed that the categorical imperative was formal and empty because any maxim could be willed as a universal law. He emphasizes the social aspect of moral lives, the extent to which moral codes are drawn from the ethical institutions of the family, civil society, and the state.

Immanuel Kant

1724 BCE

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) argues, the ‘good will’ is the only unconditional good, that is, the only thing that is good in all circumstances. In rough, a good will is a motivation to do the right action because it is the right. Being motivated in this way is to be motivated by duty. The ‘good will’ is good not because of what it brings about but in virtue of its own principle of willing.

David Hume

1711 BCE

Hume (1711-1776) contends that reason is motivationally inert: “Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them”. Hume emphasizes the emotion of sympathy, which is a reaction occasioned in one living creature by distress in another. The seeds of utilitarianism lie in the writings of Hume, who emphasizes the ‘utility’ of virtues.

Thomas Hobbes

1588 BCE

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1659) provoked widespread reaction when he argued in his masterpiece, Leviathan (1651), that there is no ultimate or objective good. Good and evil are naturally relative to people’s appetites so that they comes to regard what they are inclined to pursue as good and what they are inclined to avoid as bad. Good and bad are relative to individuals’ desires and preferences: there is no such thing as objective goodness.

Modern Ethics (1583-1645)

1583 BCE

modern natural law affirms the right of individual human beings to determine their own purposes. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) is an important figure in the mediation and transformation of the natural law theories of the medieval period into an Enlightenment context. He argued that natural law does not depend on God’s existence but on rational human nature, and that it is the function of political society to protect the natural rights of human beings.

Scholasticism: Scotus (1265-1308) and Ockham (1287-1347)

1287 BCE

In contrast with Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and to a greater degree, William of Ockham, incline towards the second conception of natural law in which human law and morality are directly dependent on God’s capacity as a lawgiver. According to Ockham, natural law is ultimately rooted in the will of God. This idea has become known as theological voluntarism, a meta-ethical doctrine according to which actions are right in virtue of God’s willing them.

Scholasticism: Aquinas (1224-1274)

1224 BCE

Eudaimonia is transposed into perfect happiness (beatitude) conceived as union with God. For Aquinas, then, the goal of human life is fully achieved in the beatific vision, identified as supernatural union with God in the after life. Aquinas’ ethical theory has been extraordinarily influential, especially as it has shaped the ethical teachings of the Catholic Church.

Ancient Greek Ethics: PROTAGORAS (490 BCE- 420 BCE) RELATIVISM

490 BCE

One of the earliest sophists(teacher who teach the art of public speaking), Protagoras, denied the existence of objective moral truth and defended a version of moral relativism. He emphasised the extent to which moral codes are human creations, sets of customs practiced and upheld by particular communities.

Ancient Greek Ethics: Socrates 470 BCE-399 BCE

470 BCE

Socrates was convinced that possessing and exercising the virtues are absolutely crucial if a person is to lead a good and happy (eudaimon) life. The point of philosophical inquiry into the virtues is that acting correctly requires that one possess knowledge of the human good. Indeed, Socrates seems to have held that the virtues of self-control, wisdom, and courage are nothing other than a particular type of knowledge.

Ancient Greek Ethics: Plato 428 BCE- 348 BCE

428 BCE

In Plato’s Theaetetus, he is said have claimed that “whatever the city establishes as just, is just for that city as long as it judges so.”
In Plato’s Gorgias, Callicles argues that conventional moral codes are the inventions of a weak majority so as to subordinate the powerful few. Weak men promote belief in the goodness of equality since this is the best they can attain. It is a law of nature that the strong ought to possess more than the weak.

Ancient Greek Ethics: Aristotle 384 BCE- 322 BCE

384 BCE

Aristotle’s basic thought is that happiness (eudaimonia)—living well—depends on a creature’s perfecting its natural endowments. It follows that the good life for man involves the attainment of virtue or excellence in reason. In general, his claim is that the virtues of character and intellect are ways of perfecting reason and hence indispensable to the good human life. However, he does not neglect the importance of friends, wealth, and social status in a good life.

Medieval Ethics: Church Fathers

354 BCE

Saint Augustine (354 BCE- 430 BCE) held that one might know the good and still not do it. To make sense of this possibility Augustine develops a notion of the will as an executive power than need not follow the intellect’s judgments. A person can perform an action that he judges to be entirely unjustified. It is always open to the will to reject the judgments of the intellect. The will is capable of choosing to do something the intellect judges to be bad.

Later Greek Ethics: Epicureanism

307 BCE

Epicurus identifies the eudaimon life with the life of pleasure, understanding eudaimonia as a more or less continuous experience of the pleasure, and also, freedom from pain and distress (ataraxia). But Epicurus does not advocate that one pursue any and every pleasure. Rather, he recommends a policy whereby pleasures are optimized in the long run. Some pleasures are not worth having because they lead to greater pains, and some pains are worthwhile when they lead to greater pleasures.

Later Greek Ethics: Stoicism

300 BCE

A basic assumption of Stoic thinking is that the universe itself is governed by laws of reason, and structured in the best possible way. This metaphysical thesis is connected with the ethical view that the good life is one that is lived in accordance with reason. Moral goodness and happiness are attained by mirroring the perfect rationality of the world in oneself and by finding out and living one’s own assigned role in the cosmic order of things.