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470 BCE
Socrates of Athens
Moral intellectualism refers to Socrates' emphasis on knowledge. He held that all virtue was founded on knowledge (hence Socrates is characterized as a virtue intellectualist). -
384 BCE
Aristotle
emphasized that virtue is practical and that the purpose of ethics is to become good, not merely to know. Aristotle also claims that the right course of action depends upon the details of a particular situation, rather than being generated merely by applying a law. -
551
Confucius
asserts that filial piety and fraternal love are the roots of humaneness, the foundation and origin of human morality; all social goods are extensions of family ethics. -
1274
Saint Thomas Aquinas
According to Aquinas, all human actions are governed by a general principle or precept that is foundational to and necessary for all practical reasoning: good is to be done and evil is to be avoided. This principle is not something we can ignore or defy. -
René Descartes
claims that the supreme good consists in virtue, which is a firm and constant resolution to use the will well; virtue presupposes knowledge of metaphysics and natural philosophy; happiness is the supreme contentment of mind which results from exercising virtue; the virtue of generosity is the key to all the virtues and a general remedy for regulating the passions, and virtue can be secured even though our first-order moral judgments never amount to knowledge. -
David Hume
he believed "causes and effects are discoverable not by reason, but by experience". He goes on to say that, even with the perspective of the past, humanity cannot dictate future events because thoughts of the past are limited, compared to the possibilities for the future. -
Immanuel Kant
He defined the “Categorical imperative,” the idea that there are intrinsically good and moral ideas to which we all have a duty, and that rational individuals will inherently find reason in adhering to moral obligation. -
Ralph Waldo Emerson
He believes that society is anathema to the Ethics of Authenticity, what he calls “self-reliance,” believing, trusting, relying on oneself to lead the life one wants. -
Karl Marx
describes morality as a property of one's behavior conditioned by social and historical existence as those moral values that bring together (or force apart) living individuals -
Michel Foucault
states that the form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection, and by this, he means that freedom consists in reflectively informed ascetic practices or practices of the self.