Rule and end in morals / by John H. Muirhead.

  • John Henry Muirhead
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Rule and end in morals / by John H. Muirhead. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    rule of ‘right reason’, and in this way determinate¬ ness given to what was otherwise indeterminate and chaotic. We read the Ethics and Politics with a strange myopia unless we see that there is no fading out in them of Plato’s vision of the idea of the Good, but rather an attempt to show how in fact it takes hold of the concrete material of life and embodies itself with greater or less complete¬ ness in it. What led to the temporary loss of the vision as such a power was, not the teaching of Aristotle, but the rise of influences Stoic, Roman, Christian, and other, under which the idea of that which it is Right to do, of a Rule according to which men should direct their conduct tended to take the place of the idea of an End or form of goodness to be realized in life. What philosophers made of this when they came to reflect upon it is familiar to the student of the history of Ethics—in theories of Moral Sense, as the immediate apprehension of rightness and wrongness as qualities of particular actions, or of general rules given a priori from which these qualities may be deduced, ending in the magnificent idealization of the law of Duty as the pronouncement of Reason in Kant. What is important for our subject is the reversion from this in the neo-Kantian ethics of the later nineteenth century to the teleological as opposed to what has been called the deontological point of view, accompanied by a vigorous attempt to
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