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This chapter discusses neurocognitive work relevant to moral psychology and the proposition that innate factors make important contributions to moral judgment. It reviews various sources of evidence for an innate moral faculty, before presenting brain-imaging data in support of the same conclusion. It is argued that our moral thought is the product of an interaction between some ‘gut-reaction’ moral emotions and our capacity for abstract reflection.

This chapter provides a summary assessment of Hare’s theory, both as an empirical account of actual human moral thinking and as a normative theory of how we ought to think and act. The chapter argues that the empirical adequacy of Hare’s theory is bolstered by its ability to explain the diversity of moral views and by the ubiquity of the golden rule, and the chapter defends its normative adequacy by responding in detail to a range of objections. One objection concerns the inability of people to simultaneously employ both explicitly utilitarian thinking and a system of nonutilitarian intuitive level rules, but the chapter points to recent empirical research suggesting that they do exactly that. The other objections are variations on the claim that the theory leads to counter intuitive conclusions on a range of cases, but the chapter shows how Hare can give plausible responses to the full range of these cases.

This introductory chapter discusses the concept of personhood, and provides a general overview of Hare’s theory. In day-to-day speech, “person” is often used synonymously with “human being,” but in philosophical discussions of personhood, persons are defined as individuals who deserve special treatment or respect in virtue of having certain cognitive capacities. The burden of proof is on the proponent of a particular definition to show why having those cognitive capacities qualifies one for special moral respect. Hare distinguishes between what he calls “critical level” moral thinking, which is explicitly utilitarian, and what he calls “intuitive level” moral thinking, which follows sets of rules that may be very non-utilitarian in flavor. The overview of Hare’s theory in this chapter emphasizes the place of animals and how, in particular, Hare’s two level utilitarianism can incorporate aspects of both animal welfare and animal rights views.

Hare argues that all moral thinking is ultimately utilitarian, because moral judgements have three logical properties that, taken together, force us to think like utilitarians. At the same time, he argues that good utilitarian reasons for not using explicitly utilitarian thinking in most normal, day-to-day situations. For these reasons, Hare’s is a two level version of utilitarianism: it embraces, in addition to explicitly utilitarian thinking at what Hare calls “the critical level,” what he calls “intuitive level” thinking for normal, day-to-day decision making. This chapter focuses on the logical properties of critical level thinking: universalizability, overridingness, and (in Hare’s special sense) prescriptivity, and Hare’s argument that these three properties together force us to think like utilitarians. I give both an informal proof this, based on the familiar golden rule and a formal proof based on a Harean analysis of the three properties, and I respond to two key objections.

Hare argues that good utilitarian reasons can be given for not thinking like utilitarians in most normal situations, where several different kinds of rules should be adhered to. This chapter focuses on this “intuitive level thinking,” emphasizing the complications that it introduces into a utilitarian analysis of a situation, and how the resulting subtleties bring a utilitarian analysis closer to common sense. There are four categories of such rules: the common morality of a society, which are not formally stated but which are widely embraced and understood as binding on all members; codes of professional ethics, which are explicitly stated but understood to be binding only on members of particular professions; laws, which are both explicitly stated and binding on all; and personal morality, which is binding only on the individual and may or may not be formally stated.

This paper introduces a two level account of moral thinking that, unlike the alternatives, is able to do justice to three very plausible propositions that seem to form an inconsistent triad: (1) people can be morally virtuous without the aid of philosophy; (2) morally virtuous people non-accidentally act for good reasons, and work out what it is that they ought to do on the basis of considering such reasons; and (3) philosophers engaged in the project of normative ethics are not wasting their time when they search after highly general moral principles which could not be discovered through non-philosophical thinking, and which specify the good reasons that virtuous people act on, as well as provide a criterion or criteria for determining what it is that people ought to do. In order to reconcile all three of these claims it is arguably necessary to adopt a particular way of thinking about virtue, as well as a particular two-level account of reasons (reasons as evidence).

The key themes of the book are recapitulated in the course of a general assessment of the relationship of Augustinianism and Cartesianism in 17th-century moral thought. The writers discovered are defended against the Sartrean-Barthesian critique that they concentrate on psychological and moral issues, and thus obscure social and political ones. Nicole in particular develops a theory of the working of an individualist (‘modern’) society, in which he draws on an Augustinian ethic that prevents him from justifying this state of affairs. There is a link between theology and a critical social vision.

The 1880s were the pivotal years in Victorian moral thought. A new wave of awareness of the plight of the urban poor was expressed in a range of both practical and intellectual activities. Some, such as Charles Booth, committed themselves to a vast project of social-scientific surveying and classifying of the urban poor. The 1880s was also the decade that saw the flourishing of respectable unbelief. The atheist Charles Bradlaugh took his seat in Parliament, and the agnostic Thomas Huxley became president of the Royal Society. The best-selling novel of the decade, Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888), told the story of an Anglican clergyman losing his faith and founding a new religious brotherhood in the East End of London based on a humanistic reinterpretation of Christianity.

In his general account of moral thought, Prichard holds that to regard a given action as right, we must imagine ourselves to be in a certain set of circumstances. In doing so, we conceive of ourselves as bound by those circumstances to perform that action. Since we have various general convictions about moral obligation, no single characteristic leads us to regard right acts as right. When two general convictions conflict, we are not in a position to know what our duty is. Being ignorant of some relevant circumstances, we cannot answer the question ‘What ought we to do?’ This follows from the fact that no common characteristic renders actions into duties.

This introductory chapter discusses how, over the course of the nineteenth century, an “intuitive” faith in an internalized sense of right and wrong came to take an increasingly prominent, if fraught, place in English moral life. It was “moralistic” figures like George Eliot—that is, novelists—who would provide the most lasting expression of this prominence. The compulsion of narrative, a reader's feeling of being drawn through a text, was a key term in the developing novel art of the nineteenth century. The metaphor of physical motion, which Victorians applied to the reading experience, came to offer a means of describing the movement from what is to what ought to be—or at least the yearning for that movement. At the same time, the moral valence that readers placed on the stories they read came to shape, in terms of both market forces and creative tradition, the principles that now define the well-plotted realist novel. By offering a fuller context for the ethical discourse of the British nineteenth century, this book argues that Victorian formalism was inextricably tied to moral thought. This not only impacts one's reading of Victorian literary and philosophical history but also offers a new perspective on one's own approaches to literature.

This chapter explains how ‘altruism’ made its way into the first published part of the greatest record of the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary. It uses this story of lexicographers, readers, definitions, and illustrative quotations as an initial vignette of the world of Victorian moral thought. It also discusses the relationship between words and concepts and the different assumptions and methods appropriate to writing the histories of each. In his History in English Words, Owen Barfield noted that the nineteenth century saw a proliferation of English words formed in combination with ‘self-’. Mentioning especially ‘self-help’ and a newly positive sense of ‘self-respect’, he saw this development as an aspect of the rise of Victorian ‘individualism’ and ‘humanism’.