Stephen Darwall, Modern Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to Kant

Stephen Darwall’s Modern Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to Kant is the first volume of a two-part series on the history of Western moral philosophy from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. This first part covers the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, in some ways, reads as a response to Terence Irwin’s The Development of Ethics: A Historical and Critical Study, Vol. II: From Suarez to Rousseau (Oxford University Press, 2008). Irwin sees modern moral philosophy through the lens of “Aristotelian naturalism” (11). On this view, the best life is one that most realizes human nature. This view is eudaimonist in that the reasons to pursue the best life are based in an agent’s good, and duty obligates when compliance aligns with their good. Irwin’s view that eudaimonism is the dominant position in modern ethics challenges an earlier reading, from Sidgwick and Anscombe, which held that moderns prioritized duty over the good and, by doing so, invented deontic moral thought. Darwall’s Modern Moral Philosophy is a defense of this deontic reading.