Developments in Moral and Social Thinking

Abstract During the second half of the nineteenth century a variety of different kinds of ethical thought came to take its place of intuitionism, which declined in popularity. In the 1860s J. S. Mill took it upon himself to update the utilitarianism of Bentham and his father, and a decade and a half later Henry Sidgwick sought to improve utilitarianism still further. At the same time, there was developed a series of new and entirely naturalistic approaches to ethics, deriving especially from evolutionary theory. The ethics of Herbert Spencer, and social Darwinism more generally, fall into this class. An altogether more radical approach is found in ethics and political philosophy of the British idealists. Stressing the fundamentally social identity of the individual, they argued that what is good for society and what is good for the individual necessarily coincide. In illustration, the chapter examines the ethics of F. H. Bradley, T. H. Green, and Bernard Bosanquet. The chapter closes with a consideration of the development of socialism, considering the contributions of F. D. Maurice, John Ruskin, and William Morris.