The Development of Ethics: A Historical and Critical Study. Volume I: From Socrates to the Reformation (review)

‘The Development of Ethics’ proves a rather misleading title for Terence Irwin’s latest book. He describes it more accurately as “a selective historical and critical study in the Socratic tradition, with special attention to Aristotelian naturalism, its formation, elaboration, criticism, and defence” (1). ‘Socratic’ refers to Irwin’s method: not merely describing “a collective Socratic inquiry” historically but also evaluating it and taking part in it (3). Unlike Alasdair MacIntyre and J. B. Schneewind, who think that “a moral theory cannot be assessed timelessly, and there are no timelessly appropriate questions that different moral theories try to answer,” Irwin declares that history reveals substantial agreement on the main principles of ethics. The historian’s task is to discover them (7). Small wonder, then, that Development does so little to illuminate how ethics changed over time. When an author seeks unity among moral philosophers of the past, or at least all the good ones, he can hardly be expected to highlight significantly new issues or approaches, let alone differences in historical context.

Irwin’s focus on “Aristotelian naturalism”—above all, on Thomas Aquinas as its finest exponent—does much to explain what volume 1 covers, what it omits, and how it unfolds. Neo-Platonists, “pagan” Roman philosophers, Jews, Muslims, Church Fathers other than Augustine, and Aristotle commentators in medieval faculties of arts (as opposed to theology) are scarcely even mentioned. After a twelve-page introduction, we find about 345 pages on Greek philosophy, including about 45 pages on Plato, 120 on Aristotle, and 75 on the Stoics. The volume proceeds with a chapter on “Christian Theology and Moral Philosophy” (under 40 pages) and a chapter on Augustine (under 25 pages); then it skips over 800 years, concluding with nine chapters on Aquinas (about 220 pages), two chapters on Duns Scotus, one on William of Ockham, one on Machiavelli, and one on “The Reformation and Scholastic Philosophy.” The last part of volume 1 includes extensive discussion of how Aquinas would, or at least could and should, reply to arguments in works composed in the three centuries after his death.

Given the author’s quest for relatively permanent principles, it would be unfair to protest that these later thinkers were arguing mainly with contemporaries, or thinkers more nearly contemporary than Aquinas, and quite often about issues of little interest to Aquinas himself. Irwin’s overarching aim, however, should never be forgotten. The entire book is shaped by his judgment that Aquinas’s works present the best statement of Aristotelian naturalism, beginning with his broad characterization of “Aristotelian naturalism” as the view that “identifies virtue and happiness in a life that fulfills the capacities of rational human nature” (4), and continuing with his assertion that Aquinas “derives his ethical theory from conditions on rational agency” (437).

This strangely Kantian but now-fashionable reading of pre-modern ethics belongs to a pattern prominent in Development as a whole, though controversial even among specialists in ancient philosophy. According to Irwin, Aristotle teaches that all virtues aim at “the fine” (kalon), and it is characteristic of the virtuous person to choose virtuous actions because they are fine (206). The Stoics’ ethical theory does not depend on their idea of a divine intelligence that orders everything for the good of the universe (291), nor does their claim that virtue is identical to happiness represent a major departure from Aristotle’s ethics (340–41). The later Christian claim that “the virtuous person does the right actions because they are right” represents no major departure, either, for “that motive is central both to the Aristotelian and to the Stoic account of the virtues” (384). Might one at least see a major departure in Aquinas’s demotion of naturally acquired moral virtues to “virtues” only in a relative sense, and especially in his argument that all moral virtues simpliciter are gifts of grace, infused by God...