2025.06.5 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Stephen Darwall, Modern Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to Kant, Cambridge University Press, 2023, 382pp., $34.99 (pbk), ISBN 9780521677790.
Reviewed by Amy M. Schmitter, University of Alberta
Some readers may recognize the title of Stephen Darwall’s study as a nod to Elizabeth Anscombe’s 1958 gauntlet, “Modern Moral Philosophy.” Responding to “Anscombe’s challenge” is the aim of this book, the first of a projected two volumes. Anscombe directed her attack against those moral philosophies that rely on law-like notions of obligation and duty, without grounding them in a (divine) lawgiver, a move she thought rendered their views unintelligible, but which she took to be common throughout modern ethics. Darwall accepts Anscombe’s description of the “fundamentally deontic or juridical character” of modern moral philosophy (3), and sets out to see how the philosophies in question can answer her charges by tracing the centuries-long emergence of a package of interconnected deontological concepts and claims. After…
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