Gordon Clark: History of Ethics (Baker's Dictionary of Christian Ethics)

1973. In Baker's Dictionary of Christian Ethics. Carl F.H. Henry, ed. Washington D.C.: Canon Press. [Reprinted in 1988 by Baker Book House.] History of Ethics

ETHICS, HISTORY OF. See also Evolutionary Ethics; Greek Ethics; Kant. Ethics, in its history from Plato to Jeremy Bentham, has been closely conjoined with politics. Political decisions require ethical judgments; an individual man cannot be separated from society; therefore there is no clear-cut distinction between ethics and politics, or between so-called personal ethics and social ethics.

To maintain some distinction, a degree of difference is inserted in the definition, making ethics a little more individual and politics a little more social.

Henry Sidgwick, the great ethical scholar of the nineteenth century, acknowledging the vagueness of ethics' boundaries, defined the subject as a rational procedure for determining what individual human beings "ought" to seek to realize by voluntary action. Ethics could also be defined as the study and eventually the justification of criteria by which one human life can be identified as better or worse than another.

Although some of the main views can be described by a title (e.g., Hedonism, the theory that pleasure is the supreme good Altruism, the theory that not every natural impulse is selfish; Instrumentalism and Situationism, the theory that there are neither final ends nor fixed rules, and that each decision must be an individual aesthetic intuition), it is almost impossible to classify the historical views with exactitude, for there is too much room for cross classification.

If one should divide the theories of all ethics into teleological (those in which the value of an act is determined by some purpose) and ateleological, the only representative of the latter would be Kant; and this makes an unbalanced classification. Then too, teleological systems are so various that their similarity (of being based on purpose) seems superficial.

For the Epicureans the purpose of a good act is the sense pleasure of the individual. For the Utilitarians it is the pleasure (maybe sense pleasure, maybe not) of the whole human race. For Aristotle the purpose of man, by nature, is happiness, and this is a combination of intellectual and moral activity in which pleasure plays but a small role. For contemporary existentialism the good life is anything one chooses, provided he does not choose to conform to his society.

Christianity, in detail, is not teleological. One does not determine a right from a wrong choice by calculating the probability of achieving a purpose. Neither are its rules determined by formal logic alone, as Kant's categorical imperative is. The particular rules of morality are the commands of God. Yet these have a purpose in glorifying God and advancing man's blessedness. But no man has any knowledge just how this is accomplished.

Since, too, philosophers frequently agree on ethics while disagreeing on metaphysics and epistemology, and vice versa, the best procedure is to study each view in its historical matrix.