Aristotle in the Ethic Wars

Abstract

Abstract Beginning from a short history of ethics offered in Korsgaard’s The Sources of Normativity, this chapter notes the practice—dating back to Anscombe’s ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’—of offering narratives about the history of modern ethics in order to unsettle the metaphysical picture underlying the rise of non-cognitivism or subjectivism in ethics. These narratives often feature Aristotelian virtue ethics as a potential alternative, and have shaped the reading of Aristotle’s ethics. The supposed ‘gap’ separating ancient and modern ethics is questioned, and with it the claim that Aristotle was unreflective about the grounding of his ethics; the supposition is also disputed that he regarded human nature as an ‘Archimedean Point’ to ground the demands of ethics, as the work of Williams and Foot might suggest. From a survey of modern appropriations of his ideas, two research questions are isolated: was Aristotle an Archimedean naturalist, and was he metaethically naive?