Virginia Woolf’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy

Abstract

In spite of her claim for modernity, Woolf’s work owes a lot to the Victorian tradition, especially, I will argue, to British moral philosophers. Moral philosophy, from the early Utilitarians to Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics and Stephen’s Science of Ethics , will be shown to resonate in Woolf’s work. Basing my argument on “On Being Ill,” I will show that Woolf reenacts in an original way the debates over morals and ethics that took place in Victorian times, while responding to Moore’s philosophy as expounded in Principia Ethica and qualifying it, thus paving the way for later twentieth- and twenty-first-century ethical theories.