The Moral Philosophy of J.A. Hobson

John Allett

Chapter 1 in J. A. Hobson after Fifty Years, 1994, pp 1-18 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract J. A. Hobson was born one year prior to the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species and J.S. Mill’s On Liberty. Thus laid out before him as a young man were the contours of a debate on the grounding of morality that was increasingly to preoccupy late Victorian society, now made anxious by the faltering of traditional religious conviction. Darwin’s theory of natural selection was of course an idea-force of paradigmatic power, fuelling, among many other things, several notable attempts to establish an objective standard of moral values identical with the workings of nature and which humankind ignored at its certain peril. Mill’s essay, on the other hand, was read by many as an especially compelling statement of the familiar position that morality was a cultural achievement, the product of noble spirits, and hence not reducible to biological drives and urges.

Keywords: Moral Philosophy; Moral Theory; Moral Community; Naturalistic Fallacy; Naturalistic Ethic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1994
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-23213-0_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781349232130

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-23213-0_1

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().