The Project
The 18ETHICS project investigates eighteenth-century ethics putting in the foreground its fundamental aim to provide guidance about moral issues. The underlying working hypothesis is that the normative moral theories that make the most substantial part of the debates on ethics in the eighteenth century revolve around the assumption that philosophers should act as experts on moral issues. In this light, eighteenth-century debates on ethics will be examined as a response to moral disagreement.
The project will thus concentrate mainly on the comprehensive doctrine of duties that made much of the work on ethics between Pufendorf and the early nineteenth century, with a special focus on systematic treatments of ethics by British, German and (to a smaller extent) French moral philosophers.
Looking at those debates in these terms, namely, we shall investigate crucial, yet largely unexplored areas of the philosophical discussion that were the main concern of eighteenth-century moral philosophers. More specifically, the project shall be pursued along five lines of inquiry:
- Moral demands towards oneself
- Moral demands towards others
- Are there moral demands towards animals?
- Disagreement concerning moral demands
- Methods and assumptions of practical ethics
