Arguments over Obligation

Introduction There seems to be a degree of agreement about what might count as the 'new' histories of philosophy. In the Epilogue to his monumental The Invention of Autonomy, J. B. Schneewind provides a snapshot of the old and the new, pointing to the difference between histories of moral philosophy that assume a chain of thinkers all trying to solve the same problem and those newer histories that drop this assumption in favour of a " variable-aim approach ". In accordance with the newer approaches: " We will not, in particular, suppose that everyone who thought about morality in a way we consider philosophical was trying to solve the same problem or answer the same questions. We will think instead that the aims of moral philosophy — the problems that moral philosophers thought required reflection — are at least as likely to have changed as to have remained constant through history ". To approach past philosophers in terms of their own problems and arguments, instead of those we now deem essential, we must adopt an historical investigative attitude. " Here " , Schneewind comments, " only historical information, and not rational reconstruction of arguments in the best modern terms, will tell us what we need to know " (Schneewind 1998: 550-1). Finally, if the historical course of moral philosophy is not governed by a single problem and its one true solution then, in order to take up the historical attitude, we must not assume that philosophy advances by coming closer to this truth or, presumably, that it 'advances' in any particular direction at all: Failure to achieve coherence or to produce valid supporting arguments may explain the change in some cases. But the single-aim view leaves unexplained a great deal that the historian will naturally wish to consider. Why do some theories emerge and flourish and then disappear, why do some recur, why is there so little convergence, what does moral philosophy as a practice or discipline do in and for the societies in which it is supported? It is more useful for the historian to turn away from the single-aim view and adopt a variable-aim approach instead. (Schneewind 1998: 553) Schneewind thus offers some important pointers to histories of moral philosophy that are new in the sense of dropping the assumption that history advances (or regresses) along a single problem-path towards a true solution, requiring us instead to identify …