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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books A Short History of Ethics: a History of Moral Philosophy From the Homeric Age To the Twentieth Century PREFACE A Short History of Ethics was first published in the United States by Collier Books, a division of Macmillan Publishing Company, in 1966 and then in Britain by what was then Routledge & Kegan Paul. It has since been translated into Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, German, Slovenian, and, most recently in 1995, into Polish.

The translator of the Polish edition, Professor Adam Chmielewski, invited me to write a preface for Polish readers and I gratefully used this opportunity to consider some of the respects in which the original text needs to be corrected or modified and some of the ways in which my perspectives on the history of ethics have changed. First of all I need to note that the title is misleading: this is a short history of Western ethics, not of ethics.

And I now have an opportunity to take account of the pertinent criticisms on particular issues made by others, to whom I am most grateful, and at least to recognize the fact that Western moral philosophy has continued to have a history since 1966. But I have not attempted to bring the story up to date. My own most fundamental dissatisfactions with this book derive from changes in my own philosophical and moral standpoint. I do of course still endorse a great deal of what I then asserted.

But, when I now read the story that I told then, I see it as a story in need of revision, one in a succession of genuinely instructive stories about the history of moral philosophy which have been told by philosophers-for example, Hegel’s, Marx’s, and Sidgwick’s (although I am well aware that my work does not rank with theirs)-each of which could later be improved upon.

And in my own later writings- especially After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, second edition, 1982), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990)-I have tried on various topics to improve upon A Short History of Ethics.

I am, however, conscious both of how much there is in the Short History with which I still agree and that it was only by first writing that book and then reflecting upon it that I learned how to do better.