And since many contemporary readers may well find themselves...

And since many contemporary readers may well find themselves more at home with the standpoint which was mine in 1966 rather than that which is now mine, it seems important still to invite readers to make the story told in the Short History their own starting-point for learning about and then reflecting upon the history of ethics. What I hope to do in this preface is to explain why I think this story needs nonetheless to be challenged.

But, before I subject myself and the story that I then told to some radical questioning, I need to attend not to my own view of the overall narrative, but to the more important of the criticisms that have been leveled at the book by others. Those criticisms have mostly concerned inadequacies in my treatments of particular authors, a type of criticism which I predicted and welcomed in advance in my original Preface.

I too have become highly critical of such inadequacies, quite as much as other critics have been, in those areas where what I wrote plainly needs to be corrected or supplemented.

Let me therefore try to supply something of what is needed by way of correction and supplement, noting however that just as it was an attempt to summarize large and complex theses and arguments all too briefly, which was a major source of defects and omissions in the original text, so what I have to say now will necessarily once again be compressed and perhaps too compressed.

This is a difficulty that I shall be able to overcome only when I finally do write that as yet nonexistent book that I think of as “A Very Long History of Ethics.” Four of the chapters where particular corrections are needed are chapter 9 on Christianity, chapter 12 on the British Eighteenth-Century Argument, chapter 14 on Kant, and chapter 18 on Modern Moral Philosophy. Let me deal with these in turn: Chapter 9: Christianity.

This chapter is the most striking example in the book of a kind of defect which I pointed out in the Preface when I wrote that “This book is inevitably the victim of the author’s overnumerous intentions.” Between 109 pages on Greek ethics and 149 pages on Western European ethics from the Renaissance to 1964 I sandwiched ten pages within which I attempted to identify the distinctive moral outlook of the Christian religion and to bridge the historical gap of 1300 years between Marcus Aurelius and Machiavelli and to give some account of the importance of medieval moral philosophy.

What an absurdity! But it was not only my absurdity.