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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 CHAPTER 8: POSTSCRIPT TO GREEK ETHICS THE DIVISION of labor and the differentiation of function in early societies produces a vocabulary in which men are described in terms of the roles they fulfill.

The use of evaluative words follows hard upon this, since any role can be filled well or ill, and any customary mode of behavior conformed to or broken away from. But evaluation with a wider scope is only possible when traditional role behavior is seen in contrast with other possibilities, and the necessity of choice between old and new ways becomes a fact of social life.

It is not surprising therefore that it is in the transition from the society which was the bearer of the Homeric poems to the society of the fifth-century city-state that good and its cognates acquired a variety of uses, and that it is in the following decades that men reflect self-consciously about those uses. Greek philosophical ethics differs from later moral philosophy in ways that reflect the difference between Greek society and modern society.

The concepts of duty and responsibility in the modern sense appear only in germ or marginally; those of goodness, virtue, and prudence are central. The respective roles of these concepts hinge upon a central difference. In general, Greek ethics asks, What am I to do if I am to fare well? Modern ethics asks, What ought I to do if I am to do right? and it asks this question in such a way that doing right is made something quite independent of faring well.

A writer thoroughly imbued with the modern spirit in ethics, the Oxford philosopher H. A. Prichard20 could accuse Plato of falling into error simply by attempting to justify justice at all. For to justify justice is to show that it is more profitable than injustice, that it is to our interest to be just. But if we do what is just and right because it is to our interest, then, so Prichard takes almost for granted, we are not doing it because it is just and right at all.

Morality indeed cannot have any justification external to itself; if we do not do what is right for its own sake, and whether it is to our interest or not, then we are not doing what is right. The assumption made by Prichard is that the notion of what is to our interest, of what is profitable to us, is logically independent of the concept of what it is just and right for us to do.