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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 11 NEW VALUES BOTH HOBBES and Spinoza struck their contemporaries as outrageous innovators; to both the label of “atheist”-which was used in seventeenth-century Europe with almost as much accuracy as the label “communist” is used in twentieth-century America-was attached.

Spinoza was expelled from the synagogue; Hobbes was attacked by the Anglican clergy. And just because they stand so far from their contemporaries, it is only in a relatively indirect way that they give expression to the common and shared dilemmas of their society. But the questions which they ask, and the values which they embody-different as these are-soon become questions and values which inform a whole way of social life.

And in a variety of ways philosophical questions and practical questions come into a closer relationship. In a variety of ways, for differing social circumstances provide relevantly different contexts for the relationship. In France, for example, philosophy in analyzing the concepts of the existing social and political order, those of sovereignty, law, property and the like, becomes critical of those concepts, and so an instrument for criticism of the established order.

In England philosophy, in analyzing the concepts of the existing order, often provides a justification for these concepts.

The differences between France and England are partly to be explained by the fact that the English social order provides many French writers in the eighteenth century with a model in terms of which to criticize their own society; whereas within England no such model as yet exists, although by the end of the century the French Revolution had enabled France to return the compliment.

Nonetheless, in England we can mark the stages by which one moral scheme was transformed into a largely different one. We can use this history to partially explain how philosophical criticism can have quite different relations to social change in different types of period. There may be forms of society in which a variety of criteria are employed to justify and explain moral, social, and political standards. Do we obey the current rules and seek the current ideals because God authorizes them?

Or because they are prescribed by a sovereign with legitimate authority? Or because obeying them is in fact a means to the most satisfying forms of human life?