In this magisterial study, one of our leading moral philosophers refutes
the charge (originally made by Elizabeth Anscombe) that modern ethics is
incoherent because it essentially depends on theological and religious
assumptions that it cannot acknowledge. Stephen Darwall's panoramic
picture starts with the seventeenth-century thinker Grotius and tells
the story continuously down to the time of Kant, exploring what was in
fact a completely new way of doing ethics based on secular ideas of
human psychology and universal accountability. He shows that thinkers
from Grotius to Kant are profoundly united by this modern approach, and
that it helped them to create a theory of natural human rights that
remains of great political relevance today. He further shows that this
new way of thinking provides conceptual resources that are far from
exhausted, and that moral philosophy in this idiom still has a vibrant
future.