ABSTRACT
Bernard Williams wrote “We are contrasting ethical and egoistic considerations. What sorts of considerations bear on action but are not ethical considerations? There is one very obvious candidate, the considerations of egoism, those that relate to the comfort, excitement, self-esteem, power, or other advantages of the agent. The contrast between these considerations and the ethical is a platitude.”1 Yet the opposition has been rendered a platitude by the way in which the ethical is normally understood – as an investigation of the constraints that ought to be placed on the pursuit of self-interest. But there is another way of conceiving the ethical that does not conclude in this hackneyed dichotomy, a line of philosophers and intellectuals whose concerns are the ethical life and the ethical society but who are relatively uninterested in egoism as a problem. Among their ranks could be included numerous Continental thinkers. Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, certain branches of psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School come to mind; but some important American intellectuals, such as Thoreau, Emerson, and Dewey, also fall into this class.
