ABSTRACT
It can, I think, be said of the period we are considering that with respect to ethics, amid all the individual statements or restatements of personal views on right and wrong, there were three major themes that together have an especially strong claim to our attention. One of them, the ideal of philanthropy (literally, the 'love of mankind'), rested on a very old impulse to perform good works, ·an impulse sanctified by Hebrew scripture and the Christian doctrine of charity but not finally dependent on any formal religious teaching. A second theme, the Utilitarianism of Bentham's Philosophical Radicals, was firmly rooted in the rationalism and individualism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The third, Immanuel Kant's 'categorical imperative', though its formulator was at once a philosophe and a devout Christian, rejected the Enlightenment's rational calculation of benefits to individuals as well as the ideal of simple charity as being, both the one and the other, incapable of supplying an independent standard of ethical judgement.
