ABSTRACT

Philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often began their accounts of morality or politics with a description of man in a ‘state of nature’. The implausibility of many philosophical accounts of morality – such as the more extreme forms of Egoism or Emotivism – would have been obvious had their authors begun with a list of truisms about human nature. The theory of egoism is a rival to utilitarianism as an account of right action in that it asserts that actions are right or wrong, or are obligatory, in so far as they are in the agent’s own long-term interests. A utilitarian can also stress a second main function performed by moral rules. In addition to the human deficiencies for which ‘lightning calculators’ can compensate, human beings are also deficient in altruism. The concept which may be used to sum up the emotional side to social morality is that of fraternity.