ABSTRACT
The modern world emerges with a rather different attitude towards appetite and pleasure. Human beings are understood to seek happiness, but this is happiness understood as pleasure, the satisfaction of desires. The Enlightenment thinkers continued to move away from the idea of a religious foundation for morality, in favour of founding morality rationally, and in particular in terms of a scientific understanding of the human being. Rights are another important element in the moral thinking of modernity. In addition to explaining the purpose of the state, the social contract theory gives us another way of thinking about the nature of morality. Indeed, right from the start, utilitarianism was hostile to the notion of natural or individual rights that are held by all human beings. Hobbes introduces into modernity the notion of the human being as a purely natural being, a creature driven to seek pleasure and avoid pain, a machine programmed for self-preservation, that pointedly excludes any such moral dimension.
