Richard Price and the Foundation of Virtue : Some Historical Roots of Contemporary Ethics in “A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals”

An examination of a little-known 18th-century texts of moral philosophy.

Although little known, Richard Price’s A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals (1758) is one of the most relevant texts of eighteenth-century moral philosophy. Hastings Rasdhall described it “as the best work published on Ethics till quite recent times” because it “contains the gist of the kantian doctrine without Kant’s confusions”; C.D. Broad pointed out in this regard that “until Ross published his book The Right and the Good in 1930” there existed “no statement and defense of what may be called the ‘rationalistic type’ of ethical theory comparable in merit to Price’s”; and W.D. Hudson considered A Review “probably the best statement of the case for rational intuitionism which has ever been written”. In this volume Francesco Allegri demonstrates, through a rigorous analysis of the text, the full validity of previous evaluations, highlighting in particular that in A Review it is possible to find many of the traits that characterize the ethical reflection of our own times, such as the exigency to focus attention on the meaning of terms in order to clarify and resolve disputes; the identification of different levels and types of inquiry and the need to keep them distinct; the thesis that moral judgments are not definable in non-moral terms; the criticism of all forms of normative monism; the non-absolute nature of ethical principles, to be conceived as prima facie or pro tanto duties; the necessity to distinguish the moral properties of the agent from the moral properties of the action, etc. For this reason, confronting Price’s Review means going to the historical roots of contemporary ethics.