This essay, one of the last that Frankena wrote, provides a scrupulously detailed exploration of the various possible meanings of one of Sidgwick's most famous footnotes in the Methods Long intrigued by what Sidgwick had in mind when he said that he would explain how it came about that for moderns it is not tautologous to claim that one's own good is one's only reasonable ultimate end, Frankena uses this note as a point of departure for a penetrating (...) review of Sidgwick's insights and ambiguities on the differences between ancient and modern ethics. (shrink)

I begin with a note about moral goodness as a quality, disposition, or trait of a person or human being. This has at least two different senses, one wider and one narrower. Aristotle remarked that the Greek term we translate as justice sometimes meant simply virtue or goodness as applied to a person and sometimes meant only a certain virtue or kind of goodness. The same thing is true of our word “goodness.” Sometimes being a good person means having all (...) the virtues, or at least all the moral ones; then goodness equals the whole of virtue. But sometimes, being a good person has a narrower meaning, namely, being kind, generous, and so forth. Thus, my OED sometimes equates goodness with moral excellence as a whole and sometimes with a particular moral excellence, viz., kindness, beneficence, or benevolence; and the Bible, when it speaks of God as being good sometimes means that God has all the virtues and sometimes only that he is kind, mereiful, or benevolent. When Jesus says, “Why callest thou me good: None is good, save one, that is God,” he seems to be speaking of goodness in the inclusive sense, but when the writer of Exodus has God himself say that he is “merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth,” God is using “goodness” in the narrower sense in which it means benevolence, for he goes on to make it clear that he is also just and severe. Similarly, “good will” may mean either “morally good will” in general, as it does in Kant, or it may mean only “benevolent will,” as it usually does; in “men of good will” it is perhaps ambiguous. (shrink)

In response to Hauerwas, Frankena explores the nature of a moral virtue and the relation between virtue and obligation. He argues that those notions are not related in all the ways Hauerwas suggests and that the ties that do link them can be understood on the basis of an ethical analysis that gives primacy to moral obligation. In response to both Hauerwas and Carney, he examines the relation between morality and religion and argues that his analysis of the concept (...) of morality allows an adequate understanding of both systems of thought. (shrink)

This book is an introduction to three important philosophies of education. It's main purpose, however, is to help teach the the student how to do philosophy of education.

An expansion of 3 lectures presented by the author in 1978 at the University of Michigan.

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1961, given by William K. Frankena, an American philosopher.

Morality has been getting a great deal of looking at in recent years by philosophers, theologians, psychologists, social scientists, journalists, and novelists, as well as by people, especially students, women, and young people, on the street. Much of this investigation has been aimed at redesigning morality or developing a ‘new morality’, and some of it at doing away with morality entirely and replacing it with something else, with the something elses ranging all the way from love, through religion, sincerity, authenticity, (...) and doing one's own thing, to selfishness. New-moralism and amoralism seem to be widespread, the first often being seen as an antidote to the second. At any rate, many are convinced that morality, at least modern morality, Christian or non-Christian, has been based on a mistake, or on a number of mistakes, though there are different views about what these are. Among others, moral philosophers have also been looking at morality, especially in the form of an inquiry into its definition, meaning, or nature, and into its logic, categories, and justification, but usually with some aloofness from the fray, thinking of themselves rather as elucidating morality than as revising or replacing it, leaving the driving to others, or taking for granted that morality is essentially sound as it stands, though sometimes defending it or at least studying the logic of the question ‘Why should I be moral?’. (shrink)

Thus ethical theory has been involved in a double controversy, the general controversy between naturalism and supernaturalism, and a more special one between naturalism, intuitionism, and non-cognitivism. These two debates have been variously mingled. Naturalists in the one sense have not always been naturalists in the other. Some naturalists in the broad sense have also been naturalists in the narrower, but some of them have been intuitionists, and many of them, especially recently, have been non-cognitivists. Again, supernaturalists have sometimes been (...) intuitionists, sometimes non-cognitivists, and sometimes naturalists. (shrink)

Today, as so often in the past, there is much ado about morality. Theologians, psychologists, social scientists, journalists, novelists, students, drop-outs, women's libbers, and people on the street are all asking pointed questions about it. Some are for de-moralizing society and the individual, asking either whether an individual should try to be moral or to assume a morality if he has it not, and if so why; or even whether our society should have a morality at all or has any (...) right to have one - asking in short, whether we should not “kick” the moral habit we have cultivated for so long. For those who reply that we should, there is the further question what is to take the place of morality, and the answers range from love, through religion, sincerity, authenticity, and doing one's own thing, to selfishness, an enlarged system of law and order, or just nothing at all. Those who think we should keep morality, on the other hand, often argue for a “new morality,” looking for a new moral wine and even for new bottles to put it in. Non-moralism and new-moralism are in the air, along with more than the usual intimations of immorality, and it is with them, and only indirectly with the immorality, that I am now concerned. (shrink)

This paper analyzes in some detail what an ethics of love would be like if interpreted rigorously as an ethics of being rather than of doing. It delineates the metaethical structure of such an ethics and suggests the characteristics of love appropriate to the structure. The author then indicates some problems that arise for such an ethical theory.

It is well known that Sidgwick finished his examination of “the methods of ethics” in some difficulty. Just what that difficulty was and how he came to be in it, we shall see in due course. This paper is written in the conviction that what he was doing is worth looking at again in the context of contemporary discussion.

Kantian ethics is both very much alive and very much under attack in recent moral philosophy, and so I propose to review some of the discussion, though I must say in advance that my review will have to be incomplete and oversimplified in various ways.