Jerome Schneewind is the author of two works in the history of modern moral theory that are widely acknowledged to be classics. These are Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy (1977) and The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (1998). No one with any interest in modern philosophy or the history of moral philosophy or ethics itself can afford not to know these works, especially the second. Knowing that the current anthology is a collection of the best of Schneewind's essays on moral philosophy from 1963 to 2009, nearly the full span of his career, should therefore be sufficient to motivate any serious student to seek them out. When invited to review the book, I leaped at the opportunity, and I can honestly say that reading the essays is an inestimable joy. They are constantly fascinating, careful in design, lucid, beautifully written, precisely argued, rich, and always challenging. For those who know Schneewind's great books and are already familiar with some of the essays, there is the pleasure of seeing complex lines of textual analysis, historical and philosophical argument, and interpretive reflection condensed in such clear and accessible fashion. For those who do not know the books, many of the essays ought to tempt the reader to find the books and immerse oneself in them. The book on Sidgwick and the Victorians may be for specialized interests, but the book on the developments that led to Kant's ‘invention of autonomy’ as the ground of morality ought to be required reading for every graduate student of philosophy in every department everywhere.

The present anthology contains nineteen essays. Two deal with Sidgwick and the Victorians. Many others concern Kantian and pre-Kantian moral philosophy. Four of the essays are methodological and discuss the historiography of modern moral philosophy, two by engaging the views of Alasdair MacIntyre and Elizabeth Anscombe. The final essay, originally delivered as a Dewey Lecture to the American Philosophical Association, is a memoir in which Schneewind reflects on his career, those who influenced him, and how he came to understand his task and his responsibilities as a philosopher.

As is always the case in a collection such as this, there is too much in the various essays to discuss them all in a short review. But I would like to entice the reader by saying something about a few matters that strike me as especially intriguing. One is the sketch of the story Schneewind tells in The Invention of Autonomy about the history of modern moral philosophy. A second is the way in which he conceives and executes the historiography of moral philosophy. A third concerns the things we learn about his own philosophical work and career from his memoir, especially his sense of himself as a Jew and his commitment to teaching and university administration. Schneewind himself notes that the claim that all philosophy is historical in an essential and determinative way applies to our own contemporary work, as it does to all those who preceded us. And if so, it applies to Schneewind's thinking and writing as well. We are tempted to ask what connection there might be between features of his own life and career, as he recalls them, and why his philosophical work looks the way it does and what it means.

In an essay of 1993, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy: From Beginning to End?’ (chapter 5), Schneewind sketches the history that helps us understand why Kant's moral philosophy was such a watershed. The central theme of this history is the shift from the central role of authority in morality to that of ‘equal moral competence’ and all that such a shift implies and requires. This development in morality is one strand in a fabric of changes since the seventeenth century that have psychological, economic, social, political, and religious dimensions. Until the eighteenth century, ethics was largely about attaining the good, but individuals were not all equally capable of its accomplishment. Citing a neo-Stoic, Guilliame du Vair, Schneewind notes that he and those like him ‘were writing for an elite’ (88). A similar view holds for Christianity and is even found, Schneewind argues, in the natural law writings of someone like Francisco Suarez; it may be true that ‘all men have consciences’ but it is not true that ‘all of them have equally capable consciences . . . The need for an educated clergy instructing the consciences of “the multitude” is thus evident’ (88–9). Schneewind goes on to show how ubiquitous such a view was by citing figures as diverse as Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, Locke, Malebranche, Spinoza, Clarke, and even – quite surprisingly – Solomon Maimon, a young Jewish contemporary of Kant best known for his important essay on Kant's critical philosophy (89–92).

This view about moral expertise had important implications for moral obligation and motivation. The basic idea – Schneewind's primary example, as so often, is Suarez – is that moral obligations are grounded in divine will, which dictates what would facilitate a good life and which motivates by threatening punishments for disobedience. In a sense, God's benevolence toward His creatures is reflected in His commands and the sanctions He establishes to motivate obedience to them. Even when there is no such view of divine providence, as in Spinoza, there lingers the idea that moral knowledge is restricted to only a few; what most people require is a ‘superior power’ to keep order and to deal with ‘the hopes and fears of the masses’ (94).

In order to break with this elite model, later thinkers had to revise their moral psychology and eliminate the legislative model of moral obligation. Schneewind here suggestively provides a historically precise account of what Elizabeth Anscombe, in her famous article ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, famously claimed took place only a century or more later. He turns first to Richard Price and then to Reid and Kant for the view that we are not solely, if at all, morally motivated by rewards and punishments; rather ‘we can be motivated by our recognition of the constraints rationality imposes on action, without any thought of good or ill to be derived from the action’ (95). A central Kantian theme, then, is that we as rational and moral selves are motivated to act and free to act by considerations rooted in our own rational nature and not in the dictates of another authority.

The shift from an elite to an egalitarian conception of morality also involved the ‘shift from an inquiry about the highest good to an inquiry about duty, where the latter is conceived to take, as Sidgwick says, a “quasi-jural” form’ (97). Here the pivotal figure is Hugo Grotius, whose major work, On the Law of War and Peace (1625), has as its central subject disagreement, controversy, or strife. Writing during a period of war and political conflict, the wars of religion and civil wars on the continent and later in England, Grotius took them to be permanent features of social and political life; his problem was how to conceive of human psychology so that one could negotiate settlements that kept conflict ‘within bearable limits’ (98). Like Hobbes, for Grotius the laws of nature, moral law, and also political laws have as their goal the accomplishment and maintenance of whatever level of peace and stability is possible, given the human propensity to conflict and strife. This view, Schneewind argues, is unlike the view of divine rule and law that one finds in the natural law tradition. In Richard Hooker's terms, for example, the whole of nature and society is a kind of divine corporation, organized and governed by God for the attainment of goodness and perfection. Grotius, Hobbes, and later Pufendorf demur dramatically from this picture or at least from its underlying motivations. For them, ‘the natural-law understanding of morality [is] the solution to the question of how to sustain sociability that we quarrelsome and unsociable creatures want and need’ (100).

This new problematic has multiple implications that contributed to the shift from focus on the good to the primacy of duty, from the elite model to the egalitarian one. For example, ‘the belief that people are unalterably prone to conflict . . . generates a pressure toward allowing that moral awareness must be open to everyone’ (101). Furthermore, in a world prone to controversy and conflict, setting limits can only be facilitated by the primacy of obligations and rights, rather than the aspiration to goods and satisfactions. And these obligations must not be the dictates of some supreme power whose interests are suspect and whose authority might smack of domination and oppression, nor can their capacity to motivate be tied to rewards and punishments.

The story that Schneewind tells, then, is a story about a change in our understanding of human nature and especially of the role of disagreement and conflict in our social and political lives. It is also a story about divine voluntarism and responses to it, a story which he beautifully summarizes in ‘Voluntarism and the Foundations of Ethics’ (1995). Even voluntarists such as Hobbes and Pufendorf agreed that moral principles can be discovered by reason, but they claimed that at the level of justification, morality was grounded in divine will. ‘Voluntarists claimed that their view is the only one compatible with God's omnipotence, because it alone leaves God absolutely untrammeled in creating the world’ (204). It was this account of moral justification, articulated for example in Pufendorf, that was the target of Leibniz's criticism that such a view makes human and divine justice wholly equivocal and threatens to turn God into a tyrant and human beings into slaves (204–5). These are criticisms of divine voluntarism that receive perhaps their classic formulation in Kant's famous charges in Reason within the Limits of Reason Alone that Judaism is a statutory religion and not a moral faith; in Judaism, for Kant, God is a despot who uses reward and punishment to motivate obedience to His law. Schneewind shows how from the seventeenth century through Kant, moral rationalism was conceived in order to retain a role for God without running afoul of these objections. That role, moreover, is to guarantee, through divine providence, that ‘the world [is] hospitable to action from rational principle’ (213); here too the classic formulation of moral rationalism that finds such a role for God comes in Kant's argument in the Critique of Practical Reason for the postulate of God's existence (215).

There are historical – economic, political, religious, and psychological – considerations that provide the context in which there occurred this shift to a modern conception of the moral self, to the rationalist response to voluntarism, and to a modern problematic for moral philosophy. In these essays Schneewind only occasionally points to these considerations, but they are certainly prominent in his own mind. Moreover, when we look at his memoir, we find there hints about what events, experiences, and considerations had a significant impact on him in the course of his career as a philosopher. If we can ask what a philosopher is doing as a philosopher, then we can ask that question of Schneewind himself.

In the story he comes to tell about the history of modern moral philosophy, the Grotian realism about the human propensity for controversy, conflict, and war plays an especially prominent role. It is a realism that makes one ask what role law and morality play in curbing the excesses of human conflict and rectifying those social injustices that demean and disfigure and harm us. There are two comments in Schneewind's recollections that I found particularly intriguing as hints regarding his moral sympathies and the way his personal and social concerns may very well have encouraged him in his attempt to understand where those sympathies come from and how and why they first arose, not in him but in the history of Western society and culture. Have we always viewed human beings as driven to conflict? In a world of strife, what role does law play? And what role is there for divine will? And what about morality and its role in such a world? If we are moved to dominate and control, is there anything within us, within all of us, which can control such a tendency, or is war and conflict always without safeguards and limits?

Schneewind begins by recalling the anti-Semitism that he felt growing up in suburban New York in the 1930s and 1940s. He admits that his family was completely assimilated and secular; they belonged to no synagogue and presumably paid little if any attention to Jewish practice and ritual. What Schneewind remembers is the sense of being excluded – of being an outsider, of parties to which he was not invited, country clubs to which his parents could not belong, and later quotas which restricted Jews in college admissions. And he remembers the news from Europe and the visits of European relatives whom his father had helped to emigrate; all of this clearly had some impact on him. He hastens to affirm his lack of affiliation with Judaism or any religion, his ‘lack of interest in assessing religious claims to truth’, as he puts it, but the sense of exclusion and rejection, for no apparent reason, had its effect. Schneewind frames it as an intellectual puzzle: how could Christians who professed love of others treat Jews this way? But there is more here than a question of the consistency of Christianity; there is the awareness that one's beliefs notwithstanding, human beings have a propensity to conflict and domination, to exclusion and oppression, and a conviction that morality might play a role in mitigating its ill effects. ‘Being Jewish makes me feel that I share to some extent in the vulnerabilities of the oppressed’ (407), or, as Bernard Malamud once put it, we are all Jews, except we don't know it. Moreover, the belief in a powerful and benevolent God and obedience to His will does not seem to be a very effective remedy for such propensities; in fact, they may seem oddly dissonant with them.

The second comment that Schneewind makes in his memoir, which he takes to be connected with this early one concerning anti-Semitism and his sense of identity with the excluded and oppressed, concerns social injustice. He refers to the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968 and speaks of it as the ‘most important single event in shaping the place philosophy had in my life thereafter’ (417). Sitting in London in 1968, doing research on Victorian moral philosophy, he worried that writing philosophy and its history did not seem to be doing enough to help with the ‘social and political problems that were emerging in the turmoil at home’. He then tells the story of how he first became involved in university administration and especially with problems concerning teaching and the education of minorities and the poor. Later, he would serve as Provost as Hunter College in New York. He spent a significant portion of his career – at Pittsburgh, Hunter, Johns Hopkins, and for the American Philosophical Association – as an administrator, and Schneewind seeks to explain, to some degree, that what led him ‘not to remain just a passive observer’ (417) was his sense of a responsibility or obligation intrinsic to morality itself. I have nothing to say about how accurate such a self-assessment might be. What strikes me as intriguing is that here too we find Schneewind choosing to single out the context of exclusion, domination, and injustice that in the 1960s had erupted in American life and to acknowledge how it had moved him. To be sure, he later hints that he came to see the problems as intractable and to question the value of investing his life in university administration. Nonetheless, there was a time for Schneewind when features of his story about the history of modern moral philosophy percolated into his own life. We are individuals and groups with drives to secure ourselves that lead to disagreement, conflict, and war; morality can serve to respect our common humanity and yet give us some guidance toward peace and limiting our capacity to dominate and harm one another; and in order to put that morality into practice, we are obligated to act. Duty calls, and we need to use institutional means to develop policies and guide conduct in ways that enhance human dignity and respect human rights.

What do these two recollections tell us about Schneewind's understanding of moral philosophy and its modern history? We should not be tempted to speculate about some tight or determinative connection. Schneewind regularly in his reminiscence refers to his interest in understanding how religion and morality are related. But in fact, from reading him, it becomes clear that his overarching interest is more complex; it is to understand how religion and religious belief are related to moral thinking, to social and political developments, and to the philosophical inquiry into ethics and morality. If the pre-modern way of framing these relationships concerns the attainment of the good life, the post-seventeenth-century way is gradually to free ourselves from notions of hierarchy and teleology in terms of which we can derive a precise conception of the human good, to find a place for morality as a domain distinct from religion, and to understand human psychology and conduct from a naturalistic point of view that recognizes the intractability of human conflict and yet provides a basis for a conception of human dignity and worth. Schneewind's experiences seem to have convinced him that both of these stages of development or perspectives have contributed to who we are today; his historical work has enabled him to understand the sources, the configurations, the arguments and objections, all of which have contributed to our modern situation. He starts out with his own sensibilities and intuitions, and in order to understand himself and our modern situation, he engages in an historical, genealogical act of examination and interpretation. In spirit his project is akin to those of MacIntyre and Taylor; his historiography is arguably attuned to a similar project. And it is rich and provocative historiography indeed, historically scrupulous and philosophically precise, conducted for the sake of what it tells us about what place moral philosophy might play and should play in our lives.

Schneewind finds in the history of moral philosophy a multiplicity of problems, solutions, views, and debates. There is no one, single aim or question that all of moral philosophy in the West has sought to accomplish or answer. His point about the variety and historical contingency of moral thinking shows that he has some sympathy with those figures – like Hobbes and Locke – whom he describes as voluntarists of a sort and yet also rationalist and humanistic. They appreciated the insight that the mysteriousness of the divine showed that voluntarism was not an alternative way of grounding or justifying moral principles; rather it was a refusal ‘to seek the kind of foundation that the rationalists thought was needed’ (216). Such a voluntarism recognizes the contingency of nature and the contingency of those moral principles attuned to it. They are ‘intended to guide beings with our empirical nature, physical and emotional as well as rational’ (217). Voluntarists of this sort do not reject the role of reason; ‘on the contrary, one of their chief aims was to show that moral controversies can be settled rationally’ (217). They rejected Platonism and had a respect for nature, experience, and science. Let me end by quoting Schneewind's description of such rational voluntarists; it is a description that we might take to express something like his own convictions: