Volume 37, Number 3 · March 1, 1990
Voice of Experience
By Alan Ryan
Innocence and Experience
by Stuart Hampshire
Harvard University Press, 195 pp., $20.00
It is not surprising that exasperated laymen should wonder about the point of moral philosophy; the self-confident often can't see why intellectuals should struggle to reach conclusions that any decent citizen learned in childhood, while the unconfident may not care for the corrosive effects of all inquiry. It's rather more surprising that philosophers themselves have often doubted whether moral philosophy was a branch of philosophy at all. Whatever Hume meant when he observed that 'reason is and always must be the slave of the passions,' it certainly sounded deflationary, a reminder that moral judgment was less well-founded than our views about mathematics or natural science. John Stuart Mill is best known as a social and political theorist of a utilitarian bent; yet his System of Logic runs to two stout volumes of his collected works, while his essay Utilitarianism runs to barely sixty pages.
Review, 6028 words
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