2 - Between Kantianism and utilitarianism: T. H. Green

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Most men, however, at least in their ordinary conduct, are neither voluptuaries nor saints; and we are falling into a false antithesis if, having admitted (as is true) that the quest of self-satisfaction is the form of all moral activity, we allow no alternative (as Kant in effect seems to allow none) between the quest for self-satisfaction in the enjoyment of pleasure, and the quest for it in the fulfilment of a universal practical law. Ordinary motives fall neither under the one head nor the other. They are interests in the attainment of objects, without which it seems to the man in his actual state that he cannot satisfy himself, and in attaining which, because he has desired them, he will find a certain pleasure, but only because he has previously desired them, not because pleasures are the objects desired.

(Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, Sect. 160.)

In his study of L. T. Hobhouse's social and political thought, Liberalism and Sociology, Stefan Collini remarks that “men make their own theory but they do not do so in circumstances of their own making.” Following Pocock, Collini means that any innovative theoretical enterprise is ineluctably constrained and sculpted by its surrounding, authoritative conceptual discourse. This discourse, though never static, envelops new philosophical inquiry within established conceptual horizons. These conceptual horizons function hegemonically by structuring and framing subsequent theorizing. They subdue and tame philosophical innovation.

As the Introduction makes plain, I am deeply sympathetic towards this method of writing intellectual history.