What moral philosophers can learn from the history of moral concepts

Abstract

It is often claimed that the core moral concepts are universal, though the words used to articulate them have changed significantly. I reject this claim. Concepts cannot be disentangled from words; as these latter change, they change too. Thus the philosophical analysis of moral concepts cannot overlook the history of the words by which these concepts have been expressed. In the second part of the essay, I illustrate this claim with the example of happiness, showing how its original ‘verdictive’ meaning was overlaid, in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a new psychological sense. Knowledge of this history should make us cautious, I suggest in conclusion, of narrowly psychological accounts of happiness.