Concluding Reflection

Abstract

This chapter discusses issues which arose in this period and remain important for philosophical ethics today. The deepest of these is the contest between individualism and holism which was traced in the French Revolution and then in Hegel (Section 1). This fundamental ethical divide interacts with the metaphysics of freedom (Sections 2 and 4) and is shaped by the philosophical crisis of religion (Section 3). Section 5 turns to the ethics of freedom, and Section 6 to its politics, which centres on the relation between democracy and liberalism. Reflection on these topics must take account of the impact of modernism (Section 7), and of the epistemological effects of democracy (Section 8). A concluding reassessment is proposed by contrasting the syntheses of Hegel and Mill (Section 9), and returning in Section 10 to ask: what, then, are the foundations of ethics?