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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Who are the most significant moral philosophers in the history of Western philosophy?

Brian Leiter

So our poll got over 650 responses; here's the top 20:

1. Aristotle  (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)
2. Immanuel Kant  loses to Aristotle by 364–227
3. Plato  loses to Aristotle by 414–168, loses to Immanuel Kant by 349–241
4. David Hume  loses to Aristotle by 494–95, loses to Plato by 378–197
5. John Stuart Mill  loses to Aristotle by 493–102, loses to David Hume by 292–271
6. Socrates  loses to Aristotle by 464–104, loses to John Stuart Mill by 292–250
7. Thomas Hobbes  loses to Aristotle by 556–29, loses to Socrates by 319–192
8. John Rawls  loses to Aristotle by 557–38, loses to Thomas Hobbes by 272–250
9. Jeremy Bentham  loses to Aristotle by 543–39, loses to John Rawls by 273–250
10. Aquinas  loses to Aristotle by 547–23, loses to Jeremy Bentham by 280–222
11. Augustine  loses to Aristotle by 550–20, loses to Aquinas by 306–131
12. Friedrich Nietzsche  loses to Aristotle by 542–57, loses to Augustine by 263–247
13. Soren Kierkegaard  loses to Aristotle by 553–31, loses to Friedrich Nietzsche by 290–210
14. Epicurus  loses to Aristotle by 554–21, loses to Soren Kierkegaard by 218–214
15. Henry Sidgwick  loses to Aristotle by 542–27, loses to Epicurus by 286–181
16. Jean-Jacques Rousseau  loses to Aristotle by 566–21, loses to Henry Sidgwick by 242–216
17. G.E. Moore  loses to Aristotle by 563–20, loses to Jean-Jacques Rousseau by 264–191
18. Benedict Spinoza  loses to Aristotle by 543–24, loses to G.E. Moore by 252–194
19. G.E.M. Anscombe  loses to Aristotle by 555–13, loses to Benedict Spinoza by 268–165

20. G.W.F. Hegel  loses to Aristotle by 546–14, loses to G.E.M. Anscombe by 227–161

I'm not surprised by the top five, all of which I would have picked for the top ten, except perhaps Kant.  But thereafter I do marvel at what my colleagues think!  Thoughts from readers on the results, and what they say about the current state of philosophy?  Signed comments strongly preferred.  You may, of course, lament the absence of your favorite philosophers from the poll, though do consider whether they would have likely craked "the top 20."  (Of those that didn't make the top 20, the biggest surprise to my mind is Adam Smith.)

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31 responses to “Who are the most significant moral philosophers in the history of Western philosophy?”

  1. Rob Gressis

    Just out of curiosity, Brian, why is Kant not in your top 10?

    BL COMMENT: Wrong about too much, and perniciously so. But I understand why he did as well as he did.

    Reply
  2. Levi Asher

    Wouldn't it be fair to combine Plato and Socrates for the purposes of this ranking?

    Reply
  3. Michael J. Augustin

    I am very pleased to see Epicurus on this list!

    Reply
  4. Jack Hughes

    The Socratic problem is raised whenever the issue of ranking philosophers comes up, and the fact that most people who vote on these polls are not Plato scholars means that results for these two should always be taken with a grain of salt. Having said that, it personally seems implausible (at least to me) to say that Plato did not develop substantially different moral views from Socrates, as Platonic ethics has very little in common with Cynicism (the other school influenced greatly by Socrates – I'm not even counting Cyrenaicism), and differs substantially from the accounts of Xenophon or Aristophanes. Plato for instance seemed to believe that people knowingly do evil, and eventually came to some conclusions about what some virtues were that Socrates were ambivalent towards. Frankly, it is debatable even that Socrates was a virtue ethicist.
    I know Brian said that "You may, of course, lament the absence of your favorite philosophers from the poll" but I'm still baffled by the absence of any Stoic philosophers. The Stoic school was the most significant school of all throughout the Hellenistic period and although I don't agree with them myself, I think the absence of Chrysippus, Seneca, Epictetus etc. is all the more lamentable given the strong placing of Epicurus.

    BL COMMENT: I agree about the Stoics. I was going to put in "the Stoics" as a choice, but then I thought I should get individual Stoics, but then I forgot to do that!

    Reply
  5. Matt

    Seeing the results, I wonder if in some cases contributions outside of moral philosophy were being considered in many cases. (Is Spinoza's contribution to moral philosophy really greater than Adam Smith's? That seems surprising to me, but perhaps it can be explained.) In my own case, I was unsure of how to weigh contributions to political philosophy compared to ethics more narrowly conceived. I gave significant weight to contributions to political philosophy (so Hobbes and Rousseau ranked pretty high) but gave more weight to ethics and meta-ethics more narrowly conceived. Because of that, I put Neitzsche above Hobbes (for example), while I otherwise would have likely reversed this. I'd be curious to know how others weighted various factors.

    Reply
  6. Jack Cunningham

    I agree with you that Kant is way too high as is Plato/Socrates. I think Nietzsche should be higher given that he was the first to point out that morality was tied up with psychology, and history as a way of exposing that our virtues are quite what we think they are.
    My top five would be as follows:
    1. Nietzsche
    2. Aristotle
    3. MIll
    4. Hume
    5. Rawls

    Reply
  7. Sharif

    Anscombe being rated more significant than Hegel is very strange to me. She *might* have been less wrong and less often than Hegel. But that is a different matter.

    At least Hegel wasn't outranked by T.H Green, I guess.

    Reply
  8. Phil Gasper

    If "most significant" means "most influential," the list looks pretty solid to me. If it means something like "most nearly correct," then obviously there is going to be wide disagreement about who should be in the top 5, the top 10 and the top 20. In my view Moore is mostly an inconsequential figure who defends an implausible metaethics on the basis of a weak argument, but since he makes the top 20 I assume he has his passionate defenders too.

    Reply
  9. Alan White

    First, I agree with you that Kant is waaaaay overrated in lots of ways. Still I want to argue for the old boy’s ranking in one specific way: his second formulation of the CI. That version (logically equivalent to the 1st version??—no way!!) resonates with students. I use lots of examples—looking in the eyes of cashiers instead of just regarding them as check-out robots (and vice-versa of course)—but also a loving relationship of marriage/commitment as opposed to using one another for some benefit/profit (and yes I use the word “prostitution”). The result over a couple of decades? At least two former students who filed for divorce after the Kant lecture (yes—they came back to thank me—and Kant—and of course they were both women)! Who knew that dry old Kant could be such a mover!

    Second—I’m astounded that Stevenson did not make the top 20. Expressivism has become a major metaethical player in that area, but more broadly also even in an analysis of conditionals (J. Bennett).

    FWIW. Great poll!

    Reply
  10. Aaron Garrett

    Well that's it. Butler and Smith aren't there. I guess I've been wasting my scholarly life.

    Reply
  11. Joseph Streeter

    One historically important tradition not represented is the modern natural law tradition. A strong case could be made for placing Hugo Grotius at least in the top 20 for historical significance. But as Phil Gasper says, 'significance' is an ambiguous concept, and I imagine Grotius has little relevance for contemporary moral philosophers.

    Reply
  12. Jonathan Zaikowski

    "Wives, servants, and children are possessed in a way akin to our possession of objects. If they flee, they must be returned to the owner if he demands them, without regard for the cause that led them to flee."

    Guess they should have stuck around for the Metaphysics of Morals lecture…

    Reply
  13. Jack Hughes

    I should have mentioned this in my first post, and I apologise for not doing so.But one thing I am disappointed, but not surprised by is the strong showing of Mill relative to Bentham. It is Bentham who founded Utilitarianism and the idea of "felicific calculus", Mill on the other hand is most important for his widely rebuked distinction between higher and lower pleasures (which he stole from Epicurus) and for his highly controversial notion of the harm principle, which neither achieves what it attempts to do (ie. demonstrate that the role of government is very little), nor is it consistent with the notion of happiness of the highest good (not to mention that it also is not very original, see the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen). I can only wonder how these rankings would be affected were it not for the fact that it is Mill who is taught in high schools and universities.

    Reply
  14. doris

    I wonder what motivated people to include Anscombe?

    Reply
  15. Eric Brown

    Doris, I assume that people are crediting Anscombe with the revival of broadly Aristotelian moral philosophy of recent decades. Reasonable people can disagree about how much of the credit she should get and about how "significant" the revival itself is. But it's not worth the effort to disagree. In any case, this is a game to be played with friends over beers, and we should do that soon.

    Reply
  16. A. Flynn

    Also, I would guess there is a strong contingent of people who think that *Intention* is the best/most novel/richest/etc. work of moral psychology written in the 20th century. (A very controversial assessment to be sure, but one that seems to have grown in recent years.) Whether that is enough to put Anscombe in the top 20 of all time, I'm don't know.

    Reply
  17. Colin Heydt

    I've written a lot on Mill, but there is no way I would put him that high–he should be, at best, in the 15-20 range.

    Stoicism certainly deserves representation somewhere in the top ten. Butler should rank, at least, in the 10-15 range (and above Mill, Rawls, and Bentham, among others–Aaron, your scholarly life is safe with me…). And I agree with Joseph Streeter that modern natural law deserves a place on this list, but I would put forward Pufendorf rather than Grotius.

    BL COMMENT: Grotious was in the poll, but didn't make it to the top 20.

    Reply
  18. Michael Rosen

    I wonder how many who voted felt confident in distinguishing the intellectual contributions of Plato and Socrates (I certainly don't).

    Reply
  19. soothish@gmail.com

    Those of you who don't know his work at all should look into the work of Nicloai Hartmann. See for a start the entry in the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHENOMENOLOGY or the chapter on him in PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO MORAL PHILOSOPHY. Both of those can be found on my Web site by Googling my name (Robert Welsh Jordan). For modern natural law, you might look at the work of Franz Brentano (latter 19th century). You'll find a summary of his views on my Web site as well; it's in the article on Franz Kafka and the Prague followers of Brentano.The Kafka article is there in German as well as in English.

    Reply
  20. Tom Carson

    I would have ranked Sidgwick in the top 4-6. I also would have ranked Hare in the top 15 and Ross in the top 20.

    Reply
  21. Michael Sevel

    I wonder also if the votes for Bentham were on the basis of his Introduction alone. If his writings in legal philosophy, which relate to his work in moral philosophy in complex and illuminating ways (and which have been publicly available for less than a century), were taken into account, he may merit a higher placement. If the relevant metrics here are insight and innovation (rather than "influence"), then certainly.

    Reply
  22. Hannes Nykänen

    I have to say that I can't take this list seriously: Moore but not Wittgenstein! It should be the other way round and with MANY names in between them; Sidgwick but not Heidegger…

    There is too much nationalism and cliquishness in this list for it to be a serious effort at all.

    BL COMMENT: Perhaps, or perhaps too much knowledge of moral philosophy. The idea that Wittgenstein, not Moore, and Heidegger, not Sidgwick, are major moral philosophers suggests a quite unusual understanding of the parameters of the subject.

    Reply
  23. Chris Bertram

    Since the question was "significance to moral philosophy (**broadly conceived**)", the absence of Marx, Spencer, Godwin and Machiavelli from the poll is worth noting. Of course, "significance" is a bit of a weaselly term here because it could suggest intellectual merit but also merely causal influence.

    BL COMMENT: Marx a moral philosopher?!? Those are fighting words!

    Reply
  24. Chris Bertram

    BL, I didn't say Marx was a moral philosopher, and the question you asked wasn't "who is the most significant moral philosopher" but who was of the greatest significance to moral philosophy (broadly conceived).

    BL COMMENT: Mere logic chopping!

    Reply
  25. Chris Bertram

    … and given that *was* the question, surely Charles Darwin has a claim to a top-20 spot?

    BL COMMENT: True, he did have a lot of influence on Herbert Spencer.

    Reply
  26. Ben

    I suspect the more interesting/fun data set here isn't so much the rankings themselves, but rather patterns in individual responses. I imagine some of the robust ones are very predictable: presumably everyone who ranked Bentham so highly also put Sidgwick, Mill, and maybe Moore high on the lists, too.

    But there are others I'm more curious about. Do responses that ranked Nietzsche in the top five, say, also tend to resemble each other in other significant respects? Do Anscombe fans tend to like virtue ethicists (Aquinas, Foot, Murdoch), people who stressed practical reasoning or moral phenomenology (even though many of these are heterodox figures in the analytic ethics canon) or just other philosophers who get a lot of attention in currently trendy work (Moore, Ross, etc., despite their almost total philosophical difference from Anscombe)? And so on.

    (I love that Jacques Maritain keeps finishing at or near the bottom in these polls, by the way!)

    Reply
  27. Hannes Nykänen

    Actually I, while I searched the net, found myself in the middle of this discussion, which I scrolled a bit up and down, then saw the list but never read the title of it… so I missed it was a list of moral philosophers. My apologies for that. Of course the list might appear to make more sense now that I realise it is on moral philosophers. But on the other hand listing moral philosophers is even more difficult to make meaningful. I do not think only of things such as that Levinas should be higher and Simone Weil included but that one can (despite its influence)ask whether what Aristotle writes is really ethics in our sense of the word (and thus disagree about what "our" sense is). And one can think that a list on moral philosophers should not include Heidegger at all. And what should be made of the often made suggestion that not only the Tractatus but Wittgenstein's whole philosophy is underpinned by an idea of ethics? What if that is right? Heidegger is on the list presumably because he in such an "influential" way ignored ethics. Or is this wrong? Did he have a "fundamental" ethics? Furthermore, I think that both Adorno and Freud should be on the list. There are many more cases like these; cases that show that we disagree about what the list is about and whether such a list can be meaningful at all. But maybe that was one of the purposes with the list? (I don't know if this is a bad suggestion since I have not visited this page before.)

    BL COMMENT: I think such lists are profoundly meaningful, not about philosophical quality, but as revealing interesting things about those who are professional philosophers, i.e., those most likely to participate (the majority being Anglophone professional philosophers of course, though the non-Anglophone readership of this blog is rather large).

    Reply
  28. John Schwenkler

    As others have noted, "significance" can mean a lot of things — but to the extent that it's *influence* that's being measured here, Saint Augustine is underrated in this list. For better or worse (I think it is a mix of both), his account of the moral life had an absolutely enormous influence on subsequent Western philosophy. Certainly it's hard to imagine how we could have had Kant or Aquinas without him.

    Reply
  29. mitch

    Adorno's absence, while not surprising, is most troubling. He should be #1.

    BL COMMENT: Adorno, like Marx, is a hard case. But in a survey where poor Nietzsche comes in only 12th, what chance did Adorno really have?

    Reply
  30. Rob Gressis

    Why I should think Adorno is the most significant moral philosopher of all time? Is there some article I can read that will explain this to me?

    Reply
  31. Najoll.wordpress.com

    Here is a slightly belated addition to this conversation, and, specifically an answer (of sorts) to Rob Gressis.

    I am far from sure that Adorno is the most significant moral philosopher of all time. Yet, I am sympathetic to the claim that he was a great moral philosopher, though also to the feeling that the case for that greatness is somewhat obscure, or lacking. I am sympathetic to that latter feeling because Adorno's ideas are somewhat inaccessible in the original texts, and, also, often badly explained in the literature. However (and setting aside the complication that, in some ways, Adorno was actually against moral philosophy – and indeed against accessibility), at least one decent and short introduction to his moral philosophy exists. To wit: Fabian Freyenhagen, 'Moral Philosophy' in Theodor Adorno. Key Concepts, ed. D. Cook (Acumen, 2008).

    Reply

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