Moral philosophy in the eighteenth-century German tradition was a rich and lively discipline. Looking at various histories of ethics and philosophy more generally, however, one gets the opposite impression: Kant’s moral philosophy is dominant in such histories, and when other figures are mentioned at all, attention is paid primarily to Kant’s two most important predecessors, namely Christian Wolff and Christian August Crusius. Kant himself might even be to blame here, for these are the only two German figures he explicitly mentions when categorizing approaches to moral philosophy that differ from his own. In this talk I provide a more colourful overview of the major positions in eighteenth-century German moral philosophy prior to Kant. In addition to Wolff’s perfectionism and Crusius’s voluntarism, I discuss views such as Johann August Eberhard’s empiricism, Christian Fürchtegott Gellert’s dispositional ethics, and August Wilhelm Rehberg’s Kant-inspired moral theory. My intention is to thereby outline what readers in the late eighteenth-century would have considered to be the major approaches to moral philosophy in the previous century.
Michael Walschots is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, where he is part of the project: 'Rethinking Enlightenment: The Reception of John Locke in Germany.' He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Western Ontario, Canada in 2016 and works primarily in the history of modern philosophy, especially during the eighteenth century. He has published widely on Kant's ethics and Scottish moral philosophy and is the editor of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason: Background Source Materials forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, and co-editor of Christian Wolff's German Ethics: New Essays, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.