Grotius at the Creation of Modern Moral Philosophy

It is widely if not universally believed that ethical philosophy began in the seventeenth century to assume a distinctively “modern” form, opposing itself to “ancient” Greek ideas and to more recent scholastic approaches that derived in part, at least, from Aristotle. Hugo Grotius was central in shaping this modern form. Grotius’s Rights of War and Peace, published in 1625, is best known as the first systematic treatise on international law, but to thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it seemed to set a new agenda in moral and political philosophy across the board. Jean Barbeyrac’s Historical and Critical Account of the Science of Morality, attached to his translation of Pufendorf’s Law of Nature and Nations in 1706, praised Grotius as “the first who broke the ice” of “the Scholastic Philosophy; which [had] spread itself all over Europe” (1749: 67, 66). Indeed, a strong case can be made that the very concepts to which Barbeyrac used ‘morality’ and ‘science’ to refer (in his “critical account” of “morality”’s “science”) were themselves substantially shaped by Grotius and his influence.