Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, David King, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team. MORAL PHILOSOPHY: ETHICS, DEONTOLOGY AND NATURAL LAW. BY JOSEPH RICKABY, S.J. Nihil Obstat: JOSEPHUS KEATING, S.J. _Censor deputatus_ Imprimi potest: JOANNES H. WRIGHT, S.J. _Præp. Prov. Angliæ_ Nihil Obstat: C. SCHUT, D.D. _Censor deputatus_ Imprimatur: EDM. CAN. SURMONT _Vie. Gen._ PREFACE (1905). For fifteen years this Manual has enjoyed all the popularity that its author could desire. With that popularity the author is the last person to wish to interfere. Therefore, not to throw previous copies out of use, this edition makes no alteration either in the pagination or the text already printed. At the same time the author might well be argued to have lapsed into strange supineness and indifference to moral science, if in fifteen years he had learnt nothing new, and found nothing in his work which he wished to improve. Whoever will be at the expense of purchasing my _Political and Moral Essays_ (Benziger, 1902, 6s.) will find in the first essay on the _Origin and Extent of Civil Authority_ an advantageous substitute for the chapter on the State in this work. The essay is a dissertation written for the degree of B. Sc. in the University of Oxford; and represents, I hope, tolerably well the best contemporary teaching on the subject. If the present work had to be rewritten, I should make a triple division of Moral Philosophy, into Ethics, Deontology (the science of [Greek: to deon], i.e., of what _ought_ to be done), and Natural Law. For if "the principal business of Ethics is to determine what moral obligation is" (p. 2), then the classical work on the subject, the _Nicomachean Ethics_ of Aristotle, is as the play of Hamlet with the character of Hamlet left out: for in that work there is no analysis of moral obligation, no attempt to "fix the comprehension of the idea I _ought_" (ib.). The system there exposed is a system of Eudaemonism, not of Deontology. It is not a treatise on Duty, but on Happiness: it tells us what Happiness, or rational well-being, is, and what conduct is conducive to rational well-being. It may be found convenient to follow Aristotle, and avow that the business of Ethics is not Duty, not Obligation, not Law, not Sanction, but Happiness. That fiery little word _ought_ goes unexplained in Ethics, except in an hypothetical sense, that a man _ought_ to do this, and avoid that, _if_ he means to be a happy man: cf. p. 115. Any man who declares that he does not care about ethical or rational happiness, stands to Ethics as that man stands to Music who "hath no ear for concord of sweet sounds."