10. The next and last two unit-ideas to be singled
out are philosophical (moral and epistemological)
theories whose conceptual and historical relations with
the ideas discussed above are complex and worthy of
exploration. The first of these, which may be called
ethical individualism, is a view of the nature of moral-
ity. According to this view, the source of moral values
and principles, the creator of the very criteria of moral
evaluation, is the individual: he becomes the supreme
arbiter of moral (and, by implication, other) values,
the final moral authority in the most fundamental sense.
In a sense, this view can be seen as the philosophical
consequence of carrying the idea of autonomy to its
extreme logical conclusion. Moreover, it is intimately
linked with the logical dissociation of fact and value
(and can only be expressed within a vocabulary which
embodies this disjunction). It can thus be seen to have
been latent in the thought of Kant and of Hume, but
both avoided its implications, the former by postulating
an impersonal moral law, the latter by appealing to
the moral uniformity of mankind.
The dilemmas of ethical individualism have only
become acute in this century, though they are clearly
revealed in the thought of Nietzsche and Weber; the
latter argued that when faced with conflicting moral
positions, “the individual has to decide which is God
for him and which is the devil” (“Wissenschaft als
Beruf,” 1919). Most species of existentialism, emotivism,
and prescriptivism—all three denying objective uni-
versal moral principles—are forms of ethical individ-
ualism. Its most coherent contemporary expressions are
in the early writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, e.g., L'exis
tentialisme est un humanisme (1948), and in the work
of the contemporary Oxford philosopher R. M. Hare,
e.g., The Language of Morals (1951).
