Sacrifice Regained

Roger Crisp is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford and Uehiro Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St Anne's College, Oxford. He is the author of Reasons and the Good (Oxford 2006) and The Cosmos of Duty: Henry Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics (Oxford 2015), co-editor of Well-Being and Morality: Essays in Honour of James Griffin (with Brad Hooker; Clarendon Press 2000), and editor of The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics (Oxford 2013) and Griffin on Human Rights (Oxford 2014).

Roger Crisp's excellent book concerns the relation between morality and self-interest in the British Moralists . . . Each chapter begins with a critical account of the moral theory of the moralist, followed by a critical discussion of the moralist's view of the relation between morality and self-interest. . . . Even readers not so concerned with the relation between morality and self-interest will benefit from the state-of-the-art treatments of the moral theories. You can piece together a fine short history of utilitarianism from the chapters on Cumberland, Hutcheson, Hume, Gay, Tucker, Paley and Bentham (and a short history of objections to utilitarianism from the chapters on Butler, Smith, and Price). And you can trace histories of certain strategies, such as (remarkably common) split-level defences of psychological egoism, rational egoism, or consequentialism.