Cicero · Politics

The Honourable and the Useful

Cicero’s ethics of duty - his argument, in On Duties, that the truly honourable and the truly useful can never really conflict, and that nothing genuinely advantageous is ever immoral.

What you'll be able to recall

You learned Cicero’s teaching that the honourable and the useful never truly conflict, and that we have duties grounded in our common humanity. Eighteen centuries later, Kant built a rigorous philosophy on duty done for its own sake. State how Kant grounded moral duty.

Leads to Kant.

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