{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.025255562236921228, 'fraction_numerical': 0.009621166566446182, 'mean_word_length': 5.4, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 1, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Development of Ethics

During the past thirty or so years, the history of ethics has flourished in ways it did not earlier in the last century. A continuum of approaches has emerged, from the more exegetical and contextualized to the more philosophically probing, with much interesting work being pursued at either pole, including much that is sensitive also to the concerns of the other. Both scholarly and philosophical discussions, moreover, have extended far beyond the canonical figures on which earlier work centred. Many lesser known, but still interesting and important philosophers, are finally getting their due. This new activity has raised ambitions for more comprehensive treatments, both for their own sake and for the light they might shed on contemporary philosophy. J. B. Schneewind’s landmark work, The Invention of Autonomy (1998), sought to understand seventeenthand eighteenth-century ethical thought as embarked on a distinctively modern project that is still much alive on the current scene. The ‘Grotian problematic’, as Schneewind termed the task that faced Grotius and his followers, was to articulate and defend a basis for social order in the face of scepticism aboutAristotelian teleological foundations, a project that mainstream moral philosophy continues to pursue today. Rawls’s Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (2000) had a similar synoptic scope and framing vision, illustrated by its introduction’s title: ‘Modern Moral Philosophy, 1600–1800’. Rawls began with a contrast between ancient and modern ethics that he took from Sidgwick, namely, that although ancient ethical philosophy featured a single fundamental