Moral Philosophy: Ethics, Deontology and Natural Law

What do we owe to each other, and why? These are the questions that have haunted moral philosophers for millennia, and Joseph Rickaby approaches them with a clarity that feels almost radical. In this early 20th-century treatise, he argues that previous ethical thinkers made a critical error: they focused on happiness to the exclusion of duty, or vice versa, when both are essential to understanding moral life. Rickaby proposes a tripartite framework that divides moral philosophy into ethics (the study of happiness), deontology (the science of duty), and natural law (the underlying rational order that makes both possible). Drawing heavily on Aristotle while engaging with Kant and the Scholastics, he builds an argument that human acts are always purposeful attempts at happiness, yet they are also governed by obligations we cannot simply dismiss. The result is a moral philosophy that refuses to choose between virtue and rule-keeping, arguing instead that true flourishing requires both. This is not dry academic exercise: it is a sustained argument about what makes a human life go well, and what we owe to the rational order of the cosmos.