Recent Tendencies in Ethics: Three Lectures to Clergy Given at Cambridge

In the spring of 1904, Cambridge philosopher W.R. Sorley delivered three lectures to clergy, confronting a profession grappling with modern moral philosophy. The result is a crystalline account of the defining ethical debate of the preceding century: the clash between Utilitarianism, which locates moral value in experiences of pleasure and pain, and Intuitionism, which insists that moral ideas are innate, rational, and fundamentally spiritual. Sorley writes not as a neutral arbiter but as a philosopher seeking ground where religious conviction and secular ethical thought might find common cause. He traces how these controversies moved beyond academic abstraction into a broader cultural crisis, as Victorian certainties crumbled under the weight of Darwin, industrialization, and new critiques of religious authority. For readers interested in the intellectual history of modernity, these lectures offer a window into how thoughtful clergy at the turn of the century were forced to reconceive the foundations of moral life. Sorley's careful, measured prose masks a genuine urgency: he understands that how we answer 'where do moral ideas come from?' determines what kind of society we become.