Why Is the Search for the Foundations of Ethics So Frustrating?

Hellenistic cults, the imperium of Augustus, and the rule of St. Benedict all represent responses to such crises. But at least three times it has been the moral philosophers who have been summoned: in the twelfth century when Ethica took on the meaning transmitted to our word ethics; in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when a shared, secular rational form of moral justification was required to fill the place left empty by the diminution of religious authority; and now. The ability to respond adequately to this kind of cultural need depends of course on whether those summoned possess intellectual and moral resources that transcend the im-