Royce's Practice of Genuine Ethics

Frank M. Oppenheim, Xavier University

My orientation to Josiah Royce's late ethics (1912–16) moves first through a somewhat abstract view of his communal ethics and then into his concrete practice of it. His late ethics strikes academic ethicists as "strange"—a unique world in itself. It does not fit traditional forms because it is primarily neither utilitarian nor deontological, nor divine command, nor a virtue ethics. Yet it contains key features of all these kinds of ethics. So, it is not one of a kind. It is unique, sui generis.