The following symposium was featured at the seventy-seventh meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association on the occasion of J. B. Schneewind's retirement from the Chair of the Board of Officers. It was my honour to serve as the chair of this session on 28 March 2003.

This article is concerned with the shape of the story of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moral philosophy as told by J. B. Schneewind in The Invention of Autonomy. After discussion of alternative possible shapes for such a story, the focus falls on the question to what extent, in Schneewind's account, strands of empiricist voluntarism and rationalist intellectualism are interwoven in Kant. This in turn leads to consideration of different types of voluntarism and their roles in early modern ethical theory.

In The Invention of Autonomy, Schneewind argues that a main development in early modern ethical thought is the transition from a conception of morality as obedience to a conception of morality as self-governance. I consider the presuppositions implicit in the latter conception and ask whether they can be maintained.

J. B. Schneewind's Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy was the single best philosophical commentary on Henry Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics produced in the twentieth century. Although Schneewind was primarily concerned to read Sidgwick's ethical theory in its historical context, as reflecting the controversies generated by such figures as J. S. Mill, F. D. Maurice, and William Whewell, his reading also ended up being highly neo-Kantian, reflecting various Rawlsian priorities. As valuable as such an interpretation of Sidgwick surely is, Schneewind's approach has always been in some key respects too narrowly conceived in its construction of Sidgwick's philosophical and cultural context, failing to grapple with such troubling, philosophically relevant issues as the possible racism of Sidgwick's ethical and political views, or the sexual politics manifest in his collaboration with such figures as John Addington Symonds.

J. B. Schneewind's Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy surpassed all previous treatments of Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics by showing how Sidgwick's work follows a coherent plan of argument for a conception of ethics as grounded in practical reason. Schneewind offered his interpretation as the product of a historical rather than a critical study. This article undertakes a critical study of Sidgwick's work based on Schneewind's interpretation. Its thesis is that the conception of ethics for which Sidgwick argued is incoherent. As a result, it is argued, the coherent plan of argument in the Methods that Schneewind disclosed masks a deep incoherence in the argument itself.

Adams's suggestion that there must be one really right way of presenting the history of moral philosophy seems implausible to me, so I reject – with additional reasons – his charges against the structure of Invention of Autonomy. Skorupski's way of stating the ‘equal moral abilities’ thesis is not, I argue, very Kantian; a more Kantian version is not open to his objections. I am unconvinced by Schultz's claim that Sidgwick did not really hold that thesis. Deigh raises questions I cannot reply to here, but I do offer some texts that seem to show that Sidgwick is not guilty of the confusion about ‘ought’ with which Deigh charges him.

Many egalitarians believe that social inequalities are worse than natural ones. Others deny that one can coherently distinguish between them. I argue that although one can separate the influence of these factors by an analysis of variance, the distinction is morally irrelevant. It might be alleged that my argument in favour of moral irrelevance attacks a straw man. While I think this allegation is incorrect, I accommodate it by distinguishing between four claims that are related to, and sometimes confused with, the claim that social inequalities are worse. These are: that one has a stronger reason to eliminate inequalities that obtain between, or are produced by, members of one's own society; that inequalities that result from unfair treatment are worse; that inequalities that we make, rather than merely allowing to exist, are worse; and that it is bad if people are treated unfairly.

John Broome has argued that alleged cases of value incomparability are really examples of vagueness in the betterness relation. The main premiss of his argument is ‘the collapsing principle’. I argue that this principle is dubious, and that Broome's argument is therefore unconvincing.