photograph: Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell (1907)

Portrait from The Bertrand Russell Gallery

The Elements of Ethics, by Bertrand Russell, was first published in 1910, in his Philosophical Essays. (It was composed from several of his previous articles; he describes its provenance in a prefatory note.) This online edition is based on the public domain text as it appears in the 1994 Routledge paperback edition of the 1966 re-issue of Philosophical Essays (ISBN 0-415-10579-X).

Contents

  1. I. The Subject-Matter of Ethics
  2. II. The Meaning of Good and Bad
  3. III. Right and Wrong
  4. IV. Determinism and Morals
  5. V. Egoism
  6. VI. Methods of Estimating Goods and Evils