I don’t think the tripartite division is particularly helpful. It smacks of parochialism. It’s only been the standard way of breaking down ‘normative ethics’ among a small clique of analytic philosophers in the Anglophone world—i.e. a few thousand people—beginning sometime in the twentieth century. It’s a shame that it has become the default pedagogical tool for introducing students to ethics. It has some merit as such, but students end up thinking that it’s ‘the’ division of ethics, and it invariably ends up occluding more than it illuminates.
If you try and fit most ‘canonical’ figures in the history of social and political thought into the tripartite division—e.g. Thucydides, Epictetus, Augustine, Montaigne, Voltaire, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, Dewey, Wittgenstein—it becomes immediately apparent that it’s an incredibly crude and misleading way of looking at ethics, and assumes a great deal about what ‘ethics’ is. Let alone if you go beyond the canon and look at more marginal figures, or ethnography/anthropology/cultural history for that matter. As someone else said, most thinkers are sui generis; it is almost always unhelpful to impose these kind of blunt ex post categories on them. The subject is infinitely richer and more complicated than that.
I don’t think the tripartite division is particularly helpful. It smacks of parochialism. It’s only been the standard way of breaking down ‘normative ethics’ among a small clique of analytic philosophers in the Anglophone world—i.e. a few thousand people—beginning sometime in the twentieth century. It’s a shame that it has become the default pedagogical tool for introducing students to ethics. It has some merit as such, but students end up thinking that it’s ‘the’ division of ethics, and it invariably ends up occluding more than it illuminates.
If you try and fit most ‘canonical’ figures in the history of social and political thought into the tripartite division—e.g. Thucydides, Epictetus, Augustine, Montaigne, Voltaire, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, Dewey, Wittgenstein—it becomes immediately apparent that it’s an incredibly crude and misleading way of looking at ethics, and assumes a great deal about what ‘ethics’ is. Let alone if you go beyond the canon and look at more marginal figures, or ethnography/anthropology/cultural history for that matter. As someone else said, most thinkers are sui generis; it is almost always unhelpful to impose these kind of blunt ex post categories on them. The subject is infinitely richer and more complicated than that.