Social Rights and Duties

Leslie Stephen (1832 -1904) was a well-known and prolific man of letters in Victorian England. After an education at Eton and King's College, Cambridge he was ordained priest, but religious doubts caused him to relinquish his holy orders in 1875. Instead, he turned to writing and published numerous books of history, moral philosophy, and literary criticism; he also became the first editor of the "Dictionary of National Biography". Stephen's main contribution to moral philosophy was "The Science of Ethics" (1882) in which he set out in detail a secular view of ethics conditioned by Darwin's evolutionary theories. Morality, according to Stephen, is "the product of human nature, not of any ...transcendental speculations or faint survivals of traditional supersitions [and it] has grown up independently of, and often in spite of, theology". "Social Rights and Duties" consists of a collection of 12 lectures, originally delivered between 1890 and 1895 to the newly established Ethical Societies in London and Cambridge.
Here, Stephen applies his evolutionary ethics to a series of specific social and political issues, such as punishment, equality, competition, the struggle for existence, heredity, luxury, and the vanity of philosophizing. The books thus constitute an important record in the history of the ethical movement in England, as well as being an indispensable complement to Stephen's earlier theoretical treatise "The Science of Ethics".