This book is the most comprehensive study ever written of the history of moral philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its aim is to set Kant's still influential ethics in its historical context by showing in detail what the central questions in moral philosophy were for him and how he arrived at his own distinctive ethical views. In its range, its analyses of many philosophers not usually considered in histories of ethics, and its discussions of the interweaving of religious and political concerns with moral philosophy, this is an unprecedented account of the developments that led up to Kant's ethics. Extensive quotations allow the reader to understand the philosophy through the vocabularies that the philosophers themselves used.