Xiko Acis

This article investigates the historical transformation of the concept of ethics through a historical-conceptual method, analyzing turning points from Classical Antiquity to Modernity. It argues that in classical philosophy — particularly in Plato and Aristotle — ethics consisted in the rational inquiry into the common good, preserving structural autonomy vis-à-vis historical customs and positive normativity. In the context of the Roman republican crisis, Cicero promoted a strategic integration between nature, reason, and law by identifying lex as the expression of recta ratio naturae — a politically motivated decision that narrowed the space in which ethics could exercise a critical function external to normativity. This integration, consolidated in the medieval tradition by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and secularized in modernity by Hobbes and Kant, produced the structural identification of ethics with normativity, undermining its critical function. The article distinguishes between normative autonomy — the primacy of reason over external sources of obligation, a legitimate modern achievement — and structural autonomy, understood as the logical primacy of the inquiry into the common good over the formulation of any norm. It concludes that recovering this structural distinction constitutes a philosophically necessary condition for reconstituting the rational autonomy of ethics in contemporary debate.