Joseph Rickaby

Joseph Rickaby was an English Jesuit priest, philosopher, translator, and teacher associated with the Stonyhurst tradition of neo-scholastic thought. Moral Philosophy presents his account of ethics, duty, and natural law, beginning from the purposes of human action and the relation between happiness and obligation. First published by Longmans, Green and Company in the late nineteenth century, the work went through revised editions, including a fourth edition with a 1918 preface. Rickaby organizes the discussion around human acts, passions, habits, virtues, conscience, rights, property, social life, and the state. Further works by Rickaby include The First Principles of Knowledge, Free Will and Four English Philosophers, and Four-Square, while Aquinas Ethicus translated substantial portions of Thomas Aquinas's moral teaching. Moral Philosophy shows Rickaby writing as both a systematic Catholic thinker and an instructor, arranging contested questions into a structured course that connects Aristotelian concepts with debates about moral law and voluntary action.