[1] The book covers Greek ethics including Plato and Aristotle, Christian moral thought including the work of Martin Luther and writers including Niccolò Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche.

MacIntyre also discusses twentieth century philosophers including G. E. Moore, John Dewey and R. M.

[2][3] According to a review in The Journal of Philosophy, one of MacIntyre's primary theses in the book is that "moral concepts change as social life changes" and therefore philosophers who believe there is one subject of ethical inquiry are mistaken.

[4] A review in the British Journal of Educational Studies describes the book as a "stimulating, if highly impressionistic, account of the history of ethics written from the point of view of his own convictions about the state of moral concepts".

Schneewind criticises some elements of the book, noting the absence of any discussion of Henry Sidgwick and also noting MacIntyre's lack of references or bibliography or of careful exposition of some of the issues of interpretation in the history of ethics.