The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics

by Michael B. Gill

• ISBN13: 9780521184403
• ISBN10: 0521184401
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-02-17
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Uncovering the historical roots of naturalistic, secular contemporary ethics, in this 2006 volume Michael Gill shows how the British moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries completed a Copernican revolution in moral philosophy. They effected a shift from thinking of morality as independent of human nature to thinking of it as part of human nature itself. He also shows how the British Moralists - sometimes inadvertently, sometimes by design - disengaged ethical thinking, first from distinctly Christian ideas and then from theistic commitments altogether. Examining in detail the arguments of Whichcote, Cudworth, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson against Calvinist conceptions of original sin and egoistic conceptions of human motivation, Gill also demonstrates how Hume combined the ideas of earlier British moralists with his own insights to produce an account of morality and human nature that undermined some of his predecessors' most deeply held philosophical goals.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Whichcote and cudworth:

The negative answer of English Calvinism

Whichcote and Cudworth's positive answer

Whichcote and Cudworth on religious liberty

Rationalism, sentimentalism, and Ralph Cudworth

The emergence of non-Christian ethics

Shaftesbury:

Shaftesbury and the Cambridge Platonists

Shaftesbury's Inquiry: a misanthropic faith in human nature

The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody

A philosophical faultline

Hutcheson:

Early influences on Francis Hutcheson

Hutcheson's attack on egoism

Hutcheson's attack on moral rationalism

A Copernican positive answer, an attenuated moral realism

Explaining away vice

Hume:

David Hume's new 'science of man'

Hume's arguments against moral rationalism

Hume's associative moral sentiments

Hume's progressive view of human nature

Comparison and contingency in Hume's moral account

What is a Humean account, and what difference does it make?

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