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

by Michael B. Gill

• ISBN13: 9780521852463
• ISBN10: 0521852463
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-07-31
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Uncovering the historical roots of naturalistic, secular contemporary ethics, 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

Part I. Whichcote and cudworth: 1. The negative answer of English Calvinism

2. Whichcote and Cudworth's positive answer

3 Whichcote and Cudworth on religious liberty

4. Rationalism, sentimentalism, and Ralph Cudworth

5. The emergence of non-Christian ethics

Part II. Shaftesbury: 6. Shaftesbury and the Cambridge Platonists

7. Shaftesbury's Inquiry: a misanthropic faith in human nature

8. The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody

9. A philosophical faultline

Part III. Hutcheson: 10. Early influences on Francis Hutcheson

11. Hutcheson's attack on egoism

12. Hutcheson's attack on moral rationalism

13. A Copernican positive answer, an attenuated moral realism

14. Explaining away vice

Part IV. Hume: 15. David Hume's new 'science of man'

16. Hume's arguments against moral rationalism

17. Hume's associative moral sentiments

18. Hume's progressive view of human nature

19. Comparison and contingency in Hume's moral account

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