Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- A note on references and abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I The rise and fall of modern natural law
- Part II Perfectionism and rationality
- Part III Toward a world on its own
- 13 Morality without salvation
- 14 The recovery of virtue
- 15 The austerity of morals: Clarke and Mandeville
- 16 The limits of love: Hutcheson and Butler
- 17 Hume: Virtue naturalized
- 18 Against a fatherless world
- 19 The noble effects of self-love
- Part IV Autonomy and divine order
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index of names
- Index of subjects
- Index of biblical citations
15 - The austerity of morals: Clarke and Mandeville
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- A note on references and abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I The rise and fall of modern natural law
- Part II Perfectionism and rationality
- Part III Toward a world on its own
- 13 Morality without salvation
- 14 The recovery of virtue
- 15 The austerity of morals: Clarke and Mandeville
- 16 The limits of love: Hutcheson and Butler
- 17 Hume: Virtue naturalized
- 18 Against a fatherless world
- 19 The noble effects of self-love
- Part IV Autonomy and divine order
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index of names
- Index of subjects
- Index of biblical citations
Summary
Attempts to avoid the morally unpalatable consequences of Locke's empiricist ethics were at the core of the development of British moral philosophy during much of the eighteenth century. Shaftesbury kept a deity in his universe to ensure its moral harmony, but he most emphatically held that there was no need to appeal to divine laws and threats to explain how people can live decently. He tried to show that Locke's voluntarist ethics is undercut by our possession of a moral faculty that enables us to govern ourselves. Desires and passions are, for him as for Locke, blind forces caused by, but not containing, representations of goods and ills. The moral faculty gives us a special feeling of moral approval that is aroused by a harmonious balance of the motivating forces in the soul and then in turn reinforces that balance. If this was a way around Locke, it posed problems even for those who shared Shaftesbury's moral revulsion at Locke's reductionist ethics of command, threat, and obedience. Shaftesbury sometimes presents the moral feeling as a mere sentiment, causally interacting with ideas and feelings; but more deeply and persistently he treats it as revealing eternal truths. The one reading points toward a naturalistic view of morals which the other reading denies. Theories of both kinds were proposed early in the century.
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- The Invention of AutonomyA History of Modern Moral Philosophy, pp. 310 - 329Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997