As I've already noted, Shaftesbury's Inquiry concerning Virtue, or Merit first came out, in an unauthorized edition, in 1699. An official edition didn't appear until 1711, when Shaftesbury included the Inquiry in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, a three-volume set containing most of his previous writings and a new miscellaneous commentary. The philosophical skeleton of the Inquiry remained unchanged from 1699 to 1711. But Shaftesbury cut some of the most acerbic passages and added a number of points that he had thought through in the intervening years.

In this chapter, I examine one of the ideas that first appeared in the 1711 version of the Inquiry. Shaftesbury presents the idea in two different places in the revised Inquiry and in the section of his miscellaneous commentary that explicitly addresses that work. Shaftesbury's attitude toward this new idea is casual, almost offhand. He doesn't mark it as terribly important. But this casualness is either disingenuous or a miscalculation. For the new idea, carried to its logical conclusion, amounts to an abandonment of the prevailing concept of moral objectivity and ushers into British philosophy a radically new conception of morality and human nature.

The new idea appears when Shaftesbury is explaining the reason we have to be virtuous. Shaftesbury actually gives two different accounts of our reason to be virtuous, and the new idea emerges in his discussion of how these two accounts relate to each other.