STATEMENT OF THE ARGUMENT

Relations with several of the earliest and most important British Moralists are severely strained. Contemporary moral philosophy strongly favors theories of ethics that are rationalistic. Ethical rationalism attempts to deflect traditional skepticism by justifying and explaining important moral principles and motivations in terms of rational standards applying directly to practical deliberation and action. The clear pre-eminence of this approach today suggests that early-modern British moral philosophy must have started on quite the wrong foot: Hobbes's earliest leading critics, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in particular, opposed the selfish theory in the wrong way; their type of theory, which simply points to other passions and interests, neglected or explained away by Hobbes, and founds morals on these, could never give us what we (supposedly) want, namely a genuinely rational foundation for ethics. Yet these are the very thinkers whom we ordinarily largely credit with having originated the tradition leading directly to present-day moral theory.

I shall argue that sentimentalistic, desire-based accounts such as theirs cannot be ruled inadequate merely on account of their structure, and that sentimentalism should still be regarded as a genuine and live option for contemporary ethical theory. Modern diffidence toward these earliest Moralists' enterprise betrays a phobia of antirationalism or subjectivism that is itself likely to be highly historically conditioned. It perpetuates a misunderstanding of their thought as well as an overly narrow and probably outmoded conception of the proper task of ethics.