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

This volume uncovers the historical roots of naturalistic, secular contemporary ethics.

Michael B. Gill (Author)

9780521852463, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 31 July 2006

368 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm, 0.631 kg

"Gill's discussion is consistently lucid and insightful, examining difficult texts with a deft hand that rarely labors over the subject matter."
18th Century Scotland, Daniel Carey, National University of Ireland- Galway

Uncovering the historical roots of naturalistic, secular contemporary ethics, in this 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.

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?

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Philosophy of religion [HRAB], Ethics & moral philosophy [HPQ], Western philosophy: c 1600 to c 1900 [HPCD]