The problem of partiality in 18th century moral philosophy

The dissertation traces the development of what I call “the problem of partiality” through the work of certain key figures in the British Moralist tradition: John Locke, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, Anthony Ashley Cooper (the Third Earl of Shaftesbury), Francis Hutcheson, John Gay, David Hume, Joseph Butler, and Adam Smith. On the one hand, we are committed to impartiality as a constitutive norm of moral judgment and conduct. On the other hand, we are committed to the idea that it is permissible, or even obligatory, to expend disproportionate resources promoting the good of our loved ones over the good of strangers. However, these two commitments conflict with one another. This problem challenges us to provide an account of the scope and limits of reasonable partiality that does justice to both commitments. I argue that confronting this tension is a central project of early modern ethics. I offer a rereading of the British Moralist tradition, centered on debates about partiality, and thereby shift discussion of the tradition away from concerns about meta-ethics and moral epistemology, to issues of practical ethics. The topic of partiality remains central in contemporary ethics, as is evident in ongoing debates about the place of empathy in moral judgment, and the role of love in shaping our moral commitments. Though the aim of the dissertation is not to settle questions about the scope and limits of reasonable partiality, the focus here remains fixed on how the concept of partiality was problematized in our ethical thought, and how it informs our discussions in normative ethics and moral psychology. Alongside building a bridge between early modern scholarship and recent work in ethics, the dissertation casts light on two understudied figures in the British Moralist tradition – Cockburn and Gay – who contributed greatly to debates about partiality. By examining their contributions, I reconsider their place in the history of modern ethics and therefore provide a more contextualized account of philosophical thought in the period

Don\u27t Read This! : Lemony Snicket and the Control of Youth Reading Autonomy in Late-Nineteenth-Century Britain

This independent study investigates adult authority in youth literature in late-nineteenth-century Britain. Examining both sensational literature known as “penny dreadfuls” and the didactic magazines The Boy’s Own Paper and The Girl’s Own Paper, this project analyzes how rhetoric enforced middle class ideology outside of the classroom and shaped the youth reading experience. In an urbanizing, industrializing Britain, anxiety about social mobility ran high, and youth consumption of penny dreadfuls received suspicion due to their supposedly subversive content. This study argues that penny dreadfuls actually reinforced the social order, mirroring didactic literature in their construction of conservative adult authority. In order to demonstrate the similarity between these two forms, this project studies Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events as a way to approach the adult narrator in late-nineteenth-century texts due to its exaggeration of both sensational and didactic narration styles. As Lemony Snicket’s hybrid narrator deconstructs adult authority through postmodern techniques, he reveals that youth reading autonomy remained a fantasy in late-nineteenth-century Britain

The Science and Logic of William Paley's Moral Philosophy

William Paley's The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy is one of the most influential modern works of theological utilitarianism. His views on moral philosophy, evidentialism and natural theology were required reading in English universities up until the 1850s. It is the purpose of this thesis to argue that Paley believed his moral philosophy to be a science that operated according to logical principles. Chapter 1 outlines the intellectual environment, religious context and secondary literature about Paley's moral philosophy. Chapter 2 avers that Paley used Scripture and personal experience as evidence for providing a rational basis for moral knowledge. Focusing on the notion of moral law, Chapter 3 discusses the innovative principles of happiness and expediency through which Paley created a criterion of conduct that was grounded on rational evidence. Last but not least, since the Principles was a textbook in the Cambridge syllabus, Chapter 4, argues that Paley adopted a more accessible synthetic method of argumentation for educational purposes. The conclusion explains how the thesis's argument extends and challenges current interpretations of Paley's ideas

The Moral Philosophy of William Wollaston

This dissertation provides the first thorough exposition of the moral theory proposed by William Wollaston in his treatise The Religion of Nature Delineated (1724), and demonstrates it to be an innovative contribution to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries\u27 project of developing a moral theory by reason alone (in which lie the origins of contemporary moral realism); with the foundational principle of acting in accordance with nature as the standard of morality. Wollaston\u27s treatise contains an unrecognized innovation: the principle that rational agents express propositions by their actions--that, as propositions, have truth values--which makes it possible to determine the moral status of such actions by evaluating these truth values. The principle that actions express propositions to the same extent that verbal statements express propositions bridges the gap between ideas in the mind and the facts of the world (i.e., nature). It defines the deliberate actions of moral agents as natural events which can thus be evaluated in the same way that all natural objects and events are evaluated. Actions of moral agents can then be evaluated as to whether they are consistent or inconsistent with all other parts of nature. The correspondence between the truthfulness or falsehood of the propositions that moral agents express by their deliberate actions, and the empirical facts of the world, provides a focused method of evaluating the moral status of such actions in accordance with the empirical standard of moral realism. Also, in Wollaston\u27s system, as it is the nature of human beings to seek happiness, and as acting in accordance with nature is the means of attaining happiness, the production or destruction of happiness determines the degree of the moral rightness or wrongness of actions. The dissertation also demonstrates that the prevalent criticisms of The Religion of Nature Delineated which have caused it to be largely disregarded do not engage the theory and are often directed at straw men

The Problem of Partiality in 18th century British Moral Philosophy

The dissertation traces the development of what I call “the problem of partiality” through the work of certain key figures in the British Moralist tradition: John Locke, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, Anthony Ashley Cooper (the Third Earl of Shaftesbury), Francis Hutcheson, John Gay, David Hume, Joseph Butler, and Adam Smith. On the one hand, we are committed to impartiality as a constitutive norm of moral judgment and conduct. On the other hand, we are committed to the idea that it is permissible, or even obligatory, to expend disproportionate resources promoting the good of our loved ones over the good of strangers. However, these two commitments conflict with one another. This problem challenges us to provide an account of the scope and limits of reasonable partiality that does justice to both commitments. I argue that confronting this tension is a central project of early modern ethics. I offer a rereading of the British Moralist tradition, centered on debates about partiality, and thereby shift discussion of the tradition away from concerns about meta-ethics and moral epistemology, to issues of practical ethics. The topic of partiality remains central in contemporary ethics, as is evident in ongoing debates about the place of empathy in moral judgment, and the role of love in shaping our moral commitments. Though the aim of the dissertation is not to settle questions about the scope and limits of reasonable partiality, the focus here remains fixed on how the concept of partiality was problematized in our ethical thought, and how it informs our discussions in normative ethics and moral psychology. Alongside building a bridge between early modern scholarship and recent work in ethics, the dissertation casts light on two understudied figures in the British Moralist tradition – Cockburn and Gay – who contributed greatly to debates about partiality. By examining their contributions, I reconsider their place in the history of modern ethics and therefore provide a more contextualized account of philosophical thought in the period

Vicious Virtues: The Role of Naturalism and Irreligion in Hume\u27s Treatise

In his Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume offers an elaborate account of the origins of property and suggests modesty has a similar origin. In this paper, I draw on Hume’s discussions of modesty and property to extract his account of the origin of modesty. Modesty and property are ultimately regulated by pride and selfishness according to Hume. I argue that these choices of passions, as the grounds of their related virtues, express an intentionally irreligious and anti-Christian approach. Furthermore, I argue that reading Hume in the context of irreligion not only helps understand his own theory, but also explains his different relationships to Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. I conclude that readers of Hume must consider his irreligious motives alongside his skeptical and naturalistic methods if they are to understand him in a historically accurate way, and make sense of how he approaches his project in the Treatise

The discourse of gratitude in the novels of Jane Austen

Jane Austen is preeminently the novelist of gratitude, and no substantive noun of similar moral content recurs in these texts with the frequency of gratitude. Gratitude has enormous power in her novels. It is a necessary precursor of love in the formation of bonds between men and women, and no good mutual love is possible unless it evolves through the process of gratitude. For successful marriages, gratitude is even more necessary than love. Among the scholars who focus on significant terms in Austen novels, few give more than passing attention to gratitude or to the massive volume of eighteenth-century moralist texts that wrestle with gratitude\u27s role in the discourse of virtue. Internal and external evidence confirm Austen\u27s understanding of this discourse, particularly the texts of the moral sense philosopher Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) and of the Anglican bishop Thomas Sherlock (1678-1761). Those scholars who do discuss gratitude in Austen tend to see it as the acceptance and approval of subordination to authority, necessary to correct humanity\u27s essential depravity and selfishness, a long standing theosophical view in classical and Christianized philosophical discourse, and which shadows the debate between Edmund Burke and William Godwin at the onset of the French Revolution. But Austen distances herself from older theosophical views, as well as from the Burke-Godwin debate itself, and instead uses Hutcheson, who believes in humanity\u27s essential goodness, to transform gratitude into a virtue and guide for achieving happiness in this life, rather than to avoid punishment in the next. Gratitude is closely linked with benevolence, traditionally an aristocratic virtue, but Hutcheson\u27s biographer, William Robert Scott, argues that Hutcheson democratizes the Third Earl of Shaftesbury\u27s elitist philosophy of benevolence. Hutcheson\u27s theories, as well as the practical Christianity of Thomas Sherlock\u27s Discourses, seem to support the same goal of human happiness that Austen\u27s novels also endorse as the standard of moral virtue. Driving the moral thrust of her narrative seems to be confidence that, through gratitude, men and women can overcome social and gender structures that stand in the way of happiness