The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Reissue, 2/17/2011
EAN 9780521184403, ISBN10: 0521184401
Paperback, 368 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm
Language: English
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?