Patriarcha Redivivus

A great conservative thinker (Burke) once said of another, “Who now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through?” For context, Burke was referring specifically to Lord Bolingbroke’s posthumous philosophical writings, which, it is true, are not much read or indeed worth reading. But his political writings are another matter, which I perhaps shall expand upon in some future post.

I would apply Burke’s assessment of Bolingbroke’s reputation to another great conservative thinker, though perhaps with more justification: Who now reads Filmer? Who ever read him through?

Sir Robert Filmer (1588-1653) is best known today, if known at all, as the author whom John Locke attacked in his Two Treatises of Government (1689) for his supposedly crackpot views on the divine right of Kings having been derived from Adam through the Old Testament patriarchs. I was forced to read Locke’s Two Treatises in university, but I was never made to read Filmer. Had I done so, I would have discovered that the latter serves as a straw man for the former. My Whiggish educators would not have allowed that to happen, especially had any of them read Filmer themselves, which I suspect they hadn’t. So inconsequential is Filmer considered, that he doesn’t warrant an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Philosophical reputation can be a faddish thing. It is very much subject to the pressing concerns and fickle fancies of each generation of philosophers. There was a time when David Hume was considered to be a historian. If recognized at all as a philosopher, it was as  one that was bad, mad, and dangerous to know. At the same time, Thomas Reid was considered to be a philosopher’s philosopher who spawned an extremely influential school (Scottish Common Sense philosophy). There was at that time no “Humean School” to speak of. As the English-speaking world became more skeptical, less deferential to authority, more inclined to scoff at moral and religious claims to truth, more immoral (or at least amoral), Hume’s star rose and Reid’s fell. And yet, for we happy few who have taken the time to read and engage with Reid’s thought, we might wonder whence this neglect of Hume’s great contemporary.

Sometimes philosophy may hold an unflattering mirror up to society. But more often, society simply chooses the philosophical mirror it prefers to see itself reflected in. In modern times we have tended to choose very Whiggish mirrors.

Those who know of Sir Robert Filmer at all typically know him exclusively at second hand, through the critiques of John Locke and perhaps Algernon Sidney. Reliance on these sources gives a mistaken impression of him. For one thing, these critiques rely heavily on one work of Filmer’s, Patriarcha, published posthumously in 1680. By then, Filmer had been dead for nearly 30 years, and in any case, Patriarcha was not the work he was best-known for in his lifetime, not the work upon which his earlier reputation was built. For that, one must turn to such works as The Free-holders Grand Inquest (1648), The Anarchy of a Mixed or Limited Monarchy (1648), or Observations concerning the Originall of Government (1652). It must be admitted however, that much in these works was borrowed from Patriarcha. And it must also be admitted that since the 1980s there has arisen some controversy as to whether Filmer was actually the author of The Free-holders Grand Inquest. (If he didn’t write it, then the anonymous author was someone who thought, wrote, and argued very much like him.)

Given the lapse of time between Filmer’s death and the critiques of Locke and Sidney, it should be noted that the latter were writing to a different generation, with different political concerns. While Filmer wrote in the context of the English Civil War, Sidney’s Discourses concerning Government (also published posthumously) was written during the Exclusion Crisis, as part of a campaign to keep the Catholic James, Duke of York from succeeding his brother on the English throne. Locke’s Two Treatises (1689) was published during the so-called “Glorious Revolution” that replaced James II (the aforementioned Catholic Duke of York) with his daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William III. Actually, Locke’s work was written earlier, during the Exclusion Crisis. As Peter Laslett, Locke’s greatest editor, convincingly argued, “Two Treatises is an Exclusion Tract, not a Revolution Pamphlet” (p. 61). In any case, whether these were Exclusion or Revolution tracts, they were trying roughly to achieve the same thing: delegitimize the (hereditary) Stuart claim to the throne by attacking a prominent defender of it.

Filmer is portrayed by Locke and Sidney as rather a ridiculous figure, a slightly cretinous old reactionary with crack-brained ideas about the King being God’s anointed through descent from Adam. That portrayal has essenitally continued to this day. In a review of a then-new edition of Filmer’s works, Christopher Hill, eminent 20th-century Marxist historian of the English Civil War period, cannot help making a snide little jab at Filmer (and Tories in general) when he wrote that “Filmer’s theory was the best the Tories could produce in the decisive decade 1678-88.” Again, it seems we’re meant to save ourselves the trouble of reading something not worth reading.

Hill’s words paper over the fact that through that same decade the Whigs hadn’t fared much better; they too stooped to grave-digging, resurrecting long-dead authors to support their cause. Philip Hunton’s A Treatise of Monarchy (1643) comes to mind, which was reprinted in 1689, not long after Filmer’s works had been reissued. Entering this pair in the lists was ironic, for they had done battle previously: Hunton’s Treatise had already been ably answered by Filmer’s Anarchy years before. It seems both sides were scavenging old ideas to support their respective causes, as is attested by the outpouring of reprints of Civil War-era works on similar themes that were reprinted during the Exclusion Crisis and the "Glorious" Revolution (a large selection of which can be found scattered in the pages of the Harleian Miscellany, for those who are interested).

 If Filmer was as obtuse and not worth reading as Locke, Sidney, Tyrrell, et al. have portrayed him (and as Christopher Hill implies), then why did they put themselves to the trouble of reviving and then attacking him? Why not let the poor deluded old man rest in peace? One reason was that the Tories had reprinted his previously published works in 1679, followed by an edition of his previously unpublished Patriarcha in 1680. The other reason was that Filmer’s ideas had proponents, influential ones. As Locke tells us in his preface,

“There was never so much glib Nonsence put together in well sounding English. If he [the reader] think it not worth while to examine his Works through, let him make an Experiment in that Part where he treats of Usurpation, and let him try whether he can, with all his Skill, make Sir Robert intelligible…. I should not speak so plainly of a Gentleman, long since past answering, had not the Pulpit, of late years, publickly owned his Doctrine, and made it the Currant Divinity of the Times.”

Thomas Hobbes had also strenuously defended monarchy, though on different grounds than Filmer. However, Hobbes was also a notorious infidel, and could therefore be safely ignored by most in the 1680s. Indeed, some of his ideas – e.g. natural liberty in an original state of nature, the institution of government by contractual consent – had already been co-opted by the Whigs for their purposes, so that by a strange sublimation, what had been arguments for absolutism became the very core of liberal theory.

Unlike Hobbes, Filmer was no outsider; he was a member of the landed gentry and he was an orthodox religionist who went out of his way to attack the infidel Hobbes. He was therefore taken up by clergymen in a way that Hobbes could not be. So every Sunday from pulpits across the land, the laity were being instructed by High Church preachers in the virtues of passive obedience to a monarchy instituted and sanctioned by God.

Reading between the lines, one gets the impression that the Whigs felt they were losing the battle for hearts and minds. I suspect they were. But you’d never know it from the Whiggish triumphalism suffusing modern accounts of the Locke-Filmer debate. When I read Locke’s Two Treatises, I sense that the author’s seeming contempt is masking palpable ideological fear.

I contend that Locke and Sidney misunderstand (willfully?) Filmer’s point. Filmer wasn’t claiming that Charles I literally derived his power from the biblical patriarchs. He was merely making the point that political obligation, specifically obligation to a monarch, was a basic anthropological phenomenon that pre-existed any supposed compact or agreement among the political community. Subjection to authority is and has always been a natural state, into which each of us is born; it is most commonly found in the subjection of child to parent, and forms our earliest “political” experience. (Note too, that unlike the Whiggish view of political subjection, this natural relationship is not based solely – or even mostly – on an implicit threat of violence.) The supposed Hobbesian/Lockean “natural freedom” in a state of nature, on the other hand, is mere fiction. Hence, writes Filmer, “Where subjection of children to parents is natural, there can be no natural freedom” (The Anarchy, p. 142). We do not spring up like mushrooms in the night, as fully-formed isomorphic liberal selves.

Now this claim, that political authority is conceptually or analogously related to parental authority, is one that might be argued against on historical/factual grounds, but it is not an absurd or lunatic claim. The fact is, we each of us is born under authority, and we rarely question its legitimacy. So why are we so quick to question the legitimacy of existing political authority, especially in the form of a monarchy which had existed since time immemorial? Why the need to replace this common experience with an abstract and likely fictional account of an original social contract? It is ironic that, while Filmer was attacking the theorizing of Hobbes and others, who based political obligation upon a supposed social contract, Locke attempts to refute Filmer by offering — a social contract theory!

Filmer was not alone in criticizing as a whimsical fiction this social contract view of the origins of political obedience. One of Locke’s antagonists, the underrated Edward Stillingfleet (1635-1699), Bishop of Worcester, made a similar point, writing “Every new modeller of government hath something to offer that looks like reason, at least to those whose interest it is to carry it on: and, if no precedents can be found, then they appeal to a certain invisible thing called, The Fundamental Contract of the Nation, which, being no where to be found, may signify what any one pleaseth” (quoted in Hatsell, Vol. II, p. 72).

As already noted, it was in part the later preaching of Filmerian doctrine from the pulpits by clergyman such as Stillingfleet that spurred Locke to write his Two Treatises. But contrary to prevailing prejudices, it was not just clergyman and High Church Tories who were skeptical of Whiggish social contract doctrines. Chief Justice Matthew Hale (1609-1676), no High Church clergyman, and someone respected by Whig and Tory alike, wrote of England that “the original pact whereby this kingdom was settled appears not, neither have we reason to believe there was any extant, it having been so ancient a kingdom… and therefore should we make our estimate of the nature and extent of the government by that, we should be at a loss” (p. 8). So at least some of Filmer’s doctrines were establishment rather than fringe ideas, contrary to how Filmer’s legacy is portrayed by today’s Whiggish scholars.

I implied above that Locke and Sidney willingly misunderstood Filmer. First, as mentioned, they mostly chose to criticize one work, the posthumous Patriarcha. Secondly, they chose to overemphasize and mischaracterize the notion that the monarch’s authority is an estate handed down from the biblical patriarchs, who derived it from Adam. The edition of Patriarcha I have is 64 pages long. Only one part of the first chapter, a passage totaling about 9 pages, contains what is commonly supposed to be his central tenet, that monarchy is derived from the paternal authority of the Old Testament patriarchs and ultimately from Adam. There is as much Roman as there is Old Testament history in the work, and there is more English constitutional history than either (roughly 20 pages).

Indeed, Filmer demonstrates a much deeper knowledge of English constitutional history and precedent than either Sidney or Locke. In this regard, I find Locke in particular appallingly ignorant of the constitutional law and customs of his own country. This is not atypical of philosophers, who rarely let facts stand in the way of a good theory. Stillingfleet’s words, quoted above, are instructive here: Locke is one of those “new modellers” of government who, lacking precedents (largely due to his legal-constitutional ignorance), appeals to a fictional contract, which serves as the black box for whatever preconceived theory he wishes to pull out of it. There is a grain of truth to this claim, for it certainly is interesting that different social contract theorists manage to generate vastly different ideal political systems from the same basic theoretical machinery. Locke’s ideal commonwealth is radically different from Hobbes’, Hobbes’ is radically different from Rousseau’s, and Rawls’ is vastly different from Nozick’s. What all of them do have in common is a readiness to make vast quasi-anthropological claims on pretty thin empirical grounds (though to be fair, Filmer is guilty of this too).

In his use of constitutional history and precedent, Filmer has been accused of unoriginality, relying heavily on other sources. If so, then it merely shows that better minds than his were already thinking along the same lines about monarchy, sovereignty, and political authority. For example, one of Filmer’s sources was the antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631). In a short and accessible posthumous work, The Antiquity and Dignity of Parliaments (again, one of those earlier unpublished works that was dug up and published in 1679), Cotton presents a comprehensive range of precedents, in chronological order. They are all marshalled to show very convincingly that the inclusion of the commons in Parliament was a relatively recent development, and that Parliament was always intended to be no more than an advisory body to the King, summoned and dissolved at his pleasure. The King was placed in a position above the law, his sovereignty undivided. This is essentially Filmer’s view of the matter, and The Free-holders Grand Inquest could have been written by Cotton.

The cartoonish Whig depiction of Filmer, as a crazed or semi-retarded old religious zealot, whose defense of his King relies mostly or solely on Old Testament patriarchy, goes back a lot further than Locke and Sidney. Just a few years after Filmer’s death, we find Marchamont Nedham writing that “Those Men that deny this Position [that the origin of legitimate government rests with the people], are fain to run up as high as Noah and Adam, to gain a pretence for their Opinion: alledging, That the primitive or first Governments of the World were not instituted by the consent and election of those that were governed” (The Excellencie of a Free-State (1656), p. 70). Nedham was writing before Patriarcha was published. His editor, Blair Worden, believes that the reference is to Filmer’s The Anarchy of a Limited or Mixed Monarchy (1648). Assuming so, then just as with Filmer’s Whig critics a quarter of a century later, Nedham’s characterization of his argument’s reliance on Old Testament patriarchy is absurdly overblown. The edition of The Anarchy I have in my hand is forty pages long. Of that, passages reliant on biblical history, taken together, account for roughly two pages. Classical and contemporary references vastly outnumber scriptural ones. Indeed, if Filmer’s Anarchy was so reliant on Scripture, one would expect him to have chosen a verse or two of Scripture for his epigraph. Instead, he chose a couple of lines from Lucan’s Pharsalia.

Nedham seems to have been a man of rather flexible political convictions; he held them strongly and eloquently, but only until it was no longer in his interest to hold them. He wrote The Excellencie of a Free-State during his second period as a Commonwealthsman, after a stint as a Royalist propagandist. In it he argued that the end of government being the good of the people, the people ought to govern themselves, because “they best know where the shooe pinches” (p. 25). Therefore, he advocated a unicameral government by a representative popular assembly. As a conservative, someone like me might wonder whether Nedham’s claim is strictly true. Do the people always best know where the shoe pinches? And are they necessarily best placed to know how to what's causing it and how to fix it? After all, not every wearer of a shoe is a shoemaker.

It is a perennial theme of conservative jeremiads that “the people” (or “the mob”) are fickle and turbulent. Hence the need for a form of energetic government with a strongly concentrated sovereignty. For many centuries monarchy was that form of government. It is perhaps hard for us now to understand the monarchist mindset, and we are surprised when we see atavistic manifestations of it in the form of broad popular support for a Putin, a Duterte, or a Trump. But most of the people who have ever existed, have lived and died under the rule of monarchs. With this in mind, we might be a little more charitable when approaching thinkers such as Filmer, for whom monarchy was natural in the strongest sense.

Bibliography

COTTON, Sir Robert. The Antiquity and Dignity of Parliaments (1679). Reprinted in The Harleian Miscellany, Vol. VIII, pp. 216-228. London: Robert Dutton, 1810.

FILMER, Sir Robert. Patriarcha and Other Writings. Johann P. Sommerville (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

HALE, Sir Matthew. The Prerogatives of the King. D. E. C. Yale (ed.). London: Selden Society, 1976.

HATSELL, John. Precedents of Proceedings in the House of Commons (4 vols.). London: Luke Hansard, 1818.

HILL, Christopher. Review of Patriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer (Laslett, ed.). History 37.130 (1952), 166.

HUNTON, Philip. A Treatise of Monarchy. Reprinted in The Harleian Miscellany, Vol. IX, pp. 321-371. London: Robert Dutton, 1810.

LOCKE, John. Two Treatises of Government. Peter Laslett (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

NEDHAM, Marchamont. The Excellencie of a Free-State. Blair Worden (ed.). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2011.

SIDNEY, Algernon. Discourses concerning Government. Thomas G. West (ed.). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1996.

TYRELL, James. Patriarcha non Monarcha: The Patriarch Unmonarch’d. London: Richard Janeway, 1681.

William Wollaston (1659-1724)

In writing about the 18th-century British moralists, there is a certain point of controversy that comes up again and again in their writings, and which will therefore be next to impossible for me to avoid. In some ways, the topic was controversial because it was rather vague and ill-defined. I suspect that in my effort to explain it clearly and succinctly for the non-expert, I too will fall into that trap. But here goes…

Stated at its most vague, the question that exercised the British moralists so much was this: Does morality have its source in reason, or in sentiment? Those who believed the former came to be called moral rationalists, while those who believed the latter were called moral sentimentalists. The terminology is somewhat unfortunate, because it is very easy to find sentimentalist ideas in rationalist writers, and vice versa.

In any event, the debate seems muddled. I believe a large part of the reason for this is that when we talk about morality’s source lying in either reason or sentiment, we can mean any of at least four things by “source of morality”:

     1.    The source of moral knowledge.
     2.    The source of moral motivation.
     3.    The source of moral obligation.
     4.    The source of moral judgments.

Our answer to the vague question of morality’s source may change depending on which of these we’re talking about. For example, if we’re talking about moral knowledge, it would be natural to see this as based in reason. However, if we’re talking about motivation, then we might — à la Hume — believe that reason is of itself inert and cannot move us to action without the motive force of the passions. We might know our duty, but performing it is a different matter. Dr. Johnson expressed the knowledge/action gap rather eloquently when he wrote that

“It very commonly happens that speculation has no influence on conduct. Just conclusions, and cogent arguments, formed by laborious study, and diligent enquiry, are often reposited in the treasuries of memory, as gold in the miser’s chest, useless alike to others and himself. As some are not richer for the extent of their possessions, others are not wiser for the multitude of their ideas.” (Rambler No. 98)

It’s even trickier when we talk about moral judgments. For example, one might conceive of judgment as a matter of arriving at a conclusion from premises through a process of ratiocination; in which case it would be natural to see judgment as connected with knowledge, and by extension, with reason (even while accepting that reason may err). However, if one conceives of judgment as unmediated assent to a proposition, akin to intuition, then there may be room here for sentiment to play a role.

One anecdote neatly illustrates this confusion of concepts. In the first edition of John Brown’s (1715-1766) Essays on the Characteristics of the Earl of Shaftesbury (1751), the title of the second essay was “On the Obligations of Man to Virtue”. In the same year, a second edition of the book was printed, in which the essay’s title had been changed to “On the Motives to Virtue”. In every other respect, the essay remained unchanged. Now, obligations and motives are very different things. One can be obligated without being motivated, and vice versa. One can be both obligated and motivated, even though one’s motivation may come from venal and very immoral reasons. The change of title suggests that much of the core of what the British moralists were arguing about was not very clear even to themselves. It was, however, a muddle that proved very fruitful in new ideas. This weakness was, paradoxically, advantageous for discourse on morals in 18th-century Britain.

Putting aside for the moment the various confusions that often caused rationalists and sentimentalists to talk past one another, let us turn to our next British Moralist.

William Wollaston (1659-1724) was a thinker who, as we will see, fell into the rationalist camp. Of the man himself, there is little to say. He was born into a not-very-wealthy branch of an old family. He attended Cambridge, after which he was a schoolmaster for a time. Subsequently he took holy orders and became a curate, a lowly position in the Anglican Church. He toiled away in this relative obscurity until, at the age of 29, he inherited the estate of a wealthy uncle. From that time, he took up the — in my opinion perfect — life of an independent scholar-gentleman. He married and had children. In 1722 he privately published the book for which he achieved his allotted degree of fame, The Religion of Nature Delineated. In 1724 it was released publicly, and in the same year, Wollaston died.

Though almost unread now, The Religion of Nature Delineated (hereinafter referred to as RND) was extraordinarily popular in the 18th century, going through 22 editions by 1800. Benjamin Franklin was in London working for Wollaston’s publisher, Samuel Palmer, when he typeset an edition of the book in 1726.

Broadly speaking, RND was a rather idiosyncratic attempt to provide a theory of morals without relying upon revealed religion. For our purposes, the meat of the book is really contained in its first 20 pages or so. Wollaston develops the foundations of his theory in a series of propositions, the first of which is, “That act, which may be denominated morally good or evil, must be the act of a being capable of distinguishing, choosing, and acting for himself: or more briefly, of an intelligent and free agent” (p. 7). Already, we see one sense in which his theory is rationalist, since he is essentially saying that only an intelligent agent is capable of performing actions that may be denominated right or wrong, because only such an agent is capable of distinguishing moral truth. And only a free agent is capable of choosing to act based on that distinction.

So far there is nothing particularly new or controversial. In the next proposition, he expresses what he basically means by truth: “Those propositions are true, which express things as they are: or, truth is the conformity of those words or signs, by which things are exprest, to the things themselves” (p. 8). Put in the technical language of current philosophy, Wollaston adheres to an old school correspondence theory of truth, which essentially holds a proposition to be true which corresponds with the facts it expresses. Again, nothing particularly new or remarkable about this claim, certainly not by the standards of the time, anyway.

It is his third proposition that is really at the core of what made Wollaston’s theory distinctive. He asserts that “A true proposition may be denied, or things may be denied to be what they are by deeds, as well as by express words or another proposition” (p. 8). Our actions may be characterized as signs or propositions that assert facts or states of affairs. To put it in the terms of modern logic, an action can have a truth-value, in the same way that a spoken or written proposition may be true or false.

So, for example, by appropriating your laptop without your permission, my action affirms a certain state of affairs, namely that the laptop belongs to me rather than to you. Since this is not the case, I have in effect affirmed something that is false. That is what makes the action immoral, according to Wollaston.

Furthermore, just as with a stated proposition, an action affirms something that is true or false regardless of whether the agent knows it: “The truth or falsehood of [an] affirmation doth not depend upon the affirmer’s knowledge or ignorance: because there is a certain sense affixt to the words, which must either agree or disagree to that, concerning which the affirmation is made. The case is the very same still, if into the place of words, be substituted actions” (p. 9). So, whether I knew the laptop was yours or mistakenly believed it to be mine, my action would be wrong — or false — regardless.

Not only may truths be expressed in deeds as well as in words, but deeds can be even more expressive than words. To illustrate, Wollaston used the biblical story of Isaac and Abimelech. Isaac went to dwell among the Philistines with his wife, Rebekah. In order to keep her safe (don’t ask), he passed her off as his sister. But the jig was up when King Abimelech looked out a window and saw Isaac “sporting” with Rebekah. Wollaston continues,

"In the Jewish history we read, that when Abimelek saw Isaac sporting with Rebekah, and taking conjugal liberties, he presently knew her to be Isaac’s wife; and if she had not been his wife, the case had been as in the preceding instance. If it be objected, that she might have been his mistress or a harlot; I answer, that so she might have been, tho Isaac had told him by words that she was his wife. And it is sufficient for my purpose, and to make acts capable of contradicting truth, if they may be allowd to express things as plainly and determinately as words can. Certainly Abimelek gave greater credit to that information which passed through his eye, than to that which he received by the ear; and to what Isaac did, than to what he said. For Isaac had told him, that she was not his wife, but his sister." (p. 11)

When given the choice between believing the spoken affirmation “Rebekah is the sister of Isaac” or the action-affirmation “Rebekah is the wife of Isaac”, Abimelech believed the latter. In other words, not only do actions speak like words; they sometimes speak louder than words.

Here is a summary outline of Wollaston’s rationalist theory of morals:

     1. There are eternal moral truths. 
     2. Actions may affirm or deny these truths. 
     3. When our actions affirm these truths, they are good. 
     4. When our actions deny these truths, or affirm their opposite, they are bad. 
     5. Such actions are good or bad regardless of whether or not the agent intends to affirm or deny these truths. 

Much of the rest of RND is spent in demonstrating our rights and duties and how these are conformable to these claims.

(As a matter of fact, this is a pattern one finds in most of the works of the British moralists: a theory is laid out, sometimes relatively quickly, and then rights and duties are derived from the theory. This last latter part is often the least interesting, since the various writers rarely disagree fundamentally on what these rights and duties are. In fact, it is remarkable that such lively debates in moral philosophy could take place when, on what really matters — conduct, — they were in violent agreement. 18th-century Britain was after all still a society with a large set of shared moral values.)

Some Objections to Wollaston’s Theory.

Given the above admittedly oversimplified outline of Wollaston’s theories, a few objections may immediately come to mind.

First, Wollaston seems to essentially reduce moral obligation to the obligation to tell the truth (or avoid falsehood) in our words and deeds. But reducing all moral obligations to this single one means that we still have this one obligation that remains ungrounded. We have a duty to always tell the truth, but why? And remember, Wollaston’s aim was to explain morality without reliance on revealed religion, so he can’t simply say “Because God wills it”.

I think John Brown, who was mentioned earlier, was pointing to the same problem when he wrote that “’Virtue, saith this learned Writer [Wollaston], consists in a Conformity of our Actions with Truth; in treating every thing as being what it is.’ Well: be it so. Yet the Question still recurs, what is moral Truth? And this demands a Definition no less than Virtue, which was the Thing to be defined” (pp. 119-120). In other words, for Wollaston, “moral truth” seems to play the same role as “virtue”. So saying that we have a duty to conform our actions to moral truth is the same as to say that we have a duty to be virtuous, which is not very enlightening. For one thing, how do we know what is morally true/virtuous? For another, what makes it true/virtuous? Wollaston evades the really important questions.

Second, Wollaston seems to reduce all moral wrong to falsehood, as if vices were mistakes in math or logic. But isn’t there a fundamental difference in kind between morals wrongs and, say, errors in arithmetic?

A third possible objection stems from this perennial philosophical question: What, if any, is the relationship between the True, the Good, and the Beautiful? Shaftesbury had taken much heat from his critics for (supposedly) trying to reduce the Good to the Beautiful, and promoting what some later writers (e.g. Valihora) would call an “aesthetic theory of morality”. One can see how someone holding an aesthetic theory of morality might fall naturally into the sentimentalist camp: if moral good is a form of beauty, and if beauty is rather felt than thought, then morality becomes largely a matter of feeling. But is the Good reducible to the Beautiful? And can sentiment produce reliable moral judgments without the interposition of rational thought? No, said Shaftesbury’s critics. (In truth, this is merely a cartoonish oversimplification of Shaftesbury.)

If the reduction of the Good to the Beautiful is the original sin of the sentimentalists, then perhaps the reduction of the Good to the True is the original sin of rationalists such as Wollaston. Is the Good reducible to the True? If so, why do we not get worked up about arithmetical error in the same way we get worked up about moral error (our second objection, above)? Although we may theorize about it, morality is fundamentally practical, and not merely theoretical.

Fourth, Wollaston seems to make out all forms of immorality to be akin to acts of lying or of ignorance, of denying what is true or of affirming what is false, whether intentionally or mistakenly. But isn’t the moral wrongness of telling a lie different in both kind and degree from, say, the wrongness of murder? More on this below…

Clarke’s Objections to Wollaston.

The year after RND was published and Wollaston died, a 63-page pamphlet appeared entitled An Examination of the Notion of Moral Good and Evil, Advanced in a late Book entitled, the Religion of Nature delineated (1725). Its author was an obscure grammar school teacher named John Clarke (1687-1734). Despite his rather turgid prose style, it turns out that Mr. Clarke was an able and perceptive critic of Wollaston. I will offer below some of his objections, which supplement the ones we have already considered.


First, Clarke notes a fallacy in Wollaston’s claims that our actions may affirm or deny truths:

"I desire the Reader to take notice, that Affirming and Denying are Actions, which in strict Propriety of Language are only applicable to Agents; so that Actions, whether Words or Deeds, can not be properly said to affirm or deny any thing; the Agent only can be properly said to affirm or deny Truth by his Actions, whether Words or Deeds…. Thus for Instance, a Person that should pronounce, in the hearing of others, Words in the Greek Tongue, which he understands not, equivalent to this Proposition in English, There is no God, could not be said to deny the being of God." (pp. 6-9, misnumbered)
 
Put another way, Wollaston writes as if words and deeds are disembodied and free-floating entities with an independent truth-value of their own. The agent is just the occasion from which they issue, and when they are false, the agent has “done” something morally culpable, regardless of what was going on in his head when the said entities issued forth.

Clarke, on the other hand, is saying that whatever immorality there is in in one’s action, it must come from the agent’s understanding of what he is doing. If I babble a bunch of foreign words I do not understand, I cannot be said to have told a lie, since I haven’t really “told” anything. Whereas, Wollaston’s theory makes no allowance for such a case, and must treat a man as immoral who says something untrue, even unintentionally, or even if he is incapable of understanding what he has said. I would further add, that in the case of deeds, the same absurdity would seem to hold: if I am coerced into doing an immoral deed, I must be just as culpable as if I did it voluntarily, as far as Wollaston is concerned. Accepting that actions can be said to deny or affirm propositions independently of the intentions of the agent, as Wollaston seems to do, is to ascribe the same moral culpability to someone who does not intend to deny truth as to one who does (p. 12). In other words, it fails to distinguish between a lie and an error.

Clarke also notes that many of the worst kinds of immoral actions do not seem to involve any denial of truth or affirmation of falsehood at all. Indeed, using the example of a highwayman demanding money at gunpoint (p. 11), Clarke says that the demand, backed by threat of violence, is neither a denial of the true proposition that the money belongs to the victim, nor an affirmation of the false proposition that the money rightfully belongs to the highwayman. Quite the opposite, in fact. The violence of his act speaks volumes about whom the money really belongs to. And in any case, be cannot be said to be affirming or denying any proposition. He is simply making a coercive threat; he is not trying to convince the victim that his money is not his own.

We might go further here than Clarke. We might say that, even if the highwayman were affirming a proposition, it might be the proposition “I will shoot you if you don’t give me your money”. Assuming that the highwayman intends to carry through on his threat, then on Wollaston’s theory, the highwayman is behaving virtuously in affirming what is true!

When we talk of actions as affirming or denying propositions, Clarke notes that there is always the problem of interpretation, of figuring out precisely which proposition is being affirmed or denied. Deeds, like words, may be misinterpreted. Clarke argues that in many cases deeds may lack the eloquence of words:

"Does a Man break a Bargain? this is, according to Mr. Wollaston, denying the Truth by Action, denying there was any Bargain: Tho’ if another might take the same Freedom, or pretend to the like Skill for the finding out the Sense and Meaning of Actions, he would be apt to think it perhaps not a Denial of the Bargain, as tho’ there had been none, but of the Obligation only to keep it. Another Critic in Actions would perhaps find it out to be a Denial of neither, but an affirmation rather of this Proposition, that the Breach of the Bargain was a likely means to rook his Chapman of some Money…" (p. 13)

There is an indeterminacy of meaning to words and deeds.

Finally, to the list of objections to Wollaston’s theory, we can add the following humorous reductio ad absurdum from Clarke. If, as Wollaston claims, virtue lies in always affirming truth in our words and deeds, then “it will then be a glorious Exercise for a Man to spend his Time in thrumming over such worthy and weighty Propositions as these, A Man’s no Horse, a Horse no Cow, a Cow no Bull, nor a Bull an Ass” (p. 19). The most reliable road to moral sainthood would, then, seem to be to spend several hours a day sitting in an armchair and rattling off as many true propositions as come to mind.

Although Wollaston’s book sold extremely well, his theory cannot be said to have had many professed adherents. The general opinion seems to have been that the theory was ingenious but utterly wrong. In retrospect, like Hobbes before him, Wollaston’s most lasting contribution to 18th-century moral theory came from the various refutations it spawned.

Bibliography

BROWN, John. Essays on the Characteristics. London: C. Davis, 1751 (facsimile, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1969).

CLARKE, John. An Examination of the Notion of Moral Good and Evil, Advanced in a late Book entitled, the Religion of Nature delineated. London: A. Bettesworth, 1725.

VALIHORA, Karen. Austen’s Oughts: Moral Judgment after Locke and Shaftesbury. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2010.

WOLLASTON, William. The Religion of Nature Delineated. London: Samuel Palmer, 1724 (facsimile, Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1974).

The Cambridge Platonists

Benjamin Whichcote (1609-1683)

As mentioned in my previous post, this is the first of a series on the great period of the British moralists, extending from roughly 1650 to 1800.

Professional philosophers make a living by arguing against one another, and society has decided, for its own reasons, that it would like to pay certain people to make a profession out of disagreeing. And yet, strangely, the fact is that modern Anglo-American academic philosophers are really birds of a feather. The majority of them, it seems, share the following beliefs in some form: free will is an illusion; truth is subjective or is a function of power; veridical knowledge about the world is not possible (scepticism); morality is largely a matter of either subjective feeling (emotivism, non-cognitivism) or group agreement (cultural relativism), or an illusion (nihilism); the universe is reducible to force acting on passive matter ; the human agent is a causally determined machine made of flesh and propelled by desires and appetites; human beings are not special, but are just animals with somewhat more complicated brains; there is no such thing as objective beauty; there is no such thing as a soul; there is no such thing as a God.

This list is not exhaustive, but it is certainly depressing. And looking at it, one is struck by how much the modern philosopher is the direct heir of her famous 17th-century predecessors. During the middle of that century, Descartes was arguing that the universe was reducible to matter pushed by matter. At the same time, Hobbes was arguing that men were nothing more than meat puppets motivated by selfish appetites, and that right and wrong had no basis in reality other than a sovereign’s ability to impose them by force.

Some brave souls struggled, however vainly, against this reductionist impulse. Imagine for a moment a time and place where there were English-language academic philosophers who (i) wrote in elegant and beautiful prose (almost inconceivable now); who (ii) believed that Right and Wrong, Good and Evil, were distinctions with a sound basis in the nature of things; who (iii) defended the concepts of free will and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions; who (iv) believed that rather than being an inert, passive collection of matter, the universe is alive and active; and who (v) similarly believed that the mind is an active power that makes knowledge as much as it passively receives it.

This broad and unfashionable-sounding philosophical profile is characteristic of a group of 17th-century thinkers associated with Cambridge University, and particularly with Emmanuel College, a group that later came to be labelled “the Cambridge Platonists”. It is precisely this broad and unfashionable profile that makes these figures rather difficult to explain today.

To be honest, in discussing the Cambridge Platonists, I’m not quite sure where to begin. I suppose we might start with style, with their elegant prose. The first thing to keep in mind is that although they were academics, they were also clergymen. In other words, the course of their professional duties required a lighter touch, since they had to deliver sound theological doctrine, moral exhortation, and religious inspiration to congregations who were not academics themselves, or indeed were illiterate. Hence, to a professional academic philosopher of today, their writings — many of which appear in the form of sermons — can seem flaky and eccentric. But they are often extremely poetic. Take, for example, this characterization of the spiritually deadening effects of excessive self-interest offered by Peter Sterry (1613-1672): “A little Bird ty’d by the Leg with a String, often flutters and strives to raise itself; but still it is pull’d down to the Earth again: Thus a Soul fixt in a Self-Principle, may make attempts to Pray and Offer at the Bosom of God; but still it is snatch’d down by that String of Self, which ties it to the Ground” (Pinto 169). I admit there is great charm in this little simile. The author has that poetic eye, which sees the very great in the very small.

Not all of Sterry’s imagery was equally felicitous. For example, there is something rather improper in this one: “There is not the lowest thing, which hath not God in it; for God fills all: Yet as the Sun-Beams fall on a Dunghill, and are not polluted; so God is still himself to himself, high and glorious in the lowest Things” (Pinto 150). Put charitably, this might be characterized as the author’s poetic eye seeing the very small in the very great, to ill effect.

Another choice little gem comes from the lyrical pen of John Smith: “When we look unto the Earth, then behold darkness and dimness of anguish, that I may use those words of the Prophet Esay [Isaiah 8:22]: But when we look towards Heaven, then behold light breaking forth upon us, like the Eye-lids of the Morning, and spreading its wings over the Horizon of mankind sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace [Luke 1:79]” (Patrides 151).

Interestingly, among the Cambridge Platonists, Sterry was a bit of an oddball. For one thing, he was a Puritan. As a matter of fact, he was Oliver Cromwell’s chaplain. Most of the other Cambridge Platonists were Anglican, though of a latitudinarian persuasion. Also, while the others had their poetic flights, they usually succeeded in remaining firmly grounded in reason. Sterry, on the other hand, was a mystic, and some of his flights, though somehow quite dazzling, were also utterly incomprehensible if one stopped to reflect on them for too long, as in this example: “A bright or light Body, like the Sun, sends forth millions of Beams round about from every Point of itself. Such a Brightness, such a Fruitfulness is there in the Person of Christ; Millions of Angels every Moment spring and sparkle forth from him” (Pinto 153). This is a beautiful gem, but one isn’t quite sure what to do with it.

At his mystical best, Sterry was a poet of those little contemplative silences, where God is to be found: “Put out then every Spark of Creature Light or Life in your Spirits, and you shall find yourselves immediately in the Light of God. A deep Silence of all created Objects ushers in the Appearances of God in the Soul” (Pinto 184). And consider this, which he wrote in a letter to his son: “As musick is conveyed sweetest and furthest upon a river in ye Night: so is ye Musick of ye heavenly voice carried most clearly, pleasantly to ye understanding, when all ye outward senses ly wrapt up in darkness, and ye depth of night” (Pinto 184).

Sterry was a sort of poet who wrote in prose. Not all of the Cambridge Platonists were excellent stylists. Henry More (1614-1687), for instance, was a wretched writer. He also tried his hand at actual poetry, to embarrassing effect. Two things were mainly responsible for making More’s poetry bad. First, his favourite poet was Edmund Spenser, particularly the latter’s Faerie Queen, which was written in a peculiar stanza form, and used language that was self-consciously archaic and hearkened back to Middle English verse. With Spenser it has a certain charm, and certainly it flows. Here’s the effect when More employs (perpetrates?) a similar style:

     Nor Ladies loves, nor Knights brave martiall deeds,
     Ywrapt in rolls of hid Antiquitie;
     But th’inward Fountain, and the unseen Seeds,
     From whence are these and what so under eye
     Doth fall, or is record in memorie,
     Psyche, I’ll sing. Psyche! from thee they sprong.
     O life of Time, and all Alterity!
     The life of lives instill his nectar strong,
   My soul t’inebriate, while I sing Psyches song.
(“Psychozoia,” Canto I, stanza 1, in Philosophicall Poems, p. 1).

Secondly, More uses this poetical form to express very abstract philosophical concepts, deploying a Greek-derived philosophical inkhorn jargon. Long Greek words tend not to sit very naturally within English versification, partly because they don’t scan well, and partly because the reader must stop the flow to mentally construe the meaning of such terms:

    “Plain death’s as good as such a Psychopannychie.”

Wretched stuff. None of this is to say that More wasn’t a good philosopher; he was just a terrible writer, bad enough to make Kant proud. I could say much more about style, but I’d rather move on to content.

Active Minds

I mentioned above that unlike Hobbes and Descartes (and later Locke), who saw the human mind along the lines of a lump of wax passively receiving sensory impressions, the Cambridge Platonists conceptualized the mind as an active power that makes knowledge rather than merely receiving it. On this, the best spokesperson is probably Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688). Cudworth insisted that one way the active nature of the human mind manifests itself is in the integration of the various sensory impressions it receives: “The Sight cannot Judge of Sounds which belong to the Hearing, nor the Hearing of Light and Colours; wherefore that which judges of all the Senses and their several Objects, cannot be it self any Sense, but something of a superior Nature” (Treatise 70). In other words, there must be some active intellectual power that actively integrates and interprets information from all the various senses, and which cannot itself be a sense, but is something that is prior to sensory knowledge.

It is not just that the sensationalist psychology leaves unexplained how the various passively received sensory impressions get integrated without the active power of the mind. Hobbes and his ilk, in their rush to reduce knowledge to sensory impressions, effectively reduce all sense impressions to impressions of one sense — touch, since all sense is a reducible to matter impacting upon the sensory organs. Thus, they lose the basis for differentiation between the various senses (e.g. touch versus taste), and between different sensations within a sensory dimension (hard versus soft). Again, it is the active powers of the mind that make these discriminations (ibid. 60).

And since, says Cudworth, knowledge cannot be reduced to passively acquired sense-impressions without positing an active integrating and discriminating power, “Knowledge is not a Knock or Thrust from without, but it consisteth in the Awakening and Exciting of the Inward Active Powers of the Mind” (ibid. 99-100). Thus, he says, “It must needs follow from hence, that Knowledge is an Inward and Active Energy of the Mind it self, and the displaying of its own Innate Vigour from within, whereby it doth Conquer, Master and Command its Objects…” (ibid. 126).

“Connate” Knowledge and the Moral Sense

So, knowledge does not come solely — or even primarily — from the senses. The mind is active and, in a sense, creates knowledge using its own pre-existing resources. There is, then, such a thing as innate knowledge, prior to sensory experience. It is in this claim of innate knowledge that we find the Platonism of the Cambridge Platonists on display. However, instead of using the word “innate” they often prefer to use the term “connate” or “connatural”. Indeed, this latter terminology is so frequent in the writings of the Cambridge Platonists, and infrequent enough elsewhere, that it can almost serve as an identifier of the group. (As we’ll see, there are two other terms that also serve this purpose.) “Connatural” is not always used in the same way in their writings. For example, there are many places where it is synonymous with “innate”, in the sense of a kind of knowledge that is in the mind ab initio, not acquired. In other places it serves to describe knowledge that, though not necessarily present from the very first, develops early on and necessarily, as a function of the life form and history of the species. And sometimes for the Cambridge Platonists, “connatural” is used in the sense of “consistent with one’s nature”, as when Benjamin Whichcote (1609-1683) writes that “Man, as Man, is Averse to what is Evil and Wicked; for Evil is unnatural, and Good is connatural, to Man” (Moral & Religious Aphorisms #42).

Whichcote’s words show that moral knowledge is among that body of knowledge which is connate to man. Although we learn to make finer moral distinctions through experience, human beings have an innate understanding of right and wrong, good and evil. For the Cambridge Platonists, this understanding is sometimes ascribed to reason, and sometimes to “conscience”, though the latter term is often used as if it were the same thing as reason. This is because for them, reason is more akin to a sort of intuition; it is not necessarily ratiocinative. Again, here their Platonism is on display: understanding is often more a matter of directly grasping the truth rather than arriving at it by a process of explicit reasoning, of consciously moving stepwise from premises to conclusion.

For the Cambridge Platonists, there is a normative dimension to reason that allows for this identification of reason with conscience. Whichcote notes that reason has a directing force, because it is the voice of God. Therefore, “To go against Reason, is to go against God: it is the self same thing, to do that which the Reason of the Case doth require; and that which God Himself doth appoint: Reason is the Divine Governor of Man’s Life; it is the very Voice of God” (ibid. #76). The moral person listens to this voice and follows it. Disobedience to it is immorality. And when we ignore it, says Whichcote, we not only pay the price in terms of suffering the worldly consequences of error, we also suffer the sting of conscience: “If Reason may not command; it will condemn” (Select Sermons, p. 63; Moral & Religious Aphorisms #98).

Placed within the tradition of the British moralists, it is easy to see how this view of conscience as an intuitive grasping of moral truth leads naturally to the notion that we have a moral sense, which gives us access to moral truths much as sight grasps colours and shapes, and hearing grasps sounds. In other words, we can see in the Cambridge Platonists the beginnings of a “moral sense” school of thought. Shaftesbury, usually accredited as the founder of the moral sense school, edited — with a lengthy preface — an edition of Whichcote’s sermons (Select Sermons). As a matter of fact, this was Shaftesbury’s first published work. To credit Shaftesbury with inventing the moral sense is to ignore the fact that in the very volume that Shaftesbury edited, Whichcote wrote, “Man by his Nature and Constitution, as God made him at first, being an intelligent Agent, hath Sense of Good and Evil, upon a Moral account” (Select Sermons 232). Elsewhere, Whichcote wrote in a similar strain, “Man, by Reason, has apprehensions of Moral Good and Evil; as Animals, by Sense, distinguish Natural Good and Evil” (Moral & Religious Aphorisms #146). Of Shaftesbury’s two most prominent followers, Hutcheson preferred the language of “moral sense”, while Butler seems to have preferred “conscience”, the term more commonly used among the Cambridge Platonists.

“The Candle of the Lord”

So, in the Cambridge Platonists, we have a view of the mind as active, and as directing conduct through reason or conscience. This “reason-or-conscience” is connatural to man. I also said that the use of the word “connatural” is often a telltale sign that one is reading the Cambridge Platonists (Shaftesbury used it too). This is a good place to introduce another phrase peculiar to the Cambridge Platonists. They seem to have had an obsession with Proverbs 20:27: “The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord.” This image of the mind as the candle of the Lord is recurrent throughout the writings of this group.

Whichcote uses it when he writes that “The Spirit of a Man is the Candle of the Lord; Lighted by God, and Lighting us to God” (Moral & Religious Aphorisms #916). Nathaniel Culverwell (1619-1651) is often mentioned in connection with the Cambridge Platonists, because he taught at Emmanuel College, but he is usually considered not to be one of them, because his philosophical opinions are more heterodox — in his writings there is a heavy natural law influence, and he often cites Descartes with approval. However, I do consider him a Cambridge Platonist, largely on the grounds that he too was a heavy user of the “candle of the Lord” metaphor, as when he writes, “But the publishing and manifestation of this Law which must give notice of all this, does flow from that heavenly beame which God has darted into the soul of man; from the Candle of the Lord, which God has lighted up for the discovery of his owne Lawes; from that intellectual eye which God has fram’d and made exactly proportionable to this light” (Elegant and Learned Discourse 71).

What do Cambridge Platonists mean when they say that the mind is the “candle of the Lord”? Well, first, God is the source of all intellectual light (again, this is Platonism). But a finite portion of this infinite light has been placed in each of us, on purpose, that we may shed some of its rays to cut through darkness and illuminate His works. Recall John Smith’s words, quoted earlier: “But when we look towards Heaven, then behold light breaking forth upon us, like the Eye-lids of the Morning, and spreading its wings over the Horizon of mankind sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” We are surrounded by darkness, and all we have is this little candle to guide us and prevent us from stumbling around blindly.

Henry More has an interesting take on the “candle of the Lord” image. He seems to include our passions and affections as part of this luminous candle: “Nevertheless, we do not pretend, in the least, to have the Passions of the Mind exterminated. We rather account of them… as of the very Organs of the Body, and as distinctly useful… Wherefore if we can but skill our Passions aright, They are as Lamps or Beacons, to conduct and excite us to our Journey’s end” (Account of Virtue 82-83). This is a truly remarkable passage. Most philosophers in the Western tradition, Descartes included, viewed the passions with deep suspicion, since they were seen to interfere with reason, clouding or distorting it. More, on the other hand, does not distrust the passions as such. Rather, since the passions are natural, we must have them for a purpose. The passions, “rightly skilled” or trained, are guides to the understanding of good and evil, or are at least tokens of such understanding. This acceptance of our passionate nature is another foreshadowing of Shaftesbury’s philosophy.

“Plastick Nature”

I mentioned earlier that the Cambridge Platonists set themselves against those philosophers, such as Hobbes, who viewed the universe as an inert, passive collection of matter bounces against other matter in the void, to no particular purpose. For the Cambridge Platonists, by contrast, the universe is active and purposive, a sort of living organism. Instead of simply existing, with its component parts bouncing against each other endlessly, the Cambridge Platonist universe can be said to be in a process of unfolding. Since the universe is God’s creation, it can even be said to be a thought in God’s mind, with a logic to it, much as there is with a chain of reasoning in the mind. We’ve already seen that minds are active. As with minds, so with larger nature. Everything is active, unfolding according to its own internal principles.

This brings us to the third of those terms — along with “connatural” and “candle of the Lord” — that are identifiers of Cambridge Platonist writing. This activity, this “unfolding of nature according to its internal principles” is called the universe’s “plastic nature”. Although the phrase, and variants of it, is common among all the writers in this group, it is especially prominent in Ralph Cudworth and John Smith. Cudworth, for example, complains of the inertness of the materialist philosophers’ universe in the following terms: “They make a kind of Dead and Wooden World, as it were a Carved Statue, that hath nothing neither Vital nor Magical at all in it. Whereas to those who are Considerative, it will plainly appear, that there is a Mixture of Life or Playstick [sic.] Nature together with Mechanism, which runs through the whole Corporeal Universe” (Patrides 290). The universe is not a mere machine. It is an organism that grows and develops: “[T]he World was not made by any whatsoever, after such a manner as an Artificer makes an House, by Machins and Engins, acting from without upon the Matter, Cumbersomly and Moliminously, but by a certain Inward Plastick Nature of its own” (Patrides 296).

John Smith makes an important point that serves to tie much of this metaphysics together with the concept of free will, for he says that as with nature, so too with the mind. Neither nature as a whole, nor the mind as a subset of nature, is wholly compelled by extraneous forces. Rather, it moves towards ends proposed by its own internal force: “There is a Plastick Virtue, a Secret Energy issuing forth from that which the Mind propounds to itself as its End, to mold and fashion it according to its own Model. The soul is alwaies stamp’d with the same Characters that are engraven upon the End it aims at; and while it converses with it, and sets it self before it, it is turned as Wax to the Seal, to use that phrase in Job [Job 38:14]” (Patrides 166). Where a Hobbist sees the motions of the mind as being caused by contingent, occurrent wants and desires, Smith sees the mind as active in proposing ends to itself, and that there is a “fit” between agent and ends. Note too the reversal here of the Cartesian image of the mind as wax passively receiving sensory impressions from the external world. Instead, Smith proposes that the mind is itself the seal, which leaves its impression upon the external world, through willing and acting.

A living and unfolding universe with meaning, free and active minds, an innate moral faculty, a sense of beauty, the reality of good and evil, the acceptance and celebration of our passionate nature… these things are the philosophical legacy of the Cambridge Platonists. Unfortunately, it is a legacy we have mostly squandered.

Bibliography

CUDWORTH, Ralph. A Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality. London: James and John Knapton, 1731 (facsimile, New York: Garland, 1976).

CULVERWELL, Nathaniel. An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature. Robert A. Greene and Hugh McCallum (eds.). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001.

MORE, Henry. Philosophicall Poems. Cambridge: Roger Daniel, 1647 (facsimile, Menston, UK: Scolar Press, 1969).

— An Account of Virtue. Edward Southwell (trans.). London: Benjamin Tooke, 1690 (facsimile, New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1930).

PATRIDES, C. A. (ed.). The Cambridge Platonists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

PINTO, Vivian de Sola (ed.). Peter Sterry, Platonist and Puritan, 1613-1672: A Biographical and Critical Study with passages selected from his Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934.

WHICHCOTE, Benjamin. Select Sermons of Dr. Whichcot [sic.]. Edinburgh: G. Hamilton and J. Balfour, 1742 (facsimile, Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1977).

— Moral and Religious Aphorisms. London: Mathew Elkins and Marrot, 1930.

Economics as a Moral Science

“Similarly, calls for ‘solidarity’ (or fiscal transfers) run straight into concerns over moral hazard. Mario Monti, a former Italian prime minister, likes to claim that in Germany economics is seen as a branch of moral philosophy.”

— “Of Rules and Order,” The Economist (9 May 2015), p. 47.

The above lines appear in an article on German ordoliberalism that claims the doctrine has become unquestioned orthodoxy among economists and policymakers in Germany, to sometimes detrimental effect. Ordoliberalism is an offshoot of classical liberalism, which advocates a strong role for the state in setting the legal and regulatory framework within which markets can operate to their full potential. It was named after ORDO, the journal strongly associated with the school of thought.

It is not my aim to critique ordoliberalism. I am more interested in Monti’s statement to the effect that Germans see economics as a branch of moral philosophy. The impression given is that Monti sees this as a bad thing, as if economics and moral philosophy should properly be kept separate. On the contrary, I see them as almost necessarily connected and that any attempt to pretend economics has nothing to do with moral philosophy is quixotic at best, downright harmful at worst. It is my belief that economics is a branch of applied ethics.

I will begin by observing that many of the big names in the founding pantheon of economics saw themselves as moral philosophers. Let us not forget that the sainted Adam Smith was Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow from 1752 to 1764, and that before The Wealth of Nations (1776), he was already well-known as the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).

Smith’s friend David Hume wrote extensively on moral philosophy in addition to his many well-regarded essays on political economy. In the 18th century there was indeed no clear line separating the one from the other.

Even in the 19th century, Thomas Malthus was a clergyman before he was an economist. His solution to his famed population problem was a moral one: personal sexual restraint. His rejection of birth control was based on the belief that it would undermine public morals.

John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848), which went through seven editions in his lifetime, was the standard textbook on economics in the 19th century. At the same time, Mill was an exponent of the moral philosophy of utilitarianism who wrote extensively on politics and such questions of “applied” ethics as women’s rights and slavery. Book Six of his A System of Logic (1843) was entitled “The Logic of the Moral Sciences”.

Put simply, the history of economics is littered with famous economists that were also (and even primarily) moral philosophers.

At some point late in the 19th or early in the 20th century, academic philosophy in the English-speaking world decided it would be a value-free “hard” science, akin to physics or mathematics. The fad was to reduce all philosophical problems to linguistic ones, which were in turn seen to be reducible to mathematical ones. This process made academic philosophy the irrelevancy it largely is today. The fact is, not all philosophical problems are linguistic in nature, nor is a language simply a calculus. Indeed, the most interesting things about languages are not mathematical but social.

Economics underwent a similar transformation, at least insofar as it aspired to be a value-free hard science. The problem here is twofold: First, economics necessarily deals with human beings as its subject matter, and human beings are not value-free. Second, stripped of values, it is difficult see what would be the point of economics at all other than to serve basic human curiosity — hardly the sort of endeavor that will attract much grant funding.

Fortunately for us, try as it might, economics cannot avoid being value-laden. The fundamental dependence of economics on morality was exemplified by Adam Smith early on in The Wealth of Nations when he wrote that “Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog” (Bk. I, ch. 2). The notion of voluntary exchange is fundamental to economics, and neither the word “voluntary” nor the word “exchange” is value free. And once we start talking about fair voluntary exchange, we have arguably left the realm of economics proper and stumbled into the land of moral philosophy.

Aside from the concepts used in economics being value-laden, there is a deeper sense in which the discipline is a moral science. It helps to think of what economists do, and of why they do it. Yes, there is the descriptive side of it, the study and explanation of human interaction as embodied in exchange. To be able to do this well it helps to understand and be able to deploy such concepts as “value”, “institution”, “law”, “rule”, custom”, “contract”, “property” (and property “rights”), all of which are grounded in human morality. In other words, a good economist should understand that there is a moral framework that makes economic phenomena possible (it seems to me that German ordoliberalism is on the right track here). Morality is the specie that backs the economist’s paper currency.

But as importantly, there is the prescriptive side of economics, insofar as economists study with an eye to being able to make recommendations as to what will facilitate exchange, maximize production, improve well-being, etc. The bare desire to achieve any of these things presupposes, directly or indirectly, some ethical stance. Put another way,

Every economic policy prescription presupposes a moral philosophy.

By “moral philosophy” here I mean roughly a system of beliefs about what will make people happy (or good, as we’ll see). Philosophers have always asked the fundamental question, “What is the good life?” Economists ultimately ask “What is the best way to achieve the good life?” Whether they know it or not, their prescriptions presuppose an answer to the philosopher’s question.

Now, the prescriptive economist’s moral philosophy may not be a fully conscious thought in the mind of the economist who is prescribing, and whether conscious or not, it may not be all that well worked out. But trust me, it is there.

CONSEQUENTIALISM:

What is the moral philosophy of the prescriptive economist? Most commonly it is some form of maximizing consequentialism, such as utilitarianism. The consequentialist aims at maximizing the good. There is no good unless there is a person who experiences it, and the most obvious candidate for such an experienced good is pleasure. Pleasure has a necessary material basis, and the goal of prescriptive economists is to find ways to create more pleasure, mostly through expanding that material basis. However, beyond this point the details get messy.

For example, one economic prescription may be better at producing a greater amount of pleasure, while another is less good at that but better at making sure that more people get to experience the lesser amount produced. Which should be favoured, the production of greater overall pleasure, regardless of who gets to experience it? Or does distribution matter?

Then there is the sacrifice problem: if we agree that our goal is to maximize overall happiness, this may have to be done by sacrificing the happiness of particular individuals. It may seem like a good bargain from a disinterested point of view (though Nietzsche argued that there is ultimately no such thing as a disinterested point of view). But from the point of view of the person whose interest is being sacrificed, it can justifiably be asked, “Why me? Why should my happiness count for less than another person’s?”

There is also the “poetry or pushpin” problem: not all pleasures are the same. Some seem more worthwhile than others in terms of quality, even if not in terms of quantity. The sadist’s pleasure should not be privileged in the same way as other more innocent pleasures (though if the sadists can be happily paired off with the masochists…). If it’s easier to produce violent video games than sonnets, should we simply abandon sonnets as the less efficient form of pleasure production and plough all our economic efforts into improving on Grand Theft Auto and its dubious ilk? Or are there certain pleasures we should encourage and others we should discourage? If so, on what grounds? These are unavoidably questions of value. If we choose to value some pleasures over others, we must be able to justify that choice, and it seems impossible to do so without leaving the confines of pure utilitarianism.

DEONTOLOGY:
 
After consequentialism, the most common moral philosophy of the prescriptive economist seems to be some form of deontology or rights-based approach. For example, economists of a more libertarian bent will tend to see property rights as inviolable, no matter how much more pleasure the utilitarian might be able to produce through expropriation and redistribution. Often these rights are called “side constraints” in that they constrain the extent to which consequentialists can carry forward their pleasure-producing projects. There is something attractive to this approach, insofar as we feel intuitively that there should be certain things that are simply off-limits to governments, policymakers, regulators, and other assorted do-gooders. We feel that there ought to be a certain sphere in which we can make our own choices (and mistakes) without interference, even if we disagree on just what size and shape that sphere should be.

It is not just libertarian economists that have a tendency to defend their prescriptions in deontological terms. While the libertarian defends an extensive personal sphere, the socialist will emphasize the rights of others, and defend a redistributive scheme on the grounds that others are equally deserving of the fruits of production as those who currently happen to own them. If I own everything and everybody else is starving, how can I defend my holdings in a way that will carry weight with those who are starving? What about their right to eat? When redistribution is defended on the basis that those on the receiving end have a right to what they are given, it is being defended deontologically.

This brings out a central instability in just about any deontological economics. If pushed, the libertarian will often be compelled to shift from deontological to consequentialist argument to defend his rights: “I’m entitled to my entitlements because if I weren’t, production would suffer and we’d all be worse off. I’m a job creator.” This is a consequentialist argument. Deontological ethics requires far more metaphysics to defend it than an economist is typically able to offer; it’s usually easier to make a strategic retreat to consequentialism instead.

It should be noted that the consequentialist can be forced into a similar kind of strategic retreat. Finding that she too ultimately agrees that not everything can be sacrificed on the altar of pleasure production, she will usually fall back on the notion of rules, which can look very much like the deontologist’s side constraints. The difference is that the consequentialist will defend these rules on consequentialist grounds, again avoiding metaphysics. For example, having a rule allowing for inviolable property rights, a rule utilitarian will argue, leads to greater production by allowing property owners to put their property to its most productive use, etc. This rule will contribute to overall happiness in the long run and for greater numbers, even if in specific cases it works what seem like grave injustices. Of course, these claims of ultimate utility may or may not be empirically verifiable, but they allow the utilitarian to seemingly serve two incompatible imperatives — that happiness should be maximized while personal liberty remain unviolated.

PERFECTIONISM:

Aside from consequentialism and deontology, there is another moral position sometimes implicitly adopted by prescriptive economists. Though somewhat rarer, I find it very interesting when I see it, in part because it seems to go against the grain of everything we think of when we think of economics, in that it doesn’t necessarily concern itself with producing utility (nor with personal liberty). Let us call it perfectionism. There are many different kinds of perfectionism. What they tend to have in common is that, put in ethical jargon, they are non-eudaimonistic, meaning that they are not centered around the concept of happiness as such.

Utilitarianism is eudaimonistic, in that it offers views on how to increase happiness, ultimately identifying happiness with goodness. Perfectionism is the opposite of this; it uncouples happiness and goodness. The good may very well be something that has nothing to do with happiness at all. Maybe we live in a kind of broken universe, where the ethical life requires us to be unhappy, in the service of some impersonal good. It may simply be the case that ethical goodness is incompatible with being happy. Up to a point, Christianity presents us with a perfectionist morality, since it counsels us that doing our duties as God wills may require us to suffer greatly. On the other hand, Christianity degenerates into a sort of bastard utilitarianism once it starts offering future rewards and punishments in the hereafter.

Another example of a perfectionist moral theory might be certain versions of virtue ethics, which begin with an account of the virtuous moral agent, while not necessarily tying that virtue to human flourishing or happiness. It is possible to read Nietzsche this way. Malthus arguing against the use of birth control might be another instance.

What does a perfectionist economic prescription look like? Well one sees hints of it in talk of “moral hazard”. For example, some economists argue against certain schemes of public insurance because they remove the incentive to exercise caution in one’s affairs. Now this could be given a utilitarian spin: public insurance increases negligence, which increases the number of accidents, which increases overall costs, thereby decreasing overall utility and happiness. But it sometimes sounds more as if the economist is offering a virtue-ethical position: negligent citizens are less virtuous than prudent ones, so that if insurance encourages negligent behavior, it is encouraging vice. In other words, it’s not about negligence as it pertains to productivity, but negligence as it is a vicious trait of character.

A similar situation holds with regard to many of the arguments one hears against welfare or other forms of poor relief: it removes the incentive for poor people to work. This can mean that it discourages productivity (utilitarianism), or it can mean that it makes poor people lazy (virtue ethical perfectionism). Another example might be arguments offered against safe injection sites.

In practice, economists have a tendency to slide from one way of speaking to the other without thinking much about it. This interests me, because this slippage gives a window into the economist’s moral stance and value commitments at the exact moment when they think they are practicing a value-free science. The economist who speaks of the “unintended consequences” of welfare sometimes betrays an assumption that poor people are naturally vicious — or will be if given the barest opportunity.

In any case, whether consequentialist, deontological, or perfectionist, or some inconsistent mixture of these, economists are unavoidably practicing a kind of moral philosophy in doing what they do. Whether they are also practicing a moral science is less clear.

Consider the Peacock

I’ve been reading a book by Richard Joyce called The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). Now, I am far from a creationist (though I’m also far from a scientist), and in broad outlines I am a thorough believer in the theory of evolution and in some version of its mechanism of action, natural selection. Nevertheless, whenever I read a work in which the theory is applied to such complex human phenomena as our propensity to make moral judgments, I am usually left unsatisfied and sceptical.

I am left unsatisfied, because such explanations often seem beside the point: I’m never sure what purpose is served by an evolutionary explanation of how human morality arose. Is it somehow supposed to validate our moral judgments, by grounding them in our biology? If so, why is such validation necessary? Are we more apt to avoid theft if we are told that we are hardwired to find theft wrong? Or is it somehow supposed to debunk our moral judgments, by demonstrating that the experienced wrongness of theft is nothing more than a biological reaction that could have been otherwise if our evolution was just a little bit different, and that “theft” and “wrongness” are simply biological phenomena? Will this knowledge make me view my disapproval of theft as somehow contingent, parochial? In other words, I’m doubtful that an evolutionary “explanation” of morality would have much relevance for morality. It would simply be an entertainment for the curious, its entertainment value a function of aesthetic concerns such as the elegance, cleverness, and ontological economy of the explanation offered.

It must be said that Joyce’s book, to its credit, does a very good job of addressing (though not necessarily answering) the question of what purpose an evolutionary explanation of human morality is supposed to serve, or of what difference such an explanation would (or wouldn’t) make to morality itself, as practiced by humans. Indeed, this is probably the main strength of the book.

However, besides leaving me unsatisfied, evolutionary explanations of complex human phenomena also often leave me sceptical, because stories proffered to show how a certain faculty like morality arose almost always end up seeming just that — stories. Sometimes the stories are very clever, very elegant, very plausible, but for every such story on offer there is usually another writer with a different plausible story. With multiple just-so stories for sale, a reader can be excused for finding such stories dubious in general. And it seems the more complex the phenomenon being explained, the more alternative stories there are available to explain it.

Indeed, in some cases scepticism can result from explanations offered for quite simple phenomena. Take, for instance, the concept of sexual selection, as used to explain some of the more florid examples of seemingly maladaptive physical traits. Here is Joyce (p. 32) with a well-known example:

Consider the enormous and cumbersome affair that is the peacock’s tail. Its existence poses a prima facie threat to the theory of natural selection — so much so that Charles Darwin once admitted that the sight of a feather from a peacock’s tail made him ‘sick!’ Yet Darwin also largely solved the problem by realizing that the primary selective force involved in the development of the peacock’s tail is the peahen’s choosiness in picking a mate. If peahens prefer mates with big fan-shaped tails, then eventually peacocks will have big fan-shaped tails; if peahens prefer mates with triple-crested, spiraling, red, white, and blue tails, then (ceteris paribus) eventually peacocks will sport just such tails. Sexual selection is a process whereby the choosiness of mates or the competition among rivals can produce traits that would otherwise be detrimental to their bearer.

Now, at first sight nothing seems simpler than this explanation: peahens developed a sexual preference for males with large tails, and given this preference, peacocks with large tails were more likely to be chosen as reproductive partners, giving them a reproductive advantage over their smaller-tailed rivals. The story neatly answers a basic problem: why would an animal develop a trait that is so obviously an obstacle to its viability?

And yet, when we begin to inconveniently think too much about it, it doesn’t take long before the story starts to seem shaky. The problem to be solved by this story:

“Why do male peacocks have cumbersome tails that ought to make them less likely to survive long enough to reproduce?”

is not really solved at all, but rather is replaced by a different problem:

“Why do peahens have a preference for males with a seemingly maladaptive trait like cumbersome tails?”

Put another way, all we have done is shifted the focus from one maladaptive trait (massive tail plumage) to another (sexual preference for massive tail plumage). I fail to see that anything has been explained at all.

Let’s imagine a related but rival species to peafowl — related in the sense that they are physically similar in most relevant ways and (importantly) are eaten by the same predators, rival in the sense that they share the same ecological niche, relying on the same nesting places and food sources, etc.  Let us call this species “dandybirds”. Now, let us further imagine that dandyhens have developed a preference for dandycocks with small, light tails and fast running legs. Which species do you think is more likely to flourish in this ecosystem in the long run, peafowl or dandybirds?

We don’t even have to go so far as to imagine a different species; we can instead imagine a peafowl population with a subset of peahens who have a perverse sexual preference for peacocks with small, light tails and fast running legs. Which population subset is more likely to flourish?

And of course, we could also imagine an alternative kind of peafowl population in which females don’t get to choose mates at all, but are instead chased down and captured by peacocks for forced mating. This would necessarily favour strong and fast peacocks, who would be more likely to reproduce than their slower, fan-tailed brethren.

There are just too many competing possible roads natural selection could have gone down more plausibly.

Now I suppose the teller of the just-so sexual selection story could always come back with a reply to the effect that this is simply the road natural selection did in fact go down. Dandybirds never existed, nor did the alternative sorts of peafowl mentioned. Instead, there were in fact only peafowl whose females — through random mutation or whatever — prefer peacocks with extravagant tails. In other words, a highly improbable (but possible) state of affairs came about randomly. I suppose such an “explanation” is no better (or worse) than “explaining” a gambler’s run of good luck by simply recounting the series of lucky rolls he has shot.