Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T01:45:20.519Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s Democratization of Moral Virtue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2019

Getty L. Lustila
Getty L. Lustila*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper examines Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s moral philosophy, focusing on her accounts of virtuous conduct, conscience, obligation, and moral character. I argue that Cockburn’s account of virtue has two interlocking parts: a view of what virtue requires of us, and a view of how we come to see this requirement as authoritative. I then argue that while the two parts are ultimately in tension with one another, the tension is instructive. I use Cockburn’s encounter with Shaftesbury’s writings to help bring out this tension in her thought. I conclude that Cockburn’s work marks a bridge in modern moral philosophy from seventeenth-century natural law theory to the naturalism of the eighteenth century— that of Gay, Hume, and Bentham.

Keywords

Catharine Trotter Cockburnearly modern philosophyethicsconsciencevirtueJohn LockeAnthony Ashley Cooperthe third Earl of Shaftesbury
Type
Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 83 - 97
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bolton, Martha Brandt. 1993. “Some Aspects of the Philosophy of Catharine Trotter.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 31 (4): 565–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Broad, Jacqueline. 2002. Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Burnet, Thomas, Locke, John, and Porter, Noah. 1984. Remarks Upon an Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Five Tracts. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Corneanu, Sorna. 2011. Regiments of the Mind: Boyle, Locke, and the Early Modern Cultura Animi Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cockburn, Catharine Trotter. 2006. Catharine Trotter Cockburn: Philosophical Writings. Edited by Sheridan, Patricia. Orchard Park, NY: Broadview.Google Scholar
Gay, John. 1731. “Preliminary Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality.” Prefixed to An Essay on the Origin of Evil, William King, translated and edited by Law, Edmund, xi–xxxiii. London: W. Thurlbourn.Google Scholar
Gill, Michael. 2016. “Love of Humanity in Shaftesbury’s Moralists.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24 (6): 1117–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, Karen. 2015. “A Moral Philosophy of Their Own? The Moral and Political Thought of Eighteenth-Century British Women.” The Monist 98 (1): 89–101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heydt, Colin. 2014. “Utilitarianism before Bentham.” In Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism, edited by Eggleston, Ben and Miller, Dale E., 16–37. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heydt, Colin. 2017. Moral Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: God, Self, and Other. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Locke, John. 1975. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Nidditch, P. H.. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lustila, Getty. L. 2018. “John Gay and the Birth of Utilitarianism,” Utilitas 30 (1): 86–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Myers, Joanne E. 2012. “Catharine Trotter and the Claims of Conscience.” Tusla Studies in Women’s Literature 31 (no. 1/2): 53–75.Google Scholar
Rossiter, Elliot. 2016. “Hedonism and Natural Law in Locke’s Moral Philosophy.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 54 (2): 203–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sheridan, Patricia. 2007. “Reflection, Nature, and Moral Law: The Extent of Cockburn’s Lockeanism in her Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay.” Hypatia 22 (3): 133–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sheridan, Patricia. 2015. “Locke’s Latitudinarian Sympathies: An Exploration of Sentiment in Locke’s Moral Theory.” Locke Studies 15: 131–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sheridan, Patricia. 2018a. “Some Aspects of Catherine Trotter Cockburn’s Metaphysics of Morality.” In Early Modern Women on Metaphysics, edited by Thomas, Emily, 247–65. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sheridan, Patricia. 2018b. “Virtue, Affection, and the Social Good: The Moral Philosophy of Catharine Trotter Cockburn and the Bluestockings.” Philosophy Compass 13 (3): e12478.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walmsley, J. C., Craig, Hugh, and Burrows, John. 2016. “The Authorship of the Remarks upon an Essay of Humane Understanding.” Eighteenth-Century Thought 6: 205–43.Google Scholar