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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 January 2021
In the Introduction to his Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume credits “my Lord Shaftesbury” as one of the “philosophers in England, who have begun to put the science of man on a new footing.” I describe aspects of Shaftesbury’s philosophy that justify the credit Hume gives him. I focus on Shaftesbury’s refutation of psychological egoism, his examination of partiality, and his views on how to promote impartial virtue. I also discuss Shaftesbury’s political commitments, and raise questions about recent interpretations that have taken his Characteristicks to be a polemic, partisan text.
1 Hume, David, Treatise of Human Nature: A Critical Edition, ed. Norton, David Fate and Norton, Mary J. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 5.Google Scholar
2 Shaftesbury, the third Earl; Anthony Ashley Cooper, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, with A Notion of the Historical Draught, or Tablature of the Judgment of Hercules and a Letter Concerning Design, in three volumes (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2001 [1711 and 1714]). I will refer to this book in the body of the text as ‘C’ with volume number followed by page number.
3 Harris, James A., Hume: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 44–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 Rivers, Isabel, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780 – Shaftesbury to Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 241.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 Uyl, Douglas Den, “Shaftesbury and the Problem of Modern Virtue,” Social Philosophy and Policy 15 (1998): 275.Google Scholar
6 Shaftesbury’s reception in continental Europe was different, with his reputation there (especially in Germany) continuing to rise throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See Frederick Uehlein, Angelica Baum, and Vilem Murdock, “Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury,” in Holzhey and Murdoch, eds., Grundiss der Geschichte der Philosophie: Die Philosophie des 18. Jahrhunderts, Volume 1 (Basel: Schwabe, 2004), 51–89; and Robert E. Norton, The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1995).
7 Smith, Adam, Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Raphael, D. D. and Macfie, A. L. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1982 [1759]), 241.Google Scholar The most comprehensive and penetrating discussion of the philosophical relationship between Shaftesbury and Smith of which I am aware is James R. Otteson, “Shaftesbury’s Evolutionary Morality and its Influence on Adam Smith,” Adam Smith Review 4 (2008): 106–131. See also Den Uyl, “Shaftesbury and the Problem of Modern Virtue,” 314–16.
8 Smith, Adam, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. Bryce, J. C. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1985), 56.Google Scholar
9 Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric, 8.
10 Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric, 7.
11 Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric, 60.
12 Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric, 61.
13 For more on Shaftesbury’s style and how it affected the reception of Characteristicks, see Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, 86–87, 99–101, 113–14, 151–52. See also Den Uyl, “Shaftesbury and the Problem of Modern Virtue,” 276–78.
14 But Shaftesbury certainly wasn’t alone in writing philosophy in literary style. Other examples include Berkeley’s Alciphron and Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, as well as the work of Jonathan Swift.
15 See C 3.192. For discussion of Shaftesbury’s use of different narrative voices, see Uyl, Den, “Shaftesbury and the Problem of Modern Virtue,” 279–82; David Marshall, The Figure of the Theatre in Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 9–53, 58, 60–62)Google Scholar; Laurent Jaffro, “Shaftesbury on the ‘Natural Secretion’ and Philosophical Personae,” Intellectual History 18 (2008): 49–59; and Michael Prince, Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 66–73.
16 See also C 1.7, 1.13, 1.42–48, 3.65. For discussion of Shaftesbury’s views on freedom of speech, see Otteson, “Shaftesbury’s Evolutionary Morality and its Influence on Adam Smith,” passim; Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 195–212; and Den Uyl, “Shaftesbury and the Problem of Modern Virtue,” 314.
17 Shaftesbury, “Preface to Select Sermons of Dr. Whichcot. In Two Parts” (London, 1698).
18 Grote has argued that Shaftesbury himself advances egoistic hedonism. According to Grote, when Shaftesbury attacks Hobbes, the voluntarists, and other “selfish” theorists, he is not attacking the view that pleasure-based self-interest is our only reason to be virtuous but rather is attacking the view that pleasures accrued from externally-bestowed rewards and punishments are our only reason to be virtuous (Simon Grote, “Shaftesbury’s Egoistic Hedonism,” Aufklärung 22 [2010], 135–49). For our purposes here, we can be neutral on whether Shaftesbury is attacking every form of hedonistic egoism, or only an external-rewards form. That said, I think it is hard to square the hedonistic-egoist interpretation with Shaftesbury’s explicit criticism of the view “That our real Good is Pleasure” (2.128). When making that criticism, Shaftesbury points out that people sometimes define as synonymous what we will to do and what will give us pleasure, but in that case the view collapses into meaninglessness or tautology (2.128). And once pleasure is defined independently of what we will to do, we have to acknowledge that we think there are right and wrong things to feel pleasure in, which implies that we recognize a standard independent of and prior to pleasure itself (2.128–9).
19 Shaftesbury, “Preface to Select Sermons of Dr. Whichcot.”
20 Lepper, Mark, Greene, David, and Nisbett, Richard E., “Undermining Children’s Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Reward: A Test of the ‘Overjustification’ Hypothesis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 28 (1973): 130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
21 For a wealth of evidence for the existence this tendency, see Kiley Hamlin, J. et al., “Not Like Me = Bad: Infants Prefer Those Who Harm Dissimilar Others,” Psychological Science 24 (2013): 589–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
22 I discuss these points about Hutcheson on partiality in The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 181–94.
23 Greene, Joshua, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), 14.Google Scholar
24 Greene, Moral Tribes, 54.
25 Although the title isn’t always printed with the colon. On the title page of Characteristicks (in contrast to the title within the body of the text) it’s a semicolon.
26 Holmes, Geoffrey, British Politics in the Age of Anne (London: Hambledon Press, 1987), 20–21.Google Scholar There has been much debate about what the distinction between Whig and Tory actually amounted to in the reign of Anne, with disagreements about whether those coarse-grained labels capture the real lines of political faction. The idea that people during the period thought their own time was very factionalized and partisan is not so controversial. What is controversial is how to best identify the adversarial factions and parties that actually existed on the ground. See J. A. W. Gunn, Factions No More: Attitudes to Party in Government and Opposition in Eighteenth Century England (London: Frank Cass, 1972), 1–34.
27 Voitle, Robert B., The Third Earl of Shaftesbury 1671–1713 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 70.Google Scholar
28 Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 110, 210–11 and 230–32.
29 Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, xvii.
30 Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, 152.
31 Patrick Müller, “Rewriting the Divine Right Theory for the Whigs: The Political Implications of Shaftesbury’s Attack on the Doctrine of Futurity in his Characteristicks,” in Great Expectations: Futurity in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Mascha Hansen and Jürgen Klein (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012): 69.
32 Müller, Patrick, “Hobbes, Locke and the Consequences: Shaftesbury’s Moral Sense and Political Agitation in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies 37 (2014), 317.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
33 Williams, Abigail, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture 1681–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
34 Jost, Jacob Sider, “Party Politics in Characterisks,” in Shaping Enlightenment Politics: The Social and Political Impact of the First and Third Earls of Shaftesbury, ed. Müller, Patrick (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2018), 135Google Scholar; Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture 1681–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 234.
35 For discussions of Shaftesbury’s political ambivalence, see Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, 131–42; Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 230–36; Jost, “Party Politics in Characteristicks,” 136 and 147.
36 Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, 150.
37 Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, 151.
38 Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, 152. One of the strongest bits of evidence Klein cites is a letter Shaftesbury wrote to Lord Somers in 1710. Shaftesbury says there that in the third volume of Characteristicks he had the courage “to attack and provoke a most malignant party,” and he goes on to express the hope that his work will destroy that party’s hold on English academics, religion, and culture (Shaftesbury, The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen, ed. Benjamin Rand [London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1900], 432). This letter (and it’s not the only one) does sound like it was written by someone who hated the Tories. As I note, however, there are other letters and unpublished writings in which Shaftesbury seems to eschew partisanship. And I have tried to argue that there are substantive philosophical aspects of Characteristicks that speak against a partisan characterization. Shaftesbury certainly bore a great deal of hostility toward the Tories. But that does not mean he was always very positive toward the Whigs, let alone that in his writing he consistently intended to advance a Whig agenda. One possibility (suggested by Jaffro to me in correspondence) is that Shaftesbury was more animated by political aims in the third volume, while aiming to be a more thoroughly sociable and polite author in the first two volumes. What I want to resist is the idea that his strong personal animus for the Tories is the interpretative key to Characteristicks as a whole. I don’t think that’s how Shaftesbury himself conceived of the work.
39 Jost, “Party Politics in Characterisks,” 138.
40 Jost, “Party Politics in Characterisks,” 140.
41 Jost, “Party Politics in Characterisks,” 146.
42 Müller, “Rewriting the Divine Right Theory for the Whigs,” 68.
43 Müller, Patrick, “Lord Ashley and the Republic Project,” in Shaping Enlightenment Politics: The Social and Political Impact of the First and Third Earls of Shaftesbury, ed. Müller, Patrick (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2018), 125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
44 Müller, “Lord Ashley and the Republic Project,” 126.
45 Jost, “Party Politics in Characterisks,” 143.
46 Jost, “Party Politics in Characterisks,” 144.
47 Jost, “Party Politics in Characterisks,” 143.
48 Müller, “Rewriting the Divine Right Theory for the Whigs,” 81.
49 Müller, “Rewriting the Divine Right Theory for the Whigs,” 84.
50 Müller, “Rewriting the Divine Right Theory for the Whigs,” 81–82, 84–85. Müller refers to two letters, and I have questions about his reading of both of them. Both letters were to Shaftesbury’s protégé Michael Ainsworth, who was a student at Oxford at the time. Neither letter explicitly mentions Tories or Whigs. The first letter (10 May 1707) says that tyranny in the soul goes hand in hand with tyranny in government, and exhorts Ainsworth to guard against both in order to maintain his “freedom of reason” and “true zeal” for God. The first letter also warns that Oxford University has “the narrow principles and contagious manner of corrupted places” and urges Ainsworth not to be led astray by “dark speculations and monkish philosophy” (Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times with a Collection of Letters [Basil: J. J. Tourneisen and J. L. Legrand, 1790], 318–320). The second letter (19 November 1707) is critical of Oxford professors “who understand not that there is any thing preparatory to [true religion], beyond a little scholarship and knowledge of forms” and are too consumed by lower desires (“lusts and appetites,” “allurements of external objects”) to rise to the intrinsic love of God of which true religion consists (Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times with a Collection of Letters, 320–23). It seems to me that the move from these pieces of advice to a partisan Whig reading of the religious views in Characteristicks is a big leap. I do not mean to deny that Shaftesbury bore animus toward Tories nor that he thought Toryism predominant with Ainsworth’s Oxford faculty. What I question is whether these letters are evidence that we should read Shaftesbury religious views in Characteristicks as esoteric partisan attacks.
51 Müller also argues that Shaftesbury’s “Preface to Select Sermons of Dr. Whichcot” is an esoteric political work (Müller, “Lord Ashley and the Republic Project,” 128–32). In that preface, Shaftesbury does lambaste Hobbesianism and Calvinism. But I don’t see what the evidence is for taking Shaftesbury to be making any specific partisan points. One of the main thrusts of Shaftesbury’s preface is that Whichcote’s sermons should be made public because his good will can soothe the acrimony that is plaguing the contemporary scene, a stance that sounds to me more anti-partisan than partisan. Müller quotes passages from the sermons themselves in which Whichcote makes statements about the importance of freedom. But the kind of freedom Whichchote is talking about in those passages is the freedom of an individual person who is governed by her “Power of Reason” and the “Law of Right,” as opposed to those who are enslaved because they are “under the Tyranny of their Lusts” (a point that would be just as amenable to Plato as to any Whig) (Müller, “Lord Ashley and the Republic Project,” 129). The support from Shaftesbury’s preface itself that Müller cites is a passage in which Shaftesbury expresses “[a]mazement” that some people who claim to be adherents to a religion as morally impeccable as Christianity end up leading such unvirtuous lives (Müller, “Lord Ashley and the Republic Project,” 131). Maybe Shaftesbury thought that those on one side of the political divide were more guilty of this kind of hypocrisy than those on the other side. But it seems to me that it would be an overreading to find him making that point in the preface itself.
52 Müller, “Rewriting the Divine-Right Theory for the Whigs,” 83.
53 Jaffro, “Psychological and Political Balances: The Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s Reading of James Harrington,” in Shaping Enlightenment Politics: The Social and Political Impact of the First and Third Earls of Shaftesbury, ed. Patrick Müller (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2018): 149–62.
54 Jaffro, “Psychological and Political Balances,” 151.
55 Jaffro, “Psychological and Political Balances,” 155–56. Although Jaffro argues that Shaftesbury’s use of “balance” is indebted to Harrington’s Oceana, which can suggest a more political purpose than I describe here.
56 Shaftesbury, The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen, 366–67.
57 Shaftesbury, The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen, 367. But as I say in note 38, Klein aptly points to a letter that strikes a more partisan tone.
58 For evidence of Shaftesbury’s wanting to identify with a philosophical self that is independent of politics, public affairs, and titled responsibilities, see Shaftesbury, “Askemata,” in Standard Edition II.6, ed. W. Benda, C. Jackson-Holzberg, P. Müller, and F. A. Uehlein (Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog), 171, 256–58, 272, 286–87.