In Sacrifice Regained Roger Crisp offers a fresh look at the foundations and development of British moral philosophy from Hobbes to Bentham, in the process demonstrating a mastery of the writings of a legion of philosophers (seventeen principal moralists all told). The discussions in each chapter are oriented around the conflict or cohesion between the motivation of self-interest and the demands of morality (concern for the interests of others), with the key arguments of each moralist delineated and dissected in the light of this moral question. In this respect, Sacrifice Regained is an unambiguously unique contribution to the secondary literature on modern British moral philosophy, and the reader curious about the contributions made by Crisp's selection of philosophers to our understanding of morality and its challenges, and what makes their ideas still so very interesting, will not be disappointed by his acute examination of the relevant texts.
Hobbes throws down the gauntlet in Crisp's consideration of ‘the moral question’, giving expression to both psychological egoism and rational egoism. As a psychological egoist, he held that all agents in all their actions aim at their own apparent good (understood in hedonistic terms), which is as much as to say that agents act only in their own interests but may make mistakes in determining what is their good: they may act in ways that do not serve their actual good. From this point of view there is no such thing as a disinterested action; benevolence is explained in accordance with the pleasure that results (or is expected to result) from assisting others. As a rational egoist, Hobbes held that the sole ‘ultimate reason’ for an agent to act is the pursuit of their own self-interest, which is to say the balance of pleasure over pain ‘understood in a temporally neutral way across an individual's life’ (p. 15). What of morality? For Hobbes it has a purely instrumental value, as a ‘social system’ established by self-interested individuals aimed at creating the conditions for their cooperation, a system of common prudence therefore (p. 17). When an individual's commitment to this prudential standpoint appears to run contrary to her perceived self-interest, quite simply she has misjudged where her true (usually long-term) interests lie. An immediate advantage may be gained by pursuing their apparent interest, but the costs to the individual down the road in terms of personal liability and, depending on the seriousness of the breach of the established rules of cohesion, the disruption caused to social stability are decidedly not to the agent's advantage.
For many of the moralists who followed Hobbes, his theory stands as a subversion of morality, since it only requires individuals to act in ways that are in their own interest and can only explain other forms of motivation by reduction to this all-pervading consideration. Something more than an elevated regard for prudence is needed in a persuasive moral theory.
The Cambridge Platonists Henry More and Richard Cumberland rejected the moral reductionism of ‘the Beast of Malmesbury’ and set out to offer a securer foundation for virtue, stressing the peace and tranquillity of mind that accompany a virtuous life, the pleasures associated with being in communion with God and doing His will, and the pleasures gained from the sacrifices an agent is called upon to make when engaging in the most demanding forms of virtuous action. Cumberland went further to argue for a form of ‘theologically based, non-hedonistic welfarist impartialism’ that prompts Crisp to describe him as ‘the first systematic utilitarian’ (p. 33). This is a weighty claim.
For Cumberland everyone necessarily pursues their own ‘greatest happiness’, but individuals also possess a ‘natural Necessity’ revealed by reason to pursue the good of others as well as themselves and to avoid doing evil. While for some virtue is a good in itself and is pursued for no other reason than that, for others the obligation to act according to these dictates of reason is reinforced in a Hobbesian form: we are bound to act in the interests of others by sanctions affecting our self-interest. For Cumberland, however, these sanctions are not artificially created but determined by natural law, which is God's law imprinted on the mind, and this requires that we promote maximalist outcomes for ‘the common Good of the whole System of Rationals’ (p. 38) in which our own good is but one among many. The ultimate sanctions are rooted in God's favour and the eternal happiness that may be found in the afterlife. Crisp indicates in the title to the chapter on Cumberland that this is what makes him an exponent of ‘Divine Utilitarianism’. No argument there, but was he ‘systematic’ in his utilitarianism?
The main component of this claim for Crisp is the impartial maximization of the common good aimed at by Cumberland's theory. From the rational point of view, we ought to maximize the common good (this is God's will prescribed in natural law) and in doing so the distinction between individuals is irrelevant, thus the weight an individual should attach to their own good is only proportional to its contribution to the overall good, which in some instances would be no more than slight. This position, it may be allowed, is utilitarian, but is this sufficient to support Crisp's claim? For instance, for Bentham, who coined the term ‘utilitarian’ in 1781, over 100 years after Cumberland's De Legibus Naturae (1672), the idea that virtue is a good in itself, that consequences do not always have a bearing on what qualifies as virtuous, that virtuous activity may operate independently of the hedonic effects on the agent (all of which Cumberland maintained), is distinctly not utilitarian (just as Hume's animadversion to the ‘moral sense’ to explain what counts as virtuous is viewed by Bentham as an aberration from utilitarian theory). Perhaps, then, it might be more accurate to say that Cumberland's theory is utilitarian in some significant ways but not entirely.
Locke, in Crisp's account, occupies a position between Hobbes and the Cambridge Platonists on the moral question. Individuals primarily motivated by their own interests, he maintained, are yet bound by divine natural law to do good to others even when there is a cost to themselves. This natural law, its content and obligations are knowable by virtue of reason, Locke explains, and the fact that a person's ‘conscience’ condemns her for acting wrongly is an additional proof that there exists a natural law that ought to govern our actions. As Crisp puts it, for Locke ‘Without natural law there would be no virtue or vice, no fault, no guilt, no duty’ (p. 52). But, if individuals are motivated solely by self-interest might they not in certain circumstances reason that obeying divine natural law is not in their interest, even their long-term interest, even their interest in eternal happiness in the afterlife? Moreover, the worrisome subjective character of fathoming the content of natural law cannot be set aside.
Locke's combination of psychological egoism with normative moral reasoning underscores a tension in his thought which he was unable to resolve. This tension can be found in other philosophers of the age, including Mandeville (Crisp's rejuvenation of Mandeville as a serious moralist is impressive), Shaftesbury (the influence of Plato on Shaftesbury's aesthetics and its relation to the beauty, proportion and harmony found in virtue is insufficiently appreciated by Crisp), and the later utilitarian moralists, some of whose theories are vulnerable to similar criticisms to Locke's.
Butler, whose ideas were to prove enormously influential, believed the resolution to this tension lay in clearly prioritizing the well-being or happiness of others over self-interest, reasoning that this obligation is revealed through an introspective examination of our nature as humans living in relation to others and reinforced by ‘the God-given faculty of conscience’ (p. 92). Virtue consists in obedience to one's conscience and this is no more and no less than acting consistently with nature. What of self-love, which is also an inarguable component of our nature? Butler's commitment to psychological egoism is weak, believing that reason shows that while self-love is a virtue (prudence), if pursued excessively it will detract from our happiness. Benevolence is also a principle of human nature and is intimately related to self-love insofar as it determines that we have special obligations to children, friends, benefactors and neighbours, but ‘general benevolence’ plays less of a role in motivation than conscience and self-love. Ultimately, Butler points to God, who is perfectly rational and perfectly good and, therefore, cannot be supposed to have created a world in which virtue and self-interest are destined to conflict. The divine option, in this and in other forms, continued as a central aspect of moral theory in the writings of Clarke, Gay, Reid, Price, Tucker and Paley, but not the sentimentalists and partial utilitarians Hutcheson (at least not in any significant way), Smith (again not in a significant way) and Hume, and not the anti-religious Bentham.
John Gay was an important influence on utilitarian ethics. He explained moral motivation from an egoistic psychological hedonist perspective, employing associationist ideas and settling the criterion of moral obligation on the will of God. The essay in which he explained his theory in 1731 is remarkably short, but it had a significant impact on David Hartley, James Mill and John Stuart Mill, and on the religious utilitarianism expounded by Tucker and Paley, among others. It is also possible that Gay's statement of the categories of obligation (natural, virtuous, civil, religious) helped shape Bentham's theory of sanctions (physical, moral, religious, legal or political). One distinction it is important to note concerns the ‘moral sense’. As Crisp explains, though Gay believed in the existence of a moral sense he rejected Hutcheson's view that it was innate to human nature, arguing that it is acquired from ‘Observation or the Imitation of others’ (p. 190). In this form, the moral sense works hand in glove with self-love to produce the optimum outcome for the individual and others with whom she associates. Tucker and Paley offered more elaborate versions of Gay's moral theory, with the very important addition of common-sense moral rules, including those emanating from God's will, which are aimed at the overall good, serving to form the habits and dispositions of essentially self-interested individuals and guiding them towards virtuous outcomes.
Hutcheson was the first to give expression to a version of the numerical and calculative utilitarian formula ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’, but Bentham did not find it in Hutcheson's writings, nor did he see it in Priestley as he mistakenly thought he had in reflections on the matter in later life. Rather he found it in the English translation of Beccaria's Of Crimes and Punishments, which he read in 1769 along with Hume's Treatise and Helvétius’ De l'esprit – three of the most influential books on the early development of his thought. There is much in Tucker and Paley that Bentham would have found agreeable to his own theory (even though he sometimes dismissed ‘parson Paley’ as misguided), but as Crisp makes clear Bentham's focal point is not on God's will or the rewards and punishments of the afterlife as the solution to the moral question. Bentham vehemently attacked the ‘ascetic principle’ for which Christianity was one of the main sources and dismissed the idea of eternal rewards and punishments as a debilitating sham. Rather, his theory singled out the mechanisms of the law as the most important means (education was another) to make duty and interest coincide through the shaping of motives (pp. 200–201).
In analysing the thought of all these moralists Crisp's approach is that of a philosopher concerned with the logic and persuasiveness of their moral theories. He does not adopt the posture of an intellectual historian or historian of ideas looking to explicate ideas in relation to schools of thought and current debates, though from time to time he indicates the lineage of ideas in the thought of Aristotle and occasionally points to lines of influence from one moralist to another. Oddly, Crisp's chapters are not always arranged in chronological order, with the result that there are moments when the calendar order of key writings by different moralists is not observed. This will rankle with readers interested in the potential ideational links between these thinkers. Nor does Crisp attempt to relate the moral issues under discussion to political or social contexts. Nevertheless, with some omissions and additions, he follows the canon of moral philosophers established by L. A. Selby-Bigge in British Moralists (2 vols. 1897) and later updated by D. D. Raphael (1969), even referring to them as constituting a ‘tradition’ (p. 109), which suggests that the historical development of ideas is important, though what makes the selected moralists constituents of a ‘tradition’ of thought is not explained, save that they are all ‘British’ and, perhaps, they each wrestled with ‘the moral question’ which is the organizing theme of Sacrifice Regained. Crisp says, following Sidgwick, ‘they form an unusually self-contained group’ (pp. 2–3), but this begs the question – do they? Were there no writings by continental philosophers that had a significant influence on the thought of these British moralists? Here we have only to think of the influence on Bentham of the Italian Beccaria and the Frenchman Helvétius, who were both particularly important in shaping Bentham's approach to the moral question that informs Crisp's study.
In the Introduction Crisp generously allows that he would ‘welcome advice from readers on potential omissions’ from his study (p. 2), an invitation too ripe to pass over. Here are a few suggestions. Crisp follows Selby-Bigge/Raphael in making Bentham the last philosopher discussed, when a discussion of Mill might reasonably be expected given the refinements he introduced to Bentham's theory. Also, a discussion of Sidgwick would have been helpful since Crisp occasionally cites Sidgwick's insights to illuminate his discussion of earlier thinkers (more frequently than the index indicates). Further, I want to draw attention to a lesser-known moralist who deserved inclusion – John Brown (1715–66), featured in Selby-Bigge's second volume but dropped from Raphael's edition.
Brown's omission is a missed opportunity by Crisp, whose approach to the moralists he considers does not involve more than a passing attention to the views of their contemporaneous critics. This deprives his study of a readily available richness. Brown's essay ‘On the Motives to Virtue, and the Necessity of Religious Principle’ contained in his Essays on the Characteristics (1751) – that is, Shaftesbury's Characteristics – his sermons and other writings are a case in point. Not only is Brown's moral theory worthy of study in its own right – Mill declared it the best statement of the utilitarian philosophy from the religious point of view (CW, vol. X, pp. 86–87) – but he was also a shrewd critic of some of the moralists contained in Crisp's study: Shaftesbury of course, but also Mandeville, Clarke and Hutcheson, among others, making some of the same points against these moralists as Crisp. Consider the following. Brown argued with some persuasion that whenever these moralists employ examples to illustrate what they mean by virtue and what motivates individuals they invariably default to consequentialism and hedonism. This accords with Brown's own view that virtue should be understood in hedonic terms, motivation centres on the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, and the aggregate of pleasures over pains is what defines happiness. Also, Brown was a legislative utilitarian long before Bentham, arguing that the threat of punishment through law was one of the chief mechanisms by which to align personal interests with the public interest, and his version of religious utilitarianism was one of the earliest attempts (Cumberland aside) at a fulsome argument along these lines and arguably provided a more nuanced approach than that of Tucker and Paley. In the process, Brown drew upon the associationist arguments presented by Gay, recognized that ‘habit’ was central to morality, made a powerful case for the benefits of instilling virtuous habits in the young by use of education and religious instruction, and was in the vanguard of moralists in singling out ‘imagination’ as the chief means by which individuals anticipate and assess the likely consequences of their actions, including future pains and pleasures and future rewards and punishments. The significance of Brown's omission from Crisp's study is underscored by the brief three-page treatment of Clarke's ‘rationalist metaethics’ in Chapter 10, a theory roundly criticized by Brown. It is hard to argue that Brown did not warrant at least a comparable number of pages to those devoted to Clarke.
Crisp's book is published under the Clarendon imprint at Oxford University Press, from whom he might have expected stronger editorial assistance. The index is limited, making cross-referencing between moralists on selected topics difficult – there are no entries, for example, on Natural Law or Laws of Nature (or Divine Law), only a few on Psychological Egoism and Rational Egoism when the book is replete with their discussion, no entries for Benevolence, God, Religion, Rights or Virtue (defined), and other surprising omissions – and there are far too many typos for a work of this stature. There is, too, a stylistic infelicity in the over-use of the conjunctive ‘but’ to open sentences, sometimes used in consecutive sentences (three in a row on one occasion). However, from another perspective it could be said its frequent use is indicative of Crisp's concern to do justice to the complexities of the theories under discussion and is often deployed when introducing (1) a qualification or objection to a prior proposition or interpretation of an idea, followed by (2) a further consideration, an alternative reading or perspective. Despite the occasional irksomeness of this usage (perhaps, at times, because of it), following Crisp through his philosophical reasoning and interpretations of these British moralists is deeply rewarding. Finally, as a riposte to anyone tempted to state categorically that utilitarianism may be reduced to this or that unequivocal set of propositions, I recommend the concise summation of the various forms of utilitarianism in relation to the compatibility between self-interest and the overall good found at pages 154–55. On this score, Crisp is very much in tune with the history of his subject.
