Abraham Tucker

Tucker, Abraham (1705–74)

Like many of his eighteenth-century British contemporaries, Abraham Tucker was an empiricist follower of John Locke. Tucker held that the mind begins as a blank slate and remains nothing more than a passive receptacle for ‘trains’ of ideas with ‘a motion of their own’. In his moral philosophy Tucker proposed that the motive of all our actions is the prospect of our own satisfaction, and that the maximization of everyone’s satisfaction is the ultimate moral good. (The latter view became a central tenet of the utilitarians who followed him.) According to Tucker, God ensures that our self-interested motivation will be congruent with morality, for God has arranged that we will be rewarded for good and punished for evil – either in this world or in the next. Among those most influenced by his work was the utilitarian and philosophical theologian William Paley.

1 Life

Abraham Tucker was born in London to wealthy parents in 1705. His father died during Abraham’s infancy, and an uncle, Isaac Tillard, became his guardian. Tucker studied law at Oxford, but never practised. At 22, he purchased Betchworth Castle; at 31, he married Dorothy Barker, with whom he had two daughters.

Tucker’s most significant philosophical work is The Light of Nature Pursued, published under the pseudonym Edward Search. A preliminary version of this work appeared in 1763 under the title Freewill, Foreknowledge, and Fate, but the full seven volumes of The Light of Nature Pursued were not published until 1777, three years after Tucker’s death.

2 Associationist psychology

Like several other philosophers in the British empiricist tradition (notably David Hume), Tucker sought to explain the workings of the mind in terms of the principles of association that cause one idea to follow upon another. Among the associationists, Tucker makes explicit what some others seem to take as an unstated assumption: that if the flow of our ideas is entirely determined by certain principles of association, then the understanding has no role to play save that of a passive receptacle for ideas that flow through it according to laws of their own.

Our ideas combine with one another in either of two ways – by composition, in which several ideas ‘melt together’ to form a complex idea, and by association proper, in which ideas ‘appear in couples strongly adhering to each other, but not blended’ ([1777] 1977, vol. 1: 221). Ideas that are related through association can link together severally to form ‘trains’, in which a first idea couples with a second, which couples with a third, and so on.

After ideas become associated in a ‘train’, some of them may drop out, so that the earlier elements of the train come to associate directly with the later ones by means of ‘translation’. When we first see a proof of a mathematical theorem, the theorem, the steps of the proof, and the certainty that we attach to each of these steps will associate with one another to form a train. Yet later we may recall only the theorem itself and the certainty that we once associated with the proof.

Tucker takes this process of translation to be the explanation for a variety of psychological phenomena, including (for example) our sympathy with the moods of others. As children, we soon learn to associate our own happiness with the actions of others, and to associate their actions with their moods – they may play with us when they are happy or ignore us when they are sad. Eventually, we come simply to associate our own pleasure or displeasure with their happy or unhappy moods – without any intervening link of action.

3 Moral and religious philosophy

Tucker says of the will (the active element of the mind) that ‘all her motions depend upon motives, thrown upon her from external objects, or conveyed by the channels of experience, education, and example, or procured by her own cares and industry, whereto she was instigated by former motives’ ([1777] 1977, vol. 4: 302). The ‘active ingredient’ in all our motives, however we might describe their details, is the prospect of our own satisfaction. (Tucker understood ‘satisfaction’ to be a more general term than pleasure, combining the presence of any desirable feelings with the avoidance of any undesirable feelings.) And ‘the summum bonum… happiness… is the aggregate of satisfactions’ ([1777] 1977, vol. 2: 233). Thus we are absolutely determined to seek our own happiness. But Tucker’s is a soft determinism that is compatible with free will, since ‘freewill needs no compulsive force to keep her steady, for she communicates, by antecedent and external causes giving birth to her motives, with the fountain [God’s design] whence all the other streams derive’ ([1777] 1977, vol. 4: 303).

According to Tucker, ‘rectitude hath not a substantiality or distinct essence of its own, but subsists in the relation to happiness, those actions being right which upon every occasion tend most effectually to happiness’ ([1777] 1977, vol. 7: 151). And in this context, Tucker understands happiness to encompass the aggregate of satisfaction for all God’s creatures. Thus he anticipates the later utilitarians William Paley and Jeremy Bentham not only in asserting that the greatest total happiness is the greatest good, but also in proposing a consequentialist morality in which the good is prior to the right (see Utilitarianism).

So we are absolutely determined to pursue our own happiness, yet moral rectitude lies in the maximal happiness of all. But according to Tucker there is no difficulty here: our self-interested motivation and moral rectitude are congruent; for God has arranged that each of us shall achieve our greatest happiness through the greatest happiness of all.

In order to establish the existence of God and gain insight into God’s attributes, Tucker employs an extended argument that combines elements of the first-cause argument with elements of the argument from design (see God, Arguments for the Existence of §§1, 4–5). (At one point in this argument Tucker makes use of the clock and clockmaker analogy that William Paley would later popularize.) Tucker’s God is omnipresent (existing necessarily, thus existing everywhere and for all time), omnipotent (powerful enough to be the cause of everything), and omniscient (intelligent enough to plan a universe).

Among the attributes of the creator which are most important to Tucker’s moral philosophy are two manifestations of God’s goodness: God’s providence and God’s equity. Tucker proposes that the workings of nature give evidence of the providence of a creator who aims at the happiness of everyone. Tucker also argues that because of ‘the wants and weaknesses of human nature’ ([1777] 1977, vol. 3: 278) we humans are partial to those from whose good opinion we think we may benefit, while God wants no benefit that any human being can provide. So God must be impartial.

Thus the creator aims at our happiness, and the creator also plays no favourites – each of us will receive an equal measure of happiness over eternity. (Tucker rejects the notion of eternal punishment for the wicked.) For that reason, if we seek to advance our own satisfaction at the expense of others, we know that any short-term advantage we may gain will ultimately be lost – either in this world or in the next. And if we choose to sacrifice our own satisfaction to promote the general good, we know that God will compensate us fully in the end.

Now it may seem that on Tucker’s account, we will come out no better if we do good than if we do evil. It may not pay to do wrong, but does it pay to do right? Tucker argues that when we promote the general good, we increase the store of happiness that is available to us all, so that every benevolent act will enhance the ‘profit to the common stock in partnership’ ([1777] 1977, vol. 4: 502). Thus ‘whoever adds to the happiness of another, adds thereby to his own’ ([1777] 1977, vol. 4: 500).

4 Influences

Throughout The Light of Nature Pursued Tucker repeatedly acknowledges his debts to John Locke, but his other influences are hard to trace. He often mentions David Hartley (whose associationist psychology probably inspired Tucker’s own) and George Berkeley, but both of these thinkers are usually cited in criticism. Tucker undoubtedly owes a debt to John Gay, but never refers to him by name; perhaps Gay’s influence on Tucker came chiefly through Hartley. And Tucker may have been completely ignorant of his most famous contemporary, David Hume. Even where the two thinkers’ ideas seem most similar, as in their belief in soft determinism and their associationist accounts of sympathy, they diverge in their arguments and in the details of their views.

Tucker’s influence on the utilitarians who followed him, particularly William Paley, is powerful and direct. In the preface to his Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, Paley says:

There is, however, one work to which I owe so much that it would be ungrateful not to confess the obligation. I mean the writings of the late Abraham Tucker…. I have found in this writer more original thinking and observation, upon the several subjects that he has taken in hand, than in any other, not to say, than in all others put together.

(1785: xiii)