Shaftesbury

Shaftesbury, Third Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper) (1671–1713)

Shaftesbury, whose influence on eighteenth-century thought was enormous, was the last great representative of the Platonic tradition in England. He argued that by natural reason we can see that the world is an intelligible, harmonious system. In reflecting on our character traits we will inevitably approve of those which contribute to the good of humanity and of the whole system. These same personal qualities are also needed for a happy life, so virtue and happiness go hand in hand.

Shaftesbury is often seen as the founder of the moral sense or ‘sentimentalist’ school in ethics, whose members held that morality was based on human feeling rather than on reason. Although leading sentimentalists, such as Hutcheson and Hume, made use of many of his ideas, Shaftesbury himself has more in common with the rationalists, who held that there are eternal moral truths which we can know by the use of reason.

1 Life and influences

Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, was born in February 1671. Superintendence of his education was handed over to no less a personage than John Locke, with whom Shaftesbury seems to have had an ambivalent relationship. While honouring him as his ‘friend and foster father’, Shaftesbury came not only to reject, but even to detest, much of Locke’s philosophy. He played a full part in English political life, first in the Commons and then in the Lords, though ill health forced occasional retreats to the Continent. He devoted the latter portion of his life to writing; his published work was eventually brought together in his three-volume Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), a work very widely read in the eighteenth century.

Shaftesbury was deeply influenced by Greek and Roman thought, in which he distinguished two strands. The first presupposes that we live in an ordered and intelligible universe; the second that everything came into being by chance and that nothing has any meaning. It is to the former strand that Shaftesbury owes allegiance. It proceeds through Plato, Aristotle, the Neoplatonists and Platonized Christianity to the Cambridge Platonists of the seventeenth century (see Cambridge Platonism; Neoplatonism). Shaftesbury’s notebooks reveal in particular the marked influence of the Stoics, especially Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius (see Stoicism).

2 Teleology

Shaftesbury’s conception of the world is thoroughly teleological. By the use of unaided natural reason, we can come to see that the universe forms a well-ordered, intelligible, harmonious system, in which humans have their proper place. To understand the nature of anything, including ourselves, is to know what functions are natural and proper to it, and which ones are unnatural and perverted. This knowledge is practical as well as theoretical. In the Platonic tradition to which Shaftesbury belongs, to know the good is to love it. Shaftesbury is thus an apostle of intellectually disciplined enthusiasm; rational beings cannot help but be moved once they are aware of this universal harmony, which Shaftesbury celebrates in glowing and lyrical terms. To live in accordance with nature, to have one’s inner harmony attuned to the outer, is to be both virtuous and happy. Virtue is its own reward; the virtuous life is in itself the most fulfilling there is.

The passions that disturb our lives stem from false values, from a wrong assessment of what is good and bad. Once we see that our good is to be found in the part we play in the good of the whole then we can face hardship and even death with equanimity. For we find our true good not in externals, such as wealth or reputation, which can be taken from us, but in a balanced and harmonious mind, which cannot be overthrown by anything except our folly. Moreover, the goods of the mind are superior to any goods we find in nature or in human art. As Shaftesbury explains in The Moralists, A Philosophical Rhapsody (1709), mind is not only the source of harmony, beauty and goodness (which for him are essentially one and the same), but is itself better and more beautiful than its products. To value any external good more highly than inner harmony is to prefer a secondary beauty to its primary source, to prefer the shadow to the reality.

Shaftesbury stresses the immanence of the divine mind rather than its transcendence. Shaftesbury often pictures God’s relation to the world as more like that of the soul to the body than it is like that of the watchmaker to his watch. We see this in The Moralists (part III, section 1) where we find an unusual variant of the argument from design which starts from the issue of personal identity (see God, arguments for the existence of §§4–5). Among all the changes to both body and mind which any person undergoes in the course of life, it is undeniable that there is something which unites these stages and makes them all properties of the same person. We cannot give a coherent account of the metaphysical status of this self, but that there is such a continuing self which governs and superintends one’s life is undeniable. Since nature is also self-regulating and orderly, it too must be governed by a mind, which bears the same relation to the world and its activity as our mind does to our body and actions, even if we can give no clear indication of its metaphysical status.

In spite of his token orthodoxy Shaftesbury is a true parent of the Enlightenment in his willingness to question authority and in his advocacy of liberty. In thought and discussion there should be freedom of speech (at least among educated gentlemen!). No subject is too grave that it may not be subject to jest; for raillery, Shaftesbury contends, is a test of truth. Error cannot withstand mockery. Art and culture only flourish in conditions of freedom. Genuine patriotism can only spring from an identification with the body politic which cannot be found in tyrannies.

3 Ethics

The core of Shaftesbury’s philosophy, however, is his moral theory, which is most fully and systematically expounded in his Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit (1699), his earliest work. In the first part he delineates what goodness and virtue are. Every creature, and every species, is part of a wider system to which it contributes. Each system is itself part of a wider system, until we reach the universe, the complete system which incorporates all the subsystems. Each individual (or species) is to be judged by its contribution to the good of its system and, ultimately, by its contribution to the good of the whole.

In judging an individual creature we are concerned with its character, with what Shaftesbury calls its affections – its, desires, motives and enjoyments. A good creature is one whose affections will, in the normal course of events, cause it to act in a way that will be for the good both of itself and of the system of which it is a part. While animals can be good or bad, humans alone can be virtuous or vicious, for humans alone are self-conscious and capable of reflecting on their own actions and affections so that these can in their turn become the object of an affection, this time of approval or disapproval. We are naturally and ineluctably led to approve of what is natural and honest and to disapprove of what is dishonest and corrupt. Our capacity for reflection, however, enables us to be self-governing, and thus virtuous or vicious, for we can choose whether to indulge our good or our bad inclinations (see Autonomy, ethical).

We might note that Shaftesbury departs from the Stoic model in one respect. For those in the Socratic tradition the four cardinal virtues are wisdom, courage, temperance and justice. Benevolence, pity or compassion receive less emphasis. Epictetus concedes that we should behave sympathetically towards the unfortunate; but we should not disturb our stoic tranquillity by pitying them. Shaftesbury, by contrast, puts the social virtues of love, friendship and universal benevolence at the forefront of his theory (see Virtues and vices §1).

Shaftesbury proceeds in the second half to ask what reason we have to be virtuous. He assumes without argument that the only reason we can offer is that it is in our interests – a virtuous life will be a happy one. He is thus a rational egoist, for he holds that questions of the rational justification of a way of life must appeal to self-interest. But he is not a psychological egoist, for he holds, as against Hobbes, that agents have altruistic as well as egoistic motives (see Hobbes, T. §8). Nor is he an ethical egoist, for morality requires us to be motivated by concern for others (see Egoism and altruism §1).

Shaftesbury then argues, ingeniously if not always persuasively, that the qualities of character needed to live a good life are the very same as those needed to live a virtuous one. In particular, proper development of the social affections, which are directed to the good of others, gives a degree and type of satisfaction not otherwise available.

It is customary to view Shaftesbury as the source or founder of the moral sense or sentimentalist school of ethics, whose foremost members were Hutcheson and Hume (see Moral sense theories). It is true that they were much influenced by him, but in the great eighteenth-century debate as to whether morality is founded on reason or on sentiment, Shaftesbury should, I think, be counted on the rationalist side in so far as he holds that there are eternal moral truths, existing independently of us, and revealed to us by the use of reason.