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Michael B. Gill, The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics(2006, Cambridge UP) 1. Virtue without Religion Shaftesbury’s belief that atheists could have a proper “sense of right and wrong” and be “capable of Virtue” was highly provocative (Virtue or Merit 31). The Cambridge Platonists had argued that non-Christians could be fully moral, and that was enough to place them in opposition to the mainstream of English Protestantism. But even Whichcote and Cudworth didn’t go so far as to affirm the possibility of a fully moral atheist. Indeed, Whichcote maintained that one of our three fundamental moral duties is to be “Godly,” which is to believe in and show gratitude toward God. In the Inquiry, however, Shaftesbury is willing to disengage virtuous conduct from belief in God. This is one of the chief reasons many of Shaftesbury’s contemporaries called him a “free thinker” – a label often used in a pejorative fashion to identify atheistic threats to the Christianity and morality. This is also one of the chief reasons Shaftesbury is crucial to the birth of modern secular ethics. Shaftesbury himself, as we will see, had profound theological commitments, and one of the dominant strands of his thought was based on a conception of morality and human nature that implies God’s existence. But Shaftesbury did not think every person had to believe in God in order to be virtuous. He did not think virtue essentially involved any of the sorts of duties we would typically classify as religious. Shaftesbury’s position is thus a halfway house between a religio-theological ethics and an ethics that is thoroughly secular(85). 2. Good vs Virtue and the idea of Moral Sense In the Inquiry Shaftesbury draws a distinction between goodness and virtue. Goodness is something that is within the reach of all sensible creatures, not only humans but also nonhuman animals such as tigers. This is because a creature is good if its affections promote the well-being of the system of which it is a part, and nonhuman animals are just as capable of possessing this type of affection as humans. “Virtue or Merit,” on the other hand, is within the reach of “Man” alone (Virtue or Merit 16). And that is because virtue or merit is tied to a special kind of affection that only humans possess. This special kind of affection is a second-order affection, an affection that has as its object another affection. We humans experience these second order affections because we, unlike nonhuman animals, are conscious of our own passions. Not only do we possess passions, but we also reflect on or become aware of the passions we have. And when we reflect on our own passions, we develop feelings about them. Imagine, for instance, that you feel the desire to help a person in distress. In addition to simply feeling that desire, you may also become aware that you are feeling that desire. And when you become aware of that, you may experience a positive feeling (or “Liking”) toward your desire to help. Or imagine that you feel the desire to harm a person who has blamelessly bested you in a fair competition. In addition to simply feeling the desire to harm, you may also become aware that you are feeling that desire. And when you become aware of that, you may experience a negative feeling (or “Dislike”) toward your desire to harm. These are the kinds of phenomena Shaftesbury has in mind when he says that “the Affections of Pity, Kindness, Gratitude, and their Contrarys, being brought into the Mind by Reflection, become Objects. So that, by means of Affections themselves, which have been already felt, and are now become the Subject of a new Liking or Dislike” (Virtue or Merit 16). Shaftesbury calls this capacity to feel second-order affections the “Sense of Right or Wrong” (Virtue or Merit 18) or the “moral Sense” (Virtue or Merit 27). The moral sense is that which produces in us feelings of “like” or “dislike” for our own (first-order) affections. When the moral sense is operating properly, it produces positive feelings toward affections that promote the well-being of humanity and negative feelings toward affections that detract from the wellbeing of humanity. The second-order feelings that the moral sense produces can themselves motivate one to action. And people are virtuous if they act from those second-order feelings. In contrast, nonhuman animals, because they lack the powers of reflection necessary for consciousness of their own affections, do not possess a moral sense. So nonhuman animals are incapable of achieving virtue(91-2)...For Shaftesbury, creatures are virtuous only when their actions involve a conscious concern to benefit their species. Virtue belongs only to those creatures who can reflect on the public good and who act from the affection that reflection produces. Simply possessing an affection that is beneficial to its species may make a creature good, but if the creature lacks a conscious “Notion of a publick Interest” it cannot be virtuous (Virtue or Merit 18)(92). 3. An Aesthetic experience as a way of understanding the oneness of the universe According to Theocles, one’s perception of the oneness of the universe must be an aesthetic experience. This is because the unity of all things in the universe is of the same type as the unity of all the elements of a great work of art. The unity of a great work of art is not something we can grasp simply through the use of non-affective, a posteriori reasoning. We can grasp a work’s unity only through the perception of its beauty. True understanding of how the elements of a great work of art fit together is inseparable from the feeling of joy one experiences when truly appreciating its greatness. Someone who felt nothing when he or she looked at a great work of art – no pleasure, no passion – could not really be perceiving the profound coherence that constitutes its beauty. Similarly, someone who felt no joy when contemplating the universe could not really be perceiving the universal oneness. To understand the oneness of the world, according to Theocles, is to have the passionate experience of perceiving the world’s beauty. Understanding is inseparable from appreciation(105). 4. The beauty is objective: "there is an eternal and immutable standard of beauty" But Shaftesbury is far from being an emotivist or anti-realist about beauty and the oneness of the universe, Theocles’ rapturous transports notwithstanding. The position Theocles represents, inherently affective though it is, is supposed to be thoroughly objective as well. It is supposed to be objective precisely because it is enthusiastic. Now as I mentioned earlier, the idea of an objective enthusiasm should seem oxymoronic or paradoxical. For “enthusiasm,” in Shaftesbury’s time, was typically used as a label for wildly subjective flights of fancy. But Shaftesbury intends Theocles’ enthusiasm to be a reasonable enthusiasm(106). The feature of God that dominates Shaftesbury’s Moralists, in contrast, is the consummate artistry with which He created the world. An artist makes things that he finds beautiful, and the more successful the artist, the closer to his idea of beauty his creation will be. But God is a perfect artist, and the world is His creation. So from God’s perspective, the world (in its entirety) must be absolutely beautiful. We become God-like, then, just to the extent that we see the world as beautiful. Our appreciation of the beauty of the universal oneness is what unites us with the mind of God. Aesthetic appreciation of the natural world is Theocles’ sacrament(108). We can now see how The Moralists attempts to establish both the affectivity and objectivity of morals. It does so by subsuming morality into beauty. By making virtue into a type of artistic creation, Shaftesbury thinks he can explain how morality can have an essential grip on our emotions and exist independently of our particular human minds(111). Shaftesbury is a thoroughgoing objectivist about beauty. This objectivism may not be amenable to some contemporary readers, but it is integral to his position. He believes that there is an eternal and immutable standard of beauty and that God created the world in accord with it. And he believes that when we produce something beautiful, we too create in accord with the eternal and immutable standard of beauty and thus become God-like. For Shaftesbury, artistic creation is not primarily about making a new thing down here on earth. It is first and foremost about raising oneself up to heaven(112). 5. Two Reasons to Be Virtuous The Teleological Account: according to the first account of the reason to be virtuous, humans will be happiest if they live virtuously because virtue is the end or telos for which they were designed. Now virtue, according to Shaftesbury, consists of impartial benevolence toward the human species as a whole. It follows, therefore, that humans will be happiest if they consistently act to benefit humanity(118-19). The Mental Enjoyment Account: the pleasures of the body are typically those of eating, drinking, and sex. The pleasures of the mind – which Shaftesbury calls “mental Enjoyments” – are of two main types, the first consisting of the “immediate Operation” of certain affections and the second consisting of the “Effects” of the operation of those affections (Virtue or Merit 58). Shaftesbury next shows that the particular affections that produce the mental enjoyments (either immediately or by their effects) are just those that are characteristic of virtue. He also argues that the mental enjoyments are far superior to the pleasures of the body, that living by the former is in fact “the only means” of procuring “a certain and solid Happiness” (Virtue or Merit 58). He can then conclude that one can be happy if and only if one lives by the affections that are characteristic of virtue(121). The Second Type of Mental Enjoyment: the pleasure of having a "Mind or Reason [that is] well compos'd, quiet, easy within it-self, and such as can freely bear its own Inspection and Review" (Virtue or Merit 66). If, conversely, one is not benevolent, one will be unable to bear freely his own inspection and review –- one will inevitably experience the mental pain of self-condemnation (Virtue or Merit 68-73)(122). One’s ability to bear one’s own inspection is entirely under one’s own control, perfectly insulated from the vicissitudes of “Fortune, Age, Circumstances, and Humour” (Moralists 242)(122). Identity of self is not something that we all have as a matter of course. It requires resolution of will from one moment to the next, and resolution of will is forged only through one's own internal "Inquisition" or self-review (Characteristics I 116)(123). 6. Shaftesbury's new idea that inaugurates the secular ethics. Shaftesbury's new idea, then, is that even if all our beliefs are false, we will still have a conclusive reason to be virtuous. This reason to be virtuous, because it is based on the mental enjoyment account, is entirely independent of the epistemic value of our beliefs. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, Shaftesbury's overt attitude toward this new idea is nonchalant. He presents it as though it is simply a nifty way of circumventing Descartes' skeptical arguments without being pulled into the messy epistemological fray. But whether he realizes it or not, Shaftesbury's method of defanging extreme skepticism has momentous implications for our way of thinking about normativity and moral ontology. In the previous two chapters, we've seen that Shaftesbury wanted to develop an account of virtue that was both necessarily connected to human affections and firmly anchored in objective reality. His goal was to show that virtue essentially involved both being moved by certain kinds of passions and acting in accord with the universal system designed by God. But this new idea amounts to an abandonment of the second part of that goal, in that it reneges on the commitment to a correspondence between our moral affections and the systematic design of the universe. It is as though Shaftesbury is pulling up the anchor in objectivity and allowing affection to blow morality wherever it will. For Shaftesbury is saying that our reason to be virtuous will have the same normative status even if all our beliefs are false, even if there is no universal system, even if there is no external world, even if there is no God. This implies that our reason to be virtuous is constituted entirely by our own subjective, affective states. But this kind of subjective basis for the normativity of morals is something that British philosophers prior to Shaftesbury had always sought to distance themselves from. Indeed, this kind of subjective basis for the normativity of morals was typically thought of as a reductio ad absurdum of either a theory or morality: show that a theory implies that our reason to be virtuous is based on subjective affections, and you succeed in showing either that the theory is false or that we have no real reason to be virtuous. But in the 1711 revision of the Inquiry, Shaftesbury claims that subjective affections on their own really do provide a reason to be virtuous(125-26).
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