Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s Democratization of Moral Virtue

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-97
Author(s):  
Getty L. Lustila
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Moral Virtue ◽  
Moral Character ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Modern Moral Philosophy

AbstractThis paper examines Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s moral philosophy, focusing on her accounts of virtuous conduct, conscience, obligation, and moral character. I argue that Cockburn’s account of virtue has two interlocking parts: a view of what virtue requires of us, and a view of how we come to see this requirement as authoritative. I then argue that while the two parts are ultimately in tension with one another, the tension is instructive. I use Cockburn’s encounter with Shaftesbury’s writings to help bring out this tension in her thought. I conclude that Cockburn’s work marks a bridge in modern moral philosophy from seventeenth-century natural law theory to the naturalism of the eighteenth century— that of Gay, Hume, and Bentham.

Classical Republicanism and the History of Ethics

Utilitas ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. B. Schneewind
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Practical Philosophy ◽  
Social Cooperation ◽  
History Of Ethics ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
History Of ◽  
Natural Law Theory

The ‘modern’ natural law philosophers of the seventeenth century believed that conflict was an unavoidable concomitant of human intercourse, rooted in our nature. They understood the normative laws of nature as serving the purpose of setting the limits within which conflict is compatible with lasting social cooperation, thus showing, in effect, how warfare can be turned into competition. The natural lawyers were interested primarily in legal and political problems, not in ethics. But in order to provide reasoned approaches to immediate practical issues, they had to move to a level of abstract theorizing at which philosophical claims about morality were unavoidable. Natural law theory with its understanding of the central underlying problem of human sociability dominated seventeenth-century practical philosophy, and the solutions its various proponents offered generated many of the central concerns of what we know as moral philosophy.

Natural law

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annabel S. Brett
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Animal Behavior ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Social Perspective ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
The Social ◽  
Do So ◽  
Scholastic Tradition

This chapter explores the concept of natural law, turning first to the Protestant milieu. Alterity—what would in the seventeenth century come to be theorized, and problematized, as “sociability”—is the dominant mood of the humanist and Protestant handling of natural law. It is there even in Thomas Hobbes, whose natural law coincides with moral philosophy and concerns the sphere of one's actions in respect of others. However, the Catholic scholastic tradition presents a very different framing of natural law, one that centers on individual agency and regulates the behavior of individual agents in their aspect as beings of a particular kind. While authors in this tradition grapple equally with the question of animal behavior in relation to law, they do not do so from the social perspective that characterizes Protestant humanist Aristotelians and jurists.

Carmichael, Gershom (1672–1729)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Moore ◽  
Michael Silverthorne
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
The University

Gershom Carmichael was a teacher and writer of pivotal importance for the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. He was the first Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, predecessor of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid. Carmichael introduced the natural law tradition of Grotius, Pufendorf and Locke to the moral philosophy courses he taught at the University of Glasgow (1694–1729). His commentaries on Samuel Pufendorf’s work on the duty of man and citizen (1718 and 1724) made his teaching available to a wider readership in Great Britain and in Europe. He also composed an introduction to logic, Breviuscula Introductio ad Logicam, (1720 and 1722) and a brief system of natural theology, Synopsis Theologiae Naturalis (1729).

Conscience and reason: the natural law theory of Jean Barbeyrac

1993 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Hochstrasser
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Original Equation ◽  
General Development ◽  
Independent Contribution ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Authority

ABSTRACTJean Barbeyrac is best known as the leading eighteenth-century translator in French of the major writings on natural law by Pufendorf, Grotius and Cumberland. This article attempts to expound and assess Barbeyrac's independent contribution to the natural law tradition as it may be recovered both from these editions of the works of others and also from other writings. It is argued that Barbeyrac's intellectual context in the Huguenot diaspora and his distinctive reading of Locke, Bayle, and Pufendorf led him to develop an original equation of the authority of conscience with the authority of reason. The rationalist natural law theory he developed inevitably identified the role assigned to God within it and the scope of resistance to legal civil authority as central issues for debate which remained problematic for Barbeyrac throughout his career. These important ethical subjects remained unresolved in the general development of natural jurisprudence in the early eighteenth century, as exemplified in Barbeyrac's attempt to refute Leibniz's telling critique of Pufendorf.

The Illusion of Freedom Separated From Moral Virtue

2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-39
Author(s):  
Raymond L. Dennehy ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Moral Virtue ◽  
Moral Vision ◽  
Pluralistic Society ◽  
Individual Character ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
The Individual

This essay proposes that liberal democracy cannot survive unless a monistic virtue ethics permeates its culture, A monistic philosophical conception of virtue ethics has its roots in natural law theory and, for that reason, offers a rationally defensible basis for a unified moral vision in a pluralistic society. Such a monistic virtue ethics--insofar as it is a virtue ethics--forms individual character so that a person not only knows how to act, but desires to act that way and, moreover, possesses the integration of character to be able to act that way. This is a crucial consideration, for immoral choices create a bad character that inclines the individual to increasingly worse choices, A nation whose members lack moral virtue cannot sustain its commitment to freedom and equality for all.

Thomasius (Thomas), Christian (1655–1728)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Knud Haakonssen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
God's Will ◽  
The Public ◽  
German Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Law And Morality ◽  
The Mind

Christian Thomasius’ stature as the ‘founder’ of the German Enlightenment has been the source of much debate. His many essays dealing with issues in moral enlightenment and law reform (bigamy, witchcraft, torture, heresy, adultery, the use of the vernacular and so on) certainly single him out from other seventeenth-century writers. He was the public philosopher par excellence, a suitable match for August Hermann Francke, the great public theologian. Both men spent most of their career in Halle (in Brandenburg), and it was there that Francke institutionalized pietism, just as Thomasius propagated secular natural law theory. Despite many tensions, pietism and modern natural law thereby fused into a social duty-ethics that was of the greatest importance in shaping the modern Prussian state. The basis for natural law was God’s will and it was the attempt to follow this law that made humanity a moral species. Since humankind could not have any certain knowledge of the content of God’s law, the natural powers of the mind would have to be relied upon, and Thomasius’ thought was an investigation into the nature and social effect of these powers. His best-known result was a series of linked divisions between law and morality, between public and private spheres, between external and internal obligation, and between action and intention.

scholarly journals COMMON LAW JURISPRUDENCE AND ANCIENT CONSTITUTIONALISM IN THE RADICAL THOUGHT OF JOHN CARTWRIGHT, GRANVILLE SHARP, AND CAPEL LOFFT

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
GEORGE BERNARD OWERS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Ancient Constitution

AbstractA number of late eighteenth-century English parliamentary reformers synthesized arguments based upon reason and natural law with appeals to the ‘ancient constitution’. This article aims to examine how such reformers were able to move to a democratic view of political agency while maintaining a rhetorically powerful appeal to constitutionalist precedent. It will examine how three of these radicals, John Cartwright, Granville Sharp, and Capel Lofft, collaborated in their utilization of the latent natural law maxims of the English common law, reviving the rationalist potential of the jurisprudence of Edward Coke and Christopher St Germain to democratize the seventeenth-century Whig conception of the ancient constitution. It will thereby show how reformers in the 1770s and 1780s challenged the domestic and imperial political status quo by exploiting the underlying ambiguities of the intellectual resources of their own ‘respectable’ legal and political tradition.

Sources in the Scholastic Legacy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Haggenmacher
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Legal Discourse ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
Ius Gentium

This chapter enquires into the sources of international law in the scholastics. In fact the concept of sources of law obtained general currency in legal discourse, and how international law took shape as a legal discipline only after the heyday of scholasticism. But the two main pillars of what was to become classical international law in the eighteenth century—natural law and the law of nations—were both part of the theologians’ teachings of moral philosophy, especially with the Dominicans and later the Jesuits. Examining the two concepts handed down from Antiquity, Thomas Aquinas had assigned them distinct places in his system of legal norms, while fathoming their respective grounds of validity. His endeavours were continued by his sixteenth-century Spanish followers, who set out to explore the ‘internationalist’ dimensions of the Protean concept of ius gentium as well as the ‘fundamentalist’ properties of ius naturae.

Making Use of the Testimonies: Suárez and Grotius on Natural Law

Grotiana ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-136
Author(s):  
Sydney Penner
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Moral Philosophy

Thanks to Barbeyrac, Pufendorf and others, there is a long-familiar picture of Grotius as offering a groundbreaking account of natural law. By now there is also a familiar observation that there is no agreement what makes Grotius’s account innovative. Sometimes this leads to skepticism about how innovative Grotius’s account of natural law really is. Some scholars suggest that Grotius’s account of natural law resembles Suárez’s account. But others continue to argue that Barbeyrac is right to see Grotius as breaking the ice of previous philosophy and laying the groundwork for a distinctively modern moral philosophy. I plan to contribute to the debate by arguing that, properly understood, Grotius’s position is similar to Suárez’s on a range of fundamental questions, and, furthermore, that seeing Grotius as making a radical break with the past violates his own self-conception. 1

On the Primacy of Duties

Philosophy ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 70 (274) ◽  
pp. 513-532 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rom Harré ◽  
Daniel N. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Sufficient Condition ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Per Se

The concept of rights is among the more thoroughly examined in political philosophy. Nonetheless, it remains ontologically elusive and morally problematical. In the form of an allegedly natural endowment bequeathed by the Stoic philosophers, it was famously dismissed by Bentham as ‘nonsense on stilts’. Chiefly by way of natural law theory and versions of Kantian moral philosophy rights arise at once from the presupposed autonomy of rational beings and from certain duties others have to beings of such a kind. Within this tradition it is argued that morality itself is grounded in the autonomy of rational beings and that whatever overrides this autonomy converts such beings to instrumental means. Accordingly, there is a basic right to be regarded as a moral being and it is this right that generates or is foundational for the rest. Debate continues, of course, on such questions as to whether autonomy per se either logically or morally requires dutiful respect and whether rationality per se is either a necessary or a sufficient condition for autonomy itself.

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