This book is a major work in the history of ethics, and provides the first study of early modern British philosophy in several decades. Professor Darwall discerns two distinct traditions feeding into the moral philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, there is the empirical, naturalist tradition, comprising Hobbes, Locke, Cumberland, Hutcheson, and Hume, which argues that obligation is the practical force that empirical discoveries acquire in the process of deliberation. On the other hand, there is a group including Cudworth, Shaftesbury, Butler, and in some moments Locke, which views obligation as inconceivable without autonomy and which seeks to develop a theory of the will as self-determining.
1. The British moralists: inventing internalism; 2. Culverwell and Locke: classical and modern natural law; 3. Hobbes: ethics as 'consequences from the passions of men'; 4. Cumberland: obligation naturalised; 5. Cudworth: obligation and self-determining moral agency; 6. Locke: autonomy and obligation in the revised Essay; 7. Shaftesbury: authority and authorship; 8. Huteson: moral sentiment and calm desire; 9. Butler: conscience as self-authorising; 10. Hume: norms and the obligation to be just; 11. Concluding reflections.
'Positive Psychology begins with Frances Hutcheson early in the Scottish Enlightenment. Michael Gill's lucid exposition of the heavyweight thinkers of this movement is the place to begin to understand this crucial period of intellectual history.' Martin Seligman, University of Pennsylvania