The Foundations of Morality: Virtue, Law, and Obligation (transl. into Russian by R. Apressyan)

Abstract

Presenting the main tendencies in early Modern ethics Stephen Darwell assumes that natural law theories modernized by Grotius, Pufendorf, Hobbes, and Locke played significant role in its formation and development. The early Modern natural law theories are distinct in recognizing a possibility of other than universal reason principle of behavior – an egoistic reason in a form of prudence: an agent acts morally just realizing his/her aspiration towards individual good (‘rightly understood’). The early Modern natural lawyers proposed an idea of normative order aimed to limit selfish intentions by the means of socially imputed rules based on a kind of authority. In this context the issues of imputation, foundation of obligations and their difference, responsibility, etc., were proposed for discussion. Darwell considers other tendencies in the early Modern ethics as critical reaction to the challenges stimulated by theories of natural law. Rationalists like Cudworth (one of Cambridge Platonists), Shaftesbury, Leibniz, Malebranche, and Spinoza, sidelining or even refusing the normative component of morality, regarded individual morality to be a result of one’s comprehension of the objective course of things, divine or natural. On the basis of such comprehension individual self-determines him/herself as a virtuous moral agent. Mandeville provided the most outstanding criticism from egoistic perspective. He demonstrated ambiguity in relation between motives and consequences (morally good motives can lead to socially ill consequences) and thus influenced the development of utilitarianism, which insisted on constitutive role of results as a factor of behavior evaluation. Discussion between sentimentalists (Hutcheson, Hume, partly Butler) and rationalists (Clarke, Balguy, Wollaston, Price, Read) provided one more alternative to the theories of natural law: disagreements regarding the faculty (sense or reason) owing to which the agent perceives moral qualities pertain the foundation of morality; in sentimentalism morality was ultimately associated with virtue and in rationalism – with obligation.