Ethics in the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment

2021 ◽  
pp. 298-350
Author(s):  
John Skorupski
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Important Development ◽  
Philosophical Ethics ◽  
Naturalistic Account

Philosophical ethics in Britain was (and is) at least as much a contribution to as a reaction against the naturalism of the Enlightenment. This chapter examines Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham. Like Kant, Hamann, and Jacobi, Reid responds to Humean scepticism. But unlike their response, his is entirely naturalistic. Its strengths and weaknesses are examined. Ethics in Scotland was strongly sentimentalist. It culminated in Adam Smith’s Theory of the Moral Sentiments, a naturalistic account of the epistemology of evaluative and practical normativity that bases it on a phenomenology of the sentiments. It remains a contender against German accounts of will and reason. In England the most important development was the growth of utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham was by far its most influential exponent. The third section of this chapter examines the principle of utility and considers what Bentham meant by his rejection of natural rights.

Adam Ferguson as a Moral Philosopher

Philosophy ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 88 (4) ◽  
pp. 511-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Graham
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Moral Philosopher ◽  
Moral Science ◽  
Applied Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Ethics

AbstractAdam Ferguson has received little of the renewed attention that contemporary philosophers have given to the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, most notably David Hume, Thomas Reid and Adam Smith. There are good reasons for this difference. Yet, the conception of moral philosophy at work in Ferguson's writings can nevertheless be called upon to throw important critical light on the current enthusiasm for philosophical ethics and applied philosophy. Eighteenth century ‘moral science’ took its significance from a context that modern philosophers who seek to be practically ‘relevant’ need, but lack.

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).

Commerce, Virtue, and Politics: Adam Ferguson's Constitutionalism

1983 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 536-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary L. McDowell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
History Of ◽  
Moral Philosophers

Adam Ferguson was one of several moral philosophers who contributed to the Scottish Enlightenment, a period aptly described as one of “remarkable efflorescence.” The works of Ferguson and his fellow Scotsmen — Adam Smith, David Hume, Dugald Stewart, Lord Kames, Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid — were widely distributed, seriously read, and vigorously debated during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The greatest contribution of this Scottish school to the history of political thinking was the refinement of the idea of commercial republicanism, the synthesis of modern notions of polity and economy.

Introduction: Enlightenment and Empire

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Allan I. Macinnes ◽  
Jean-François Dunyach
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
North America ◽  
Financial Support ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Impact

The Enlightenment is here located in the global transmission of goods, people and ideas. The Scottish participation in Empires is explored through four distinctive themes. The first scrutinises how Whig and Jacobite perspectives on Enlightenment affected Scottish engagement with the British and other Empires. The second relates to the impact of Enlightenment thinking on the reputed decline of Spanish Empire on Scottish commercial access to Latin America. The third deals with enlightened critiques of Empire that were not necessarily sustained by observation and practical experience. The fourth explores through case studies the application of Enlightenment in North America and India. Most of the contributions were primarily given as papers to the Eighteenth Century Scottish Studies Society Conference held in Paris Sorbonne in July 2013 with the Adam Smith Society and the Centre Roland Mousnier (Sorbonne) on ‘Scotland, Europe and Empire in the Age of Adam Smith and Beyond’. This volume is published with the financial support of the Centre Roland Mousnier, Sorbonne University.

Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Schofield
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Classical Utilitarianism ◽  
University College

This chapter discusses the thought and works of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832). Since the late 1960s Bentham scholarship has been driven by the appearance of volumes in the new authoritative edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, prepared by the Bentham Project under the supervision of University College London’s Bentham Committee. The thirty-third volume in the edition, entitled Preparatory Principles, was published in December 2016. Bentham was the pre-eminent representative of the Enlightenment. He was the founder of the doctrine of classical utilitarianism, which remains one of the main strands in liberal moral philosophy; he set the parameters for the modern discipline of jurisprudence by distinguishing law as it is from law as it ought to be; his commentary on the French Declaration of Rights of 1789 constitutes a devastating attack on the philosophy of natural rights, and hence on that of human rights.

The Recovery of Liberalism: Moral Man and Immoral Society Sixty Years Later

1993 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 171-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Little
Keyword(s):  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Collective Good ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Social Harmony ◽  
Sharp Distinction ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
National Life ◽  
Individual Self

This essay is a discussion of Reinhold Niebuhr's 1932 classic Moral Man, which critiques the Liberal Movement up to the 1930s. Little reviews some of the books fundamental conclusions. First, according to Niebuhr, to believe that individual self-interest is fulfilled in a collective good is to subscribe to a “utopian illusion”. He faults liberals for allowing themselves to be victims of the Enlightenment, i.e. being incurable optimistically rational about morals and politics. Second, he addresses the issue of the will for power inevitably dominating the will for good. Liberalism, in the sense of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and John Locke, lends itself as a venue for this to occur through its condonation of egoism as the intrinsic element of total social harmony. Little develops on Niebuhr's theory of conscience where there is a sharp distinction between individual and collective morality, the latter being much less susceptible to liberal morality than the former. Where individuals are endowed with an emotional sense of sympathy and consideration toward their kind, groups or nations would find this difficult, if not impossible due to their inclusive nature. Finally, he points out the mixture of morality and power in national life: where politics, while being inseparable from virtue and legitimacy, still abuses those beliefs in the interests of “national egoism”. When moral language is used in international politics without application of self-criticism, it diverts attention from the real motives of the statesmen who use it. Little does indicate deficiencies in Niebuhr's attempts to recover liberalism in his later writings toward the end of the essay.

Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Smith
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The University

Adam Ferguson was a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a leading member of the Scottish Enlightenment. A friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, Ferguson was among the leading exponents of the Scottish Enlightenment’s attempts to develop a science of man and was among the first in the English speaking world to make use of the terms civilization, civil society, and political science. This book challenges many of the prevailing assumptions about Ferguson’s thinking. It explores how Ferguson sought to create a methodology for moral science that combined empirically based social theory with normative moralising with a view to supporting the virtuous education of the British elite. The Ferguson that emerges is far from the stereotyped image of a nostalgic republican sceptical about modernity, and instead is one much closer to the mainstream Scottish Enlightenment’s defence of eighteenth century British commercial society.

Essays on Hume, Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Berry
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Subsequent Work ◽  
Retrospective Assessment ◽  
The 1960S

A collection of essays by a leading scholar. The work selected spans several decades, which together with three new unpublished pieces, cumulatively constitute a distinct interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment as a whole while incorporating detailed examination of the work of David Hume and Adam Smith. There is, in addition, a substantial introduction which, alongside Berry’s personal intellectual history, provides a commentary on the development of the study of the Scottish Enlightenment from the 1960s. Each of the previously published chapters includes a postscript where Berry comments on subsequent work and his own retrospective assessment. The recurrent themes are the ideas of sociability and socialisation, the Humean science of man and Smith’s analysis of the relation between commerce and morality.

Thomas Reid on the Improvement of Knowledge

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-139
Author(s):  
Christopher A. Shrock
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Thomas Kuhn ◽  
Traditional Religion ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Religion And Ethics ◽  
Compare And Contrast

Thomas Reid often seems distant from other Scottish Enlightenment figures. While Hume, Hutcheson, Kames, and Smith wrestled with the nature of social progress, Reid was busy with natural philosophy and epistemology, stubbornly loyal to traditional religion and ethics, and out of touch with the heart of his own intellectual world. Or was he? I contend that Reid not only engaged the Scottish Enlightenment's concern for improvement, but, as a leading interpreter of Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, he also developed a scheme to explain the progress of human knowledge. Pulling thoughts from across Reid's corpus, I identify four key features that Reid uses to distinguish mature sciences from prescientific arts and inquiries. Then, I compare and contrast this scheme with that of Thomas Kuhn in order to highlight the plausibility and originality of Reid's work.

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