Conscientious Conviction and Conscience

This essay concerns aspects of Kimberley Brownlee’s defense of civil disobedience for those who act on conscientious conviction and conscience. Discussion focuses on Brownlee’s treatment of these central concepts. For example, she offers four criteria for identifying a sincere conscientious moral judgment: consistency, universality, non-evasion, and communication and dialogue. This essay argues from examples that the criteria as explained fail to serve the purpose of identifying when normative convictions are conscientious and moral. Then it contrasts her conception of conscience with those of Joseph Butler and Immanuel Kant, considering their merits for her purposes.

Newton’s Modal Metaphysics and Polemics with Spinozism in the “General Scholium”

This chapter is devoted to explaining the nature and use of metaphysical necessity in Newton’s “General Scholium.” In particular, it focuses on Newton’s metaphysical commitments about (i) the nature of modality; (ii) the nature of formal causation; and (iii) God’s existence. In order to explain these, the chapter draws on Clarke and Clarke’s subsequent correspondence with Joseph Butler. In order to clarify some philosophical distinctions, I treat Toland’s Spinozism, in particular, as the target of some of Newton’s arguments. Along the way, I’ll provide suggestive evidence that Newton was in a decent position to distinguish the thought of Descartes from Spinozism

Special Concern and Personal Identity

As discussed by John Locke, Joseph Butler, and Thomas Reid, prudence involves a special concern for the agent’s own personal good that she does not have for others. This should be a concern for the agent’s overall good that is temporally neutral and involves an equal concern for all parts of her life. In this way, prudence involves a combination of agent relativity and temporal neutrality. This asymmetrical treatment of matters of interpersonal and intertemporal distribution might seem arbitrary. Henry Sidgwick raised this worry, and Thomas Nagel and Derek Parfit have endorsed it as reflecting the instability of prudence and related doctrines such as egoism and the self-interest theory. However, Sidgwick thought that the worry was unanswerable only for skeptics about personal identity, such as David Hume. Sidgwick thought that one could defend prudence by appeal to realism about personal identity and a compensation principle. This is one way in which special concern and prudence presuppose personal identity. However, as Jennifer Whiting has argued, special concern displayed in positive affective regard for one’s future and personal planning and investment is arguably partly constitutive of personal identity, at least on a plausible psychological reductionist conception of personal identity. After explaining both conceptions of the relation between special concern and personal identity, the chapter concludes by exploring what might seem to be the paradoxical character of conjoining them, suggesting that there may be no explanatory priority between the concepts of special concern and personal identity.

Forgiveness and the range of resentment

This chapter introduces some key questions about forgiveness, its primary focus being the vexed issue of what the precise relationship is between forgiveness and resentment (and related emotions). Through a discussion of several writers, especially Bishop Joseph Butler, Jean Hampton and Margaret Urban Walker, it is argued that resentment has both a potentially more positive resonance, in speaking for justice, and a far broader range of application, being felt on behalf of others, not just oneself, than is often assumed in contemporary philosophical discussions of forgiveness. The chapter then sets out to distinguish a working view of non-idealized, ‘good enough’ forgiveness, from others, including some which it may initially appear to resemble. It also addresses the question of why, if resentment is warranted, one might forgive, starting to sketch the picture which later chapters will fill out as ‘love’s forgiveness’.

The Creature as a Figure of Unrestitutability, or Monsters in Paradise not Allowed: Benevolence and Restitution in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

This chapter brings Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in conversation with two moral sentiment philosophers of the 18th century, Joseph Butler and David Hume. It focuses on the connection between the modern restitutive trope and reparation as premised on shared humanity. The ‘problem’ that the Creature from Frankenstein illuminates is the conditional logic of restitution, which is open only to those who are already included in human society; animals, monsters, and other non-humans do not partake in restitution. By showing that the concept of benevolence has a central place in the construction of prelapsarian desires in Shelley’s novel, the chapter argues that the Creature represents for the other protagonists the humanity’s ‘radical outside’; he is both excluded from the benevolent society and divested of restitutive possibilities. The Creature is a figure of ‘unrestitutability’ because the possibilities of return, undoing and repair are barred from him by the virtue of his constitutive exclusion from humanity.

GLADSTONE, DEVELOPMENT, AND THE DISCIPLINE OF HISTORY, 1840–1896

Between 1885 and 1891, the Liberal statesman William Ewart Gladstone debated the scientific status of the Book of Genesis with the natural historian Thomas Henry Huxley in a series of articles published in the Nineteenth Century. Viewed in isolation, this episode has been seen as a case of a professional scientist dismissing an amateur interloper. This article repositions this familiar dispute as one chapter in Gladstone's lifelong engagement with the concept of historical ‘development’, the unfolding or evolution of Providence to human reason over time, a concept which came to prominence in the 1840s, in both Tractarian theology and in natural history. Gladstone consistently advocated an accommodation between transmutation and natural theology based on a probabilist ontology derived from the eighteenth-century Anglican churchman Joseph Butler (1692–1752). That understanding of historical truth to which Gladstone credited his ability to discern when political issues became ripe for agitation demanded a humble, Christian moral temper that embraced doubt and salutary suffering, rather than certainty and whiggish celebration of progress.

Reid

This chapter discusses the views on self-interest and morality of the Scottish ‘common-sense’ philosopher Thomas Reid (1710–96). The influence of Joseph Butler on Reid’s conception of human nature is explained, and the similarities and differences between their positions elucidated. Reid’s arguments against rational egoism are discussed. His view that virtue is a component of well-being is outlined, and it is suggested that his position on the pleasures of virtue may be said to be somewhat exaggerated. Reid’s appeal to the afterlife to guarantee complete overlap between self-interest and morality is explained.

Butler

This chapter discusses the views on self-interest and morality of Bishop Joseph Butler (1692–1752), often said to be one of the very greatest British moral philosophers of the eighteenth century. The chapter focuses particularly on Butler’s famous Fifteen Sermons. Butler’s view on human nature and the supremacy of conscience is explained. Discussion follows of his views on how to understand self-love and benevolence. His first-order ethics is shown to be both welfarist and, in effect, non-utilitarian. His arguments for the harmony of self-love and beneficence, including those depending on the idea of divine reward and punishment in the afterlife, are critically elucidated.