Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 77-06(E), Section: A.

Advisers: Stephen Darwall; Kenneth Winkler.

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I engage with three eighteenth century British philosophers---Samuel Clarke (1675-1729), John Balguy (1686-1748), and Richard Price (1723-1791)---whose shared rationalism stems from a fundamental commitment to `eternal and immutable morality'. In particular, I focus on how their distinctively ethical rationalism puts them at odds both with sentimentalists such as Hutcheson and Hume and other early modem rationalists such as Leibniz. I argue that much of the British rationalists' dissatisfaction with both sides has a common source: Leibniz, Hutcheson, and Hume all agree that aretaic notions of virtue and human excellence are at the core of ethics, whereas Clarke, Balguy, and Price prioritize the deontic concepts of right, wrong, duty, and obligation. I argue that by better understanding this key difference we can shed light on a number of notoriously thorny issues in the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence as well as the sentimentalist-rationalist debate between Hutcheson and Hume and the British rationalists.

One of these thorny issues is Leibniz's and Clarke's debate over the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). In their correspondence, Leibniz denies that mere acts of will provide a sufficient reason, while Clarke argues that they do. This leads Leibniz to remark that Clarke grants the PSR only in words (a charge that, I argue, begs the question against Clarke). I defend the view that Leibniz's and Clarke's different stances toward the PSR are related to their different accounts of freedom---Leibniz is a compatibilist, whereas Clarke is a libertarian---and that their views on freedom are, in turn, closely tied to their different conceptions of ethics. Clarke rejects compatibilism (and thus Leibniz's version of the PSR) precisely because he, unlike Leibniz, emphasizes the concepts of moral obligation and accountability--concepts that Clarke thinks (rightly or wrongly) presuppose a freedom more robust than compatibilist freedom.

I employ similar considerations to offer a new interpretation of Hutcheson's and Hume's debate with Clarke, Balguy, and Price. Commentators typically take this debate to center on the issue of whether moral truths are grounded in human affective responses or objective, rationally-accessible features of actions. As a result, they often overlook the fact that the rationalists and sentimentalist also disagree over the subject matter of ethics. Hutcheson and Hume, influenced by ancient traditions, see ethics as concerned primarily with virtue and vice. The British rationalists, breaking with these traditions, are instead concerned to defend a distinctively deontic conception of morality or natural law. This disagreement, I argue, helps explain a range of other differences in their views. We see this, for example, in their accounts of moral judgment and agency. On the rationalists' account, someone is a proper object of moral judgment only if she is a law unto herself'. For the sentimentalists, in contrast, agents are judged virtuous or vicious whenever they act from motives approved or disapproved of from an observer's point of view. This difference can be traced to the rationalists' thought that we may be held accountable for acting as we are obligated only if moral agency itself includes the capacities necessary to hold ourselves to these obligations---a thought largely lacking in Hutcheson and Hume.

This last disagreement illustrates well the value I see in studying Clarke, Balguy, and Price. It shows that they are interested in far more than defending the view, commonly attributed to them, that we have `rational intuitions' of objective moral facts. Indeed, their disagreement with Hutcheson and Hume over the nature of moral agency is orthogonal to any sort of `reason versus sentiment' dispute. (To claim that moral agents must have the capacity to hold themselves accountable to moral standards is not yet to claim that this capacity is reason.) This fact raises an interesting question: Even if Hutcheson's and Hume's sentimentalism struggles to make room for the deontic, can a more sophisticated version of sentimentalism succeed in this respect? For that matter, what sort of rationalist accounts can succeed in accommodating the deontic notions of right, wrong, duty, and obligation? (That not all brands of rationalism are equally accommodating of these notions is clear from the contrast between Clarke and Leibniz.) I treat these questions in the last portion of my dissertation and discuss how their answers are relevant not only to the history of philosophy but to contemporary ethics as well.