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"At the turn of the eighteenth century, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) placed beauty at the center of his worldview. It revolutionized Western philosophy. Thinkers such as Hume, Leibniz, Voltaire, Goethe, and Humboldt were all indebted to Shaftesbury's pioneering explorations of the experience of beauty and the role it can play in moral judgment, religious worship, and appreciation of the systems of nature. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, Shaftesbury's stature had greatly diminished, a result of his writing in a densely literary and narrative style out of step with the methodological approaches of later philosophers. This book rediscovers Shaftesbury's vibrant ideas of beauty. It explains how Shaftesbury developed those ideas, and why they remain compelling. The author intends to make several rather explicit and provocative claims: Shaftesbury was instrumental in the development of the idea that all of wild nature has beauty and intrinsic value; his religious views were more uncompromisingly rational than almost any contemporary, and they ushered in a more critical approach to the study of the Bible and religion in general; he advanced what was at the time the highly contentious claim that an atheist can be virtuous, which was one of the most significant development in secular ethical theory; he originated the sentimentalist view that moral judgment is based in affection, or moral sense, and he made significant strides in moral psychology; he engaged in serious philosophical discussion of what makes art successful, initiating the line of inquiry that would come to be called 'aesthetics'; and, finally, Shaftesbury was prophetic in identifying the dangers of partiality and what he saw as the difficulty of combining political activity in a highly charged partisan environment with impartial concern for humanity as a whole"--

Michael B. Gill offers a new account of Humean moral pluralism: the view that there are different moral reasons for action, which are based on human sentiments. He explores its historical origins, and argues that it offers the most compelling view of our moral experience. Together, pluralism and Humeanism make a philosophically powerful couple.

Uncovering the historical roots of naturalistic, secular contemporary ethics, Michael Gill shows how the British moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries completed a Copernican revolution in moral philosophy. They effected a shift from thinking of morality as independent of human nature to thinking of it as part of human nature itself. He also shows how the British Moralists - sometimes inadvertently, sometimes by design - disengaged ethical thinking, first from distinctly Christian ideas and then from theistic commitments altogether. Examining in detail the arguments of Whichcote, Cudworth, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson against Calvinist conceptions of original sin and egoistic conceptions of human motivation, Gill also demonstrates how Hume combined the ideas of earlier British moralists with his own insights to produce an account of morality and human nature that undermined some of his predecessors' most deeply held philosophical goals

AbstractIn the Introduction to his Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume credits "my Lord Shaftesbury" as one of the "philosophers in England, who have begun to put the science of man on a new footing." I describe aspects of Shaftesbury's philosophy that justify the credit Hume gives him. I focus on Shaftesbury's refutation of psychological egoism, his examination of partiality, and his views on how to promote impartial virtue. I also discuss Shaftesbury's political commitments, and raise questions about recent interpretations that have taken his Characteristicks to be a polemic, partisan text.