Enlightenment Moral Theory and British Conservatism

Abstract

The thematic unity to the moral and political theory of the Enlightenment expresses itself as an extension of the method of the Scientific Revolution. The Scientific Revolution was paradigmatic for ethical theories which followed it. Once Greek teleology and metaphysics lost their general support, ethics underwent a revolution on par with cosmology. The modern era dispensed with Aristotle’s teleological account of humanity’s natural purpose and end in happiness. For Aristotle, the final cause of man was flourishing, and virtue was “an activity which completed or perfected the individual.”¹ In place of this view, the Scientific Revolution posited a mechanistic view of man as a part of nature governed by universal and abstract laws. The ethical question became how to subsume any given act under the proper law or to find the proper law which guides any given act. Thus, the paradigm was of “discrete, individual events obeying absolute, universal laws.”² Enlightenment moral theories of several sorts have this paradigm in common: they seek to apply universal moral principles to specific acts in order to count them as good or bad. Furthermore, they isolate the act from the general character of the actor and largely from the particular morally problematic situation. Thus, a moral life did not concern the happiness of the individual reflected by his character or virtuous activity over his lifetime, but would only be the “succession of events obeying a universal law.”³

The rules of morality … are not the conclusion of our reason

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature.*