Shaftesbury Lord, in full, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, title of Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671– 1713), English philosopher and politician who originated the moral sense theory. He was born at Wimborne St. Giles, Dorsetshire. As a Country Whig he served in the House of Commons for three years and later, as earl, monitored meetings of the House of Lords. Shaftesbury introduced into British moral philosophy the notion of a moral sense, a mental faculty unique to human beings, involving reflection and feeling and constituting their ability to discern right and wrong. He sometimes represents the moral sense as analogous to a purported aesthetic sense, a special capacity by which we perceive, through our emotions, the proportions and harmonies of which, on his Platonic view, beauty is composed.
For Shaftesbury, every creature has a ‘private good or interest,’ an end to which it is naturally disposed by its constitution. But there are other goods as well – notably, the public good and the good (without qualification) of a sentient being. An individual creature’s goodness is defined by the tendency of its ‘natural affections’ to contribute to the ‘universal system’ of nature of which it is a part – i.e., their tendency to promote the public good. Because human beings can reflect on actions and affections, including their own and others’, they experience emotional responses not only to physical stimuli but to these mental objects as well (e.g., to the thought of one’s compassion or kindness). Thus, they are capable of perceiving – and acquiring through their actions – a particular species of goodness, namely, virtue. In the virtuous person, the person of integrity, natural appetites and affections are in harmony with each other (wherein lies her private good) and in harmony with the public interest. Shaftesbury’s attempted reconciliation of selflove and benevolence is in part a response to the egoism of Hobbes, who argued that everyone is in fact motivated by self-interest. His defining morality in terms of psychological and public harmony is also a reaction to the divine voluntarism of his former tutor, Locke, who held that the laws of nature and morality issue from the will of God. On Shaftesbury’s view, morality exists independently of religion, but belief in God serves to produce the highest degree of virtue by nurturing a love for the universal system. Shaftesbury’s theory led to a general refinement of eighteenth-century ideas about moral feelings; a theory of the moral sense emerged, whereby sentiments are – under certain conditions – perceptions of, or constitutive of, right and wrong. In addition to several essays collected in three volumes under the title Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (second edition, 1714), Shaftesbury also wrote stoical moral and religious meditations reminiscent of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. His ideas on moral sentiments exercised considerable influence on the ethical theories of Hutcheson and Hume, who later worked out in detail their own accounts of the moral sense. See also HOBBES, HUME, HUTCHESON , MORAL SENSE THEOR. E.S.R.