Rationalism and Perfectionism

Rationalist accounts of morality played a central role in eighteenth-century moral philosophy. This applies especially to Britain and Germany, where new views, like Hutcheson’s, Hume’s or Kant’s, entered the stage in reaction to the traditional rationalist positions. Although the debates in the English- and German-speaking areas developed largely independently, in both of them the rationalist views shared some fundamental theses. Both British and German rationalists of the eighteenth century regarded reason as the main moral faculty, insofar as reason is the cognitive power allowing human beings to discover within reality the sources of moral demands. Both British and German rationalists possessed a realistic account of the normative force of moral demands, as they held that its ultimate grounds lie in reality. All these thinkers rejected the attempt to explain moral obligation through positive commands, issued by a divine or human legislator. In spite of these shared points, there are, however, some important differences between British and German rationalisms in the eighteenth century, which will be highlighted in the following. MORAL RATIONALISM AND MORAL REALISM: SAMUEL CLARKE, WOLLASTON, BALGUY Between the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, the rejection of Hobbes’s view and of law-centred voluntarist accounts of morals in general led to a new wave of realist accounts of morality. Along with Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit (1699), Samuel Clarke’s second set of Boyle lectures (A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation, 1706) is the most important attempt of this kind at the outset of the eighteenth century. Clarke (1675-1726) aimed at an explanation of moral obligation that both accounts for its necessity and secures its accord with, on the one hand, Christian religion and, on the other, the new scientific image of the world. The most comprehensive statement of his views on morality provided in the Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion is closely connected with the discussion of the main issues of philosophical theology presented in the first set of lectures (published as A Discourse Concerning the Being and Attributes of God, 1705). Clarke shares with Cudworth and Shaftesbury a broadly Platonic background. However, the position that he develops is different from theirs in important respects. Unlike Shaftesbury, Clarke does not think that moral distinctions are harmonious proportions in actions and character traits perceived through affections.