The rise of sentimentalist ethics: Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury
Introduction
Ashley Cooper was not just a character on Lost, he was a well respected, very influential philosopher, often known by his title, Third Earl of Shaftesbury.
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- Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury
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- Ashely Cooper, evil dad of John Locke on Lost
The core of Shaftesbury’s philosophy is the belief that a person generally disposed to harm and never to help, a bad person, cannot be considered good just because he finds some reason to behave. For a person to truly be good she must be earnest in her desire to contribute to the world around her. Not for selfish reasons, but for objective reasons.
For Shaftesbury earnestness is measurable by the level of immediate emotion directed purposefully toward doing good and against evil. That means that a bad person isn’t just a person who never helps, or never helps from affection, but who lacks the right emotion; a bad person lacks “force enough to carry him directly towards good and bear him out against evil”. For the positive formulation – the truly good only earnestly mean to do good – to follow Shaftesbury will have to give a clear account of what the emotions are, and which are good and bad. Some of his assumptions are going to get in the way of that, but first a word on Good and Bad.
Good and Bad
A natural temper is only good if all the emotions are “suited to the public good or good of the species”. A person who lacks a “requisite passion” or has one that is “contrary to the main end” of the natural temper, is in some sense “corrupt”. He means this so strictly that selfishness, even if it creates good, is an “ill affection”. Every good is a public good.
Real actions, or at least interesting ones
Shaftesbury has a unique take on what counts as a real act, as opposed to something more like a reflex. He starts out by asking what we’re supposed to think about a person who has an epileptic fit on one hand, or on the other a person who remains seated, hands tied, and doesn’t steal a sack full of money left in front of them. In both cases, the person is clearly not acting of their own volition, their intentions are irrelevant or masked; the person can’t help but act the way they do.
He thinks that these situations are analogous to absentmindedly walking down the street, or even absentmindedly helping an elderly person across the street. They all lack moral worth because they don’t reflect or reveal any thing about your true volitions. Only acting from the emotions does. Only emotionally based actions reveal what you really want. For the same reason, chastising someone for an ‘unaffected’ act is pointless.
This is novel and counter-intuitive. Even people who think emotion-based actions are chosen to some degree or another would probably stop short of saying that all emotion-based actions are chosen, and only such actions ‘count’.
Still, the basic point here has the ring of truth to it: you simply don’t call a creature who is naturally gentle ‘bad’ because of a “breach of temper”, because such creatures usually return to their normal disposition. And it seems sorta fair to suggest that what is really ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ in a creature is what comes from its “natural temper”. The complication is that if a temperament is natural in a strong way, in what way is behavior stemming from it chosen?
Shaftesbury is pretty committed to the idea that emotional actions flow out of us by our natural temperament, that they are unmediated and don’t correspond to our conscious judgments. Yet he also seems to think they are not examples of a lack of volition or intention. They are instead our pure, wholly unfiltered intention. How does he square these seemingly incompatible ideas?
Unraveling the confusion
He has an explanation, and its implications for ethics are profound. The basic idea is that “natural behavior” done “earnestly” is the proper type of behavior to judge a person on, so you can only be correctly considered good if her “natural temper or the bent of her affections, primarily and immediately” leads her to good and against bad. But is there any room for choice, judgment, or cognition in being a good person?
If not, then holding an ethical theory such as utilitarianism, Aristotelianism, or Kantianism, which greatly value conscious judgment, would be self-deception. There’s not really any room for thinking as a guide to your own morality, or that of others, if ‘natural’ reaction is the key to goodness.
It seems that Shaftesbury’s thought is that an observer of an agent’s actions must be able to analyze why that person was motivated to act in the way they did, regardless of what the agent himself ‘knew’ or ‘could explain’ about their motivation. Reflecting about motives is not needed to be moral but to determine whether a person is moral, whether a person deserves praise or blame. On this account, for you to be good a third party must be able to see that you’re acting out of a benevolent character and for no ulterior, considered motive.
It strikes me as odd to think that an action we can’t “choose” is representative of our character, our true selves. But Shaftesbury didn’t made this up out of whole cloth. It follows pretty directly after Descartes’ jumbling of the power of the soul with respect to the body. And beyond Descartes himself, the Cartesian philosophy’s influence in standardizing the mechanistic view of the body as the view from which to begin theorizing about metaphysics and morals is hard to overstate. The Cartesian philosophy butchered the job of explaining how the soul could have any power over what the body does.
The Cartesian philosophy’s failure to explain at the same time how the soul/mind could effect behavior and how the body itself could effect mentality of any kind practically forced thinkers to ask anew how in the world it could be that we know what is the right thing to do and how we actually come to do the right thing.
With Shaftesbury, we’re reaping the first fruit of that goal. Let’s continue in the next post.
Cumberland on the role of anatomy and physiology in emotion and thought
Cumberland examines the human body from three angles; that of the anatomist, the physician and the psychologist. The first focuses on the organized nature of the body, the second at its liability to preventable and curable “distempers”, and the third focuses on the relation of the mind to the body.
The Brain
His work in all these facets tells him that there are aspects of human bodies that allow it to strengthen the imagination and memory far beyond animal imagination and memory.
The first thing is how large the human brain is relative to the body when compared with other animals. Because of this and because all the nerves come from either the brain or the spinal marrow, he thinks the brain can exert a tremendous amount of control on action, and he thinks “all voluntary motion is directed and governed by the brain”.
He also thinks that our first apprehension of things is passive and therefore necessary. So, for example, what we see when we open our eyes can’t be anything but what it is. And he thinks the same goes for our desire for good and aversion from evil: the mind is innately, constantly working – understanding, choosing, refusing, deciding – moving the body to get what it wants. The brain lets us observe sensible objects and better understand which ones are good or evil, and, through a process then not yet understood by science, the nervous system relays messages to the brain, assisting the imagination and memory and to the body, aiding muscles and nerves to allow motion.
Now, what would seem to follow from this is that the soul does not “direct and govern” voluntary motions of the body unless it governs the brain directly. And as we saw with Descartes, trying to explain that is a very tall order, but he tries.
He expects that science will one day explain the workings of the nervous system but he cautions that it can’t explain everything; specifically he thinks it is impossible that we could ever reduce the workings of the mind to the “mechanical powers of matter and motion”. In fact, he thinks the more we learn about the nature of the brain, “the more we shall despair of the possibility of explaining the operations of the mind by its motions”. In other words, our mental lives are not reducible to mechanical talk.
At the basis of this belief is his commitment to dualism. He as sure as Descartes was that the mind, not the brain, can in the end control its reactions to sensations. But he doesn’t give any reasons that should convince us that this is true. Instead, his deep study qua anatomist and physician recommend us that the mind may just be unnecessary and irrelevant in understanding thought and emotions. For all his advances, our hero is just as guilty of the First Cartesian Error as Descartes.
Beyond the Brain
The internal organs in our chest cavity, the viscera, also have tremendous influence in “governing” and “determining” of emotion to seek the good of others rather than hurting them. Basically, he thinks the structure of our bodies serves as a continual reminder to very strictly govern our emotions. He goes so far as to say that the only reason we obey laws of nature and the source of every virtue is that we can govern the emotions that we use in “settling or securing every man’s property”.
Due to the amazing connectivity and back-and-forth communication between the viscera and the brain, the heart, diaphragm, etc, via the nervous system, they affected in various ways by violent emotions about good or evil. (And believe me, he gets into some detail about how this might actually work!). Its similar in all the other kinds of emotion; the heart and other viscera are more moved by the influence of a more powerful brain than animals are. Animals have emotions, but ours are much stronger.
Furthermore, the heart is the fountain of all the pleasures we enjoy, so any passions that help or hinder it “more powerfully” in us than in animals “necessarily affects” us more than them. Specifically, two properties peculiar to human bodies (I’ll spare the details) that allow for communication between the viscera give us the ability to better effect diligent government of the passions, along with the motivation to do so.
All this might remind you of the Homeric theory, and I agree they’re quite similar, but lets not jump to the conclusion that Cumberland is really a confused visceral theorist. Instead, he thinks that the peculiarities of human anatomy and physiology actually suggest that the mind’s province is to “diligently attend the helm committed to its care, and to steer it skillfully”. (This is reminiscent of Descartes sailor/ship metaphor in Meditation VI).
An even stronger point against viewing Cumberland as a visceral theorist is the previously stated claim that “the strongest passions are employed regarding the selling of private property…because nothing moves men more strongly”, meaning that concepts, beliefs and expectations play a huge role in the passions, or at least in a certain type. The “conceptions of the brain affect the heart”.
What these passages also show is a deep understanding of the importance of duplex communication between the brain and the rest of the body, which I’ve said numerous times is critically important.
Conclusion
So in the end, Cumberland more or less escapes the Second and Third Cartesian Errors and its mostly his falling to the First Cartesian Error that keeps me from listing him as part of the P-A-L progression. And like Descartes, Cumberland finds himself confused in the end as to whether and how the emotions are physiological phenomena or phenomena of an impalpable mind. This confusion makes fuzzy the role of the soul in our mental lives and emotions much in the same way it was by Descartes, though in a more ‘agreeable’, scientifically more rigorous way.
I’d also point out that his methodology as a philosopher is a little troubling, as in many places he’s utterly confident that scientific advancement simply will fill in gaps in his theory while at the same time he insists that such advancement will not undermine his other fervently held belief, that the mind is not physical and really can control our emotional responses to sensory phenomena. I might even argue that this is a weak version of the Second Cartesian error.
But for our purposes, the most important takeaways are:
1) Cumberland should be credited for further solidifying the methodological point that the physiology of the body is absolutely fundamental to the nature of the emotions, even to the exclusion of the metaphysically distinct ‘soul’.
2) Cumberland keeps at the core of his theory the idea that the mind’s role is important and only partially independent of the body.
3) He is seriously confused about just what role the metaphysically separate soul he so strongly insists on has in mentality to the point that he is guilty of the same incoherence as Descartes.
4) His confusions make it unclear whether he is a cognitivist or a sentimentalist about morality, a general issue we’re about to spend a lot of time on.
Its fair to say Cumberland has a stronger feel for these confusions, but he still has them. At the least we can say that though he is a partisan of Cartesian philosophy of emotions, he seriously advances that project.
Anger, Et Cetera Online 