Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury

Life and Intellectual Context

Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), was born into a prominent Whig aristocratic family in London. His grandfather, the First Earl, was a leading statesman and early patron of John Locke, who in turn became the younger Shaftesbury’s tutor and exerted a formative influence on his education. Despite this, Shaftesbury’s mature philosophy diverged in important ways from Locke’s empiricism and his account of morality.

A frail constitution and chronic respiratory illness shaped Shaftesbury’s life and limited his political career. He sat in Parliament and briefly held office under King William III, but persistent health problems and distaste for court politics led him to withdraw from active public life. He spent extended periods abroad, notably in the Netherlands and Italy, where he immersed himself in classical literature, ancient philosophy, and the arts.

Shaftesbury’s intellectual milieu combined Lockean debates about ideas and freedom, classical Stoic and Platonic themes, and emerging Enlightenment concerns with sociability and politeness. He was deeply engaged in controversies about enthusiasm and religious toleration, as well as about the foundations of morality. Although he wrote in an urbane, literary style rather than in systematic treatises, his essays form a coherent philosophical outlook that would later be labeled part of the British moral sense school.

Major Works and Philosophical Themes

Shaftesbury’s main writings were collected in the three-volume Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711). This work gathers and revises essays, dialogues, and treatises written over the preceding decade, including Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit, The Moralists, and Sensus Communis.

A central theme is the rejection of purely self-interested accounts of morality. Against Hobbesian egoism, Shaftesbury maintains that human beings are by nature social and benevolent. He argues that the human mind contains a variety of affections (or dispositions), some self-regarding and some directed toward the good of others. Morality, on his view, concerns the proper balance and harmony among these affections, such that the good of the whole—of society and of the person—is promoted.

Shaftesbury introduces the influential notion of a “moral sense”: a reflective, second-order capacity by which we approve or disapprove our own affections and actions as well as those of others. This moral sense functions analogously to an internal sense of beauty or proportion. It responds with pleasure to virtue, conceived as a kind of harmony in character and conduct, and with displeasure to vice, which he associates with disorder, excess, and deformity.

In defending this account, Shaftesbury places considerable emphasis on aesthetic language. Virtuous actions and characters are described as beautiful, harmonious, and proportionate, while vicious ones are ugly and dissonant. This interweaving of ethics and aesthetics would become a hallmark of his legacy, influencing later discussions of taste and judgment.

Shaftesbury is also known for his stylistic and methodological choices. He writes in a conversational, essayistic mode, using dialogues, letters, and ironic personae rather than scholastic argument. He explicitly connects philosophical reflection with the cultivation of polite conversation, wit, and sociability, suggesting that philosophical inquiry is itself a social and civilizing practice.

Ethics, Aesthetics, and Religion

Ethically, Shaftesbury contends that virtue is naturally connected to happiness. A well-ordered character, in which benevolent affections harmonize with self-love, leads to enjoyment and tranquility; vicious character, marked by domination of narrow self-interest, brings inner turmoil. Proponents of Shaftesbury see this as an attempt to demonstrate that moral life does not fundamentally conflict with human flourishing but is instead its most coherent expression.

In aesthetics, Shaftesbury advances an early form of the idea that judgments of beauty involve a kind of disinterested pleasure: we can appreciate forms and harmonies for their own sake, not merely for their utility. He draws a parallel to moral judgment, suggesting that the moral sense similarly takes delight in virtue as such, not only in its consequences. These reflections helped to prepare the way for later theories of taste, including those of Francis Hutcheson and David Hume.

Shaftesbury’s religious thought is often characterized as advocating a rational and natural religion. He sharply criticizes religious enthusiasm, superstition, and fanaticism, and he is skeptical of appeals to fear, reward, and punishment as primary motives for virtuous conduct. For him, true religion aligns with the natural order of things and with a benevolent deity whose providence can be discerned in the harmonious structure of the universe.

At the same time, he maintains that virtue does not depend on revelation or theological doctrine: a person can perceive the moral beauty of virtue and the ugliness of vice through the moral sense alone. Critics, particularly more orthodox theologians of his time and later, argued that this position weakened the authority of revealed religion and the doctrines of sin and grace. Supporters, however, have seen Shaftesbury as a key figure in the development of a tolerant, Enlightenment Christianity and in the broader shift toward secular moral philosophy.

Reception and Influence

Shaftesbury’s influence was substantial in the eighteenth century, even though his works were less often read in systematic philosophical curricula later on. In Britain, he helped inaugurate the moral sense tradition, directly influencing Francis Hutcheson, who systematized many of his ideas, and shaping the background for David Hume and Adam Smith in their accounts of sympathy, moral sentiment, and virtue.

On the Continent, Shaftesbury’s essays were eagerly read and translated. In France, they contributed to Enlightenment debates on virtue, sociability, and religion. In Germany, his emphasis on the unity of the moral and the aesthetic, and his portrayal of nature as an ordered, harmonious whole, proved important for early German aesthetic theory and for thinkers associated with Sentimentalism and, indirectly, Kantian moral and aesthetic philosophy.

Critics have raised several enduring questions about his work. Some have challenged the coherence of the moral sense concept, asking whether it can be reduced to ordinary psychological processes or social conditioning. Others have argued that Shaftesbury relies too heavily on an analogy between moral and aesthetic judgment, or that his optimistic view of human sociability underestimates the depth of conflict and aggression in human life.

Nevertheless, Shaftesbury is widely regarded as a pioneering figure in early Enlightenment ethics and aesthetics, notable for defending an account of virtue that is at once naturalistic, sentimental, and closely tied to a vision of a harmonious, ordered world. His writings form a crucial link between seventeenth-century debates over self-interest and obligation and the later eighteenth-century fascination with sentiment, taste, and moral psychology.