The Modern Moral Order and Its Basis of Human Nature:Significance of Shaftesbury's Moral Philosophy for Social Theory
At the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century,Shaftesbury was confronted with not only the growing moral crisis of the commercial society and the need for a humanistic foundation for a liberal republican government program,but also the question of how to define the modern man with his expanding individuality,to bridge the gap between the individual and the society,and to reconstruct a free and virtuous general order.This required him to develop,after Hobbes,a competing theory of human nature,and thereby to construct a new moral philosophy.For this purpose,Shaftesbury drew on natural theology and Stoicism to articulate a conception of divine order that opened up the possibility of a free and virtuous civil society.Subsequently,Shaftesbury put forward a view of human nature with natural affection as the first principle,and then empirically clarified the"sociability not for self-love"that was naturally inherent in human nature,providing a powerful defense of the self-sufficiency of society itself.Finally,through the socio-psychological mechanisms of"common sense"and"moral sense",the possibility of a moral order was illustrated on the basis of universal human nature.In addition to this body of theoretical work,Shaftesbury explicitly argued that a sufficiently free and tolerant public sphere was essential to the true realization of a good moral order.Shaftesbury's moral philosophy set a theoretical tone for the later Scottish Enlightenment and for the Anglo-American social theory that treated the"social"logic as a means of settling individuals and constructing order.His ideas are still of value to us today in many ways.
Shaftesburymoral philosophymoral ordertheory of human naturenatural affectionsociability
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