[In this essay, Voitle considers the factors that contributed to the rationally inclined Shaftesbury becoming an early leader in the movement towards sentimental morality.]

How did Lord Shaftesbury, who was not at all pious in the ordinary sense of the word, who was remote and austere in his dealings with mankind, who strove all of his life to achieve a purely rational mode of behaviour, come to be regarded as one of the founders of sentimental morality?

Some modern critics have difficulty interpreting Shaftesbury because they do not realise that the whole nature of his moral statements changes as the audience he is addressing changes. By examining these audiences we can learn something about his real place in intellectual history.

One audience, which comprises most of mankind, is addressed chiefly in his correspondence. To it belong servants, members of his extended family, politicians, noblemen—just about anyone. Shaftesbury is certain that for this large group of people, the best guarantee of moral behaviour lies in the fear of God. This may seem strange for a moment, coming from someone whose piety is, to say the least, unorthodox, and who conceives the afterlife in terms just as strange. But it is not odd if we reflect on the speaker's background: he was an aristocrat, a member of a group of a few hundred persons who actually ran England at the time. He is the last person in the world to wish to disturb the patterns of religious thought which he must have considered the basis of the society of his day, the basis upon which his own rank ultimately depended.

Another audience Shaftesbury addresses is much smaller than this first group, but ultimately far more influential, because it is their thought which tends to mould the ideas of others. These he addresses in his printed works, especially in the later ones. This group he hopes will learn to follow the moral sense, but achieving the status of moral virtuosos will not be easy. Only by intense effort will they succeed in that task, which he finally paralleled to that of becoming a virtuoso in art.

Shaftesbury knew very few, alas, who sought virtue for its own sake, so that the final group addressed only in his letters is by far the smallest. From their study of the Ancients, these persons had become truly benevolent. And if we include Shaftesbury among these lovers of virtue for its own sake, we can see how they learn to act well: by the study of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, his lifelong guides. These are strange leaders for the proponent of a morality supposedly based on emotion.

You will note that two of these groups are addressed only in his letters, which means that most readers are not familiar with the concept of various audiences, since the majority of the letters have not yet been published. Combine this fact with the peculiar history of his publications—the Platonic element, not evident until The Moralists was published in 1709; the aesthetic element, which evolved from the Platonic, briefly treated during his own day but not wholly appreciated until manuscripts were printed about eighty years ago; finally the Stoic element, only evident at all during the present century from the publication of a manuscript—and it becomes quite clear where some of the confusion arises. Were you to ask a contemporary scholar what interested him most he would be likely to point to the Platonic, the aesthetic or the Stoic, not the moral sense, which was subsumed into English thought by the middle of the eighteenth century.

There were other factors which contributed to Shaftesbury's becoming an early leader of the movement towards sentimental morality. The timing of the publication of Characteristicks (1711) was very significant. Using hindsight, most contemporary scholars agree that the shift from the traditional system of morality, based on the badly eroded concept of Reason, to emotional bases was by this date already under way. Furthermore the optimistic view of human nature advocated by the Cambridge Platonists was increasingly accepted. All that was needed was to find a spokesman for these views.

To convert the shapers of opinion during his time, Shaftesbury worked very hard to cultivate an easy offhand manner, which contrasted strongly with the stiff, formal style of earlier essays such as Inquiry concerning virtue (1699). This style must have done much to make him seem the spokesman. The moral sense also had a unique advantage in being introduced by someone who had decided to appear as a populariser rather than as a theoretician. The theory, then, came later, in contrast to the way most intellectual developments take place.

Another matter also helped him into the role of spokesman. All his life, Shaftesbury had struggled to develop an appearance of impeccable morality, which he thought would counteract the bad reputation which he felt that his grandfather, the first Earl, had unjustly acquired. He succeeded so well that he was able even to make people forget how much some of the clergy mistrusted him. He became the ‘good’ Earl of Shaftesbury. Whatever accomplishments the noble classes achieved, very few of them were thought of as moral exemplars.

Circumstance also made a further contribution, in the form of the man who first chose to imitate Shaftesbury's pattern of thought, Francis Hutcheson. If many of the clergy doubted Shaftesbury's piety, none could doubt Hutcheson's. As most scholars know, Shaftesbury eventually came to hate a ‘system’. Hutcheson was overwhelmingly systematic, so much so that he came to postulate the existence of a whole family of senses parallel to the moral sense. From this point on, the role of emotion became more or less unbounded.

Shaftesbury could not have known what effect the forces of history were going to have on his notion of the moral sense. Sentimental morality ultimately involved a broad dependence on the emotions. Emotions suggest ease of access, in complete contrast to the discipline he was proposing. Granted his psychology has emotional roots, granted he was optimistic with regard to human nature, but certainly this austere, deliberate man, who sought all of his days to follow reason, could not have dreamt that historians would one day point to his idea of the moral sense as a significant step in the growth of emotional values in life and art, replacing the rational ones he himself had learned from the Ancients. His ghost cannot be happy with the results, and we have reason to examine, however necessary they may seem, our methods of tracing the pattern of development of ideas from one philosopher to another, in a sort of intellectual daisy chain.