The Development of Lockean Moral Philosophy

Abstract

Whereas Paley’s political philosophy engaged explicitly with the hot political issues of the 1780s, including proposals for the reduction of regal influence and the improvement of parliamentary representation, the context of his ethical thought is more difficult to reconstruct. We know that much of the Principleswas based on lectures given at Christ’s College in the early 1770s. Paley was admitted to Christ’s as a sizar on 16 November 1758 and started his residence in October 1759, having been a pupil at the free grammar school in Giggleswick in theWest Riding of Yorkshire, where his father was headmaster. A capable mathematician, he graduated as senior wrangler in June 1763. Unhappy spells as a schoolmaster’s assistant at Dr Bracken’s academy in Greenwich and then as an assistant curate (‘the rat of rats’, as he put it) were brought to an end in 1766when he was elected a fellow of Christ’s following his receipt of the Cambridge Members’ prize in 1765 for an essay in Latin on the relative merits of Stoicism and Epicureanism. Vacating Christ’s in 1776, Paley took up residence among the rural community of Appleby in the diocese of Carlisle. Then, from 1780 onwards, he had two houses, a prebendal residence in the close of Carlisle Cathedral and the vicarage at Dalston. In 1782 he replaced John Law, his college friend and confidant, as Archdeacon of Carlisle. He owed these appointments to John’s father, the eminent theologian Bishop Edmund Law. In the late 1770s, Edmund began pressing Paley to get on with the job of developing the lectures into a book. The Bishop’s apparent anxiety about Paley’s slow progress was undoubtedly brought on by the changing intellectual climate at Cambridge. In an atmosphere of toleration and erudition, natural-theological apologetics flourished in ‘Whig-Cambridge’ for much of the eighteenth century, and, as Paley recognised in his dedicatory preface to the Principles, few had