SOURCE: Brooks, Garland P. “Shaftesbury and the Psychological School of Ethics.” Dalhousie Review 62, no. 3 (autumn 1982): 431-40.

In the essay below, Brooks examines the theory of morality propounded by Shaftesbury, which the critic views as essentially subjective despite the philosopher's search for an objective system of ethics.

British eighteenth-century psychology: the most typical association is probably to the Nihil est in intellectu, quod non prius fuerit in sensu epistemology of the empiricists. The view that the psychology of the period was synonymous with tabula rasa, sensation and association has long been widespread. Such a perception stems in part from the tendency of certain historians to stress the over-riding importance of the nineteenth-century German experimentalists in the development of psychology and hence, by extension, of the empirical tradition which had nurtured them. Yet modern psychology had roots other than these, and the eighteenth-century had additional, and at times apparently more...