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1 The Model of Moral Monstrosity What did it mean to call someone “inhuman” in the eighteenth century? How was moral monstrosity understood? Furthermore, why was it understood in a certain way? These are the questions that I will attempt to answer in this part of my argument, focusing on philosophical texts, primarily from the domain of ethics. Many of these texts come from the group of philosophers commonly placed under the rubric of the Scottish Enlightenment . Some of them—David Hume and Adam Smith, for example—are well known. Others, such as Adam Ferguson, James Beattie, and Thomas Reid, are less familiar. One facet of my argument is that knowing these philosophers individually is not important when it comes to inhumanity. On the contrary, what is crucial is that they share the same fundamental stance on the matter. It is not surprising that moral monstrosity should be an insistent theme within the Scottish Enlightenment, the members of which tend to share the heritage of Shaftesbury, the doyen of the Cambridge Platonists. Shaftesbury had claimed that all humans have innate feelings of an ethical nature. The faculty corresponding to these feelings would come to be called “moral sense,” and one who lacks such sense will obviously be an aberration of sorts. Nonetheless, the roots of moral monstrosity extend into the seminal texts of British empiricism as well: the works of Hobbes and Locke. In fact, we can grasp moral monstrosity only if we see it as a strange hybrid of the rationalist methodology of empiri- cism and the elaboration of the sentiments—an elaboration that did not lack cynicism at times—in the ethics of the moral-sense school. I should add as well that the notion of moral monstrosity examined in this chapter is not con¤ned to Britain. It is found in French and German philosophy as well, perhaps without the same sharpness of detail but with equal vigor. Its dissemination is not a particularly mysterious process, and one could recreate without much trouble its genealogical tree. Chronologically , for example, Francis Hutcheson was a follower of Shaftesbury; Adam Smith a pupil of Hutcheson; Thomas Reid succeeded Smith in the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. On the Continent, Diderot translated Shaftesbury’s work; Lessing read Diderot and incorporated many of the latter’s ideas into his own philosophy and dramaturgy. While I will address questions of in®uence occasionally, my primary aim at this point is simply to demonstrate that a speci¤c notion of moral monstrosity enjoyed a widespread and lengthy coherence. My approach to this coherence is not that of a philosopher trying to make sense of individual arguments or determine the truth or falsity of speci¤c claims—moral monstrosity hardly calls for analysis of this type.1 The moral monster is never a topic of explicit debate. There is no essay dedicated to it. It is not a central ¤gure in any of the texts in which it appears. The moral monster is in a sense marginal, yet it is also ubiquitous. It inhabits, one could say, the blind spot of the ethics of sentimentality. It is in many ways the product of what Enlightenment philosophers did not analyze with excessive care—often claiming in fact that the moral monster was in any case unthinkable . Nonetheless, they systematically produced and reproduced this creature, and we might wonder why this was so. Although it is not an absolute origin, Shaftesbury’s An Inquiry concerning Virtue, or Merit (1699) provides all of the elements by which the ¤eld of moral monstrosity would be delimited in the decades to follow. Shaftesbury considers in the majority of his treatise those passions that predispose humankind either to benevolence (although they do not always lead to this) or to the pursuit of self-interest (which may unfortunately sometimes cause harm). He then turns to consider an odd group of emotions: “those which lead neither to a publick nor a private Good; and are neither of any advantage to the Species in general, or Creature in particular.”2 Shaftesbury must posit the existence of “unnatural affections” in order to explain certain distasteful aspects of human behavior. In their opposition to the “social and natural” passions—indeed by their very existence—these passions tend to undermine the primary claim that benevolence, combined with self-interest, forms the essence of our being. The ¤rst of such passions The Inhuman 4 [18.221.222.47] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 07...

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