Judge the Evil of Human Nature: “Moll Flanders” and Defoe's View of Conscience

Abstract

“Moll Flanders” is a companion piece of Daniel Defoe's “Robinson Crusoe”, known as Defoe's "female version of spiritual autobiography". For a long time, Defoe researchers have focused on the "individual self-sufficiency" and social problems in his works. However, the research on Defoe's moral outlook is slightly fragmented, involving money and morality, Christian morality, national morality and so on. Therefore, it is necessary to start from the text of “Moll Flanders” to deeply explore the core of Defoe's moral thought, reveal Moll Flanders' crime and punishment under the threshold of his view of conscience, and analyze the birth context of Defoe's view of conscience, which mainly includes the following aspects: The relationship between Moll Flanders and the spirit of early capitalism, the lack of national welfare policy and Moll Flanders’s moral crisis, Moll Flanders' criminal predicament and spiritual redemption. Finally, this paper aims to explore the similarities and differences between Defoe's view of conscience and David Hume's and Adam Smith's view of conscience in the context of moral philosophy, to reveal the continuity and development of the ideas, to provide the thought resources from Defoe for the modern society. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the behavior and moral concepts of the heroine Moll Flanders in Defoe's work and to explain how the social values and ideas implied in it reflect Defoe's notion of conscience. The significance of this paper is to explore the moral philosophy of Defoe's work and the connection between his conscience and Hume and Adam Smith.