Le Sentiment moral . Études réunies et présentées par Béatrice Guion

Abstract

What makes an act a moral act? Does it depend on the aims of the actor, the effects of the action, or on some more fundamental human ability to distinguish moral behaviour from ordinary behaviour in the first place? As Béatrice Guion shows in her Introduction to this informative and well-crafted collection of essays, there were a number of reasons that made these questions particularly pressing in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The first was connected to the strong emphasis on the depravity of fallen human nature in the more Augustinian versions of seventeenth-century Protestant and Catholic theology, and the attendant difficulty of finding anything beyond self-interest to explain human behaviour. The second was the concurrent concern with human survival needs in the natural jurisprudence of Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke, and the parallel difficulty of finding anything beyond a natural right to self-preservation to separate justice from injustice. Both points of view seemed to imply that any explanation of the difference between ordinary life and the moral life would have to come from the outside, either as a form of divine grace or as a particular type of sovereign state. This collection is an examination of the long eighteenth century’s search for a more internally generated and highly differentiated explanation of the differences between moral behaviour and ordinary behaviour. It consists of seventeen studies grouped into four related themes. The first, dealing with moralists and moral sentiment, made up of three essays respectively by Luisa Simonutti on Pierre Bayle and moral sentiment and by Daniel Acke and Laurent Bove on the moral thought of Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues. The second, centred on moral sentiments and the idea of a moral sense in Enlightenment thought, contains essays by Christian Maurer on Mandeville and his critics on amour-propre; Michel Faure on the social and economic origins of new forms of moral sensibility; Vincent Alain on objections to the concept of moral sentiments by Christian Wolff and Moses Mendelssohn; and François Calori on love and respect in Kant’s Doctrine of Virtue. The third section deals with fictional examinations of moral sentiments, notably in Rousseau, but also in eighteenth-century discussions of the tragedies of Ovid and Euripides and in the subtle explorations of the similarities and differences between a moral sense and a moral sentiment made by writers such as Marivaux. A final section, introduced by Julie Bloch, is centred on the relationship between the aesthetic and the moral, beginning with a broad overview by Emmanuelle Henin, and ending with two more detailed essays on the thought of Jean-Baptiste Dubos and on Diderot’s Salons by Camille Guyon-Lecoq and Pierre Hartmann respectively. Although there are one or two omissions (Hume and Helvétius, for example, are not as conspicuous as they might be), this is a wide-ranging and very helpful collection of articles.