Norman Fiering and the Revision of Perry Miller

Abstract

During the century after 1650 the theoretical foundations of Western moral philosophy underwent an extraordinary revolution. By the mid-1600s the skeptical and empirical mentality associated with the revolution in science and the demise of Scholasticism was beginning to undermine the traditional authority of religion and to provoke a sense of impending crisis in moral philosophy. In response there occurred a remarkable outburst of innovative speculation designed to resecure the ethical values of Christian civilization upon new secular moorings. Accepting the premises of the new critical outlook, many thinkers turned away from supernatural Christianity to formulate moral philosophies whose foundations were naturalistic. They took a number of tacks, but the foremost trend, exemplified by the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, sought to embed moral behavior in man's supposed sentiment of benevolence. The rise of this "new moral philosophy" of "benevolism" is the subject of Norman Fiering's Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard.1