In this lucid and provocative volume, Tim Stuart-Buttle examines the role of Cicero in the development of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British moral philosophy. He portrays this development as a progression from John Locke's grounding of ethics in the individual's obligations to an omniscient and omnipotent Creator who was the promulgator and enforcer of natural law to David Hume's exclusive focus on the natural sources of morality. Between these bookends are discussions of the ethical philosophies of Shaftesbury, Bernard Mandeville, and Conyers Middleton.
Stuart-Buttle emphasizes the centrality of Hellenistic philosophy to British ethical discourse in this period. In the minds of Locke, Middleton, and Hume, Cicero's academic skepticism served as the perfect foil to Stoicism and Epicureanism, two dogmatic schools whose seventeenth- and eighteenth-century devotees shared their ancient predecessors’ unbounded confidence in the power of human reason and their rigidity in espousing its alleged conclusions. In this view, Cicero, a uniquely sensible and humble philosopher who emphasized the limits of reason, provided the antidote to the disease of intellectual arrogance that had lain dormant for centuries but was once again rampant owing to the revival of the Hellenistic schools.
Locke contended that Cicero had demonstrated what human reason could accomplish when exerted to its fullest extent—and, by Cicero's own admission, what it could accomplish fell considerably short of providing a comprehensive account of reality. Fortunately, Christ's revelation had enlarged upon the moral knowledge uncovered by Cicero to provide a perfect ethical code. Cicero had also contributed much to ethical discourse by stressing that the universal desire for praise often promoted virtue because the attributes and actions that society praised were generally those that experience had proved were beneficial to it. Locke claimed that Cicero had disproved Thomas Hobbes's theory that only the fear of an absolute government could protect society from immoral behavior. In fact, because the fear of punishment was always limited at best, and could never motivate people to acts of positive benevolence, the love of praise provided a much stronger motive for virtue. But the greatest motivator of all was the Christian afterlife.
Despite holding opposing perspectives, both Shaftesbury and Mandeville rejected Locke's attempt to fuse classical philosophy with Christianity. Shaftesbury, the neo-Stoic founder of the moral sense school, attacked Christianity for its focus on the past (the need for repentance) and the future (the afterlife) at the expense of the present, and for its doctrine of original sin, which he considered a form of misanthropy. By contrast, the Epicurean Mandeville regarded Stoicism as self-idolatry owing to its ostensibly positive conception of human nature, which, in practice, constituted a positive conception of the nature of the enlightened few, namely, Stoic philosophers. Mandeville considered Christianity at best an insufficient basis for social morality because, like Stoicism, it demanded that humans subdue their passions to an unrealistic degree. Thus, medieval society had been compelled to construct a less rigorous and more egocentric code of ethics around the concept of honor, an ethos that catered to aristocrats. By vastly increasing societal wealth, modern commercial society had democratized this secular moral code.
Middleton, the author of a famous and influential biography of Cicero, sought to combine the Roman's academic skepticism with a Christianity that was less orthodox than Locke's. Middleton portrayed the Epicureans of the late Roman Republic as abandoning Rome in its time of direst need owing to their doctrine of nonparticipation in matters (such as politics) that troubled the mind, and the Stoics as idealists whose rigidity rendered them useless. Cicero's pragmatic skepticism shone by comparison. In the end, Middleton's fusion of Cicero with Jesus granted precedence to the former, whose empiricism provided the yardstick by which to judge even biblical claims.
Like Locke and Middleton, Hume endorsed Cicero's academic skepticism as the key to moral progress. Just as the empiricism associated with this skepticism had overturned the false scientific dogmas of the old philosophical schools in recent times, so it could also overturn their moral dogmas. Hume preferred paganism to Christianity because the former religion had had nothing to say about morality, leaving it to society to craft mores on utilitarian grounds. He believed that Cicero had refrained from denouncing the superstitions of paganism because they were harmless, having no bearing on the Roman moral code. (Hume does not appear to have understood that Cicero not only tolerated Roman religion but promoted it because he connected piety to patriotism, a cardinal civic virtue in the Roman statesman's eyes.) By contrast, according to Hume, Christianity had fused what should not be fused, religion and morality—the search for the otherworldly and unknowable with the search for the worldly and knowable, to the detriment of the latter. Hume claimed that while the order and complexity of the universe indicated that there was a first cause of some kind, the nature of this first cause was unknowable. Thus, the Lockean sense of obligation to deity was irrational and should have no bearing on morality. The supposition that the first cause was a being that possessed a sense of morality comparable to that of humans was mere superstition. Hume desired a society in which religion was strictly subordinated to civil law since civil law generally reflected the mores reached by society on utilitarian grounds.
As Stuart-Buttle notes, the identification of Cicero as an academic skeptic, a categorization that Locke, Middleton, and Hume based largely on the Academica, was simplistic. Cicero's declarations concerning natural law in the hugely influential texts De republica and De legibus were as dogmatic as those of any Stoic, exhibiting an absolute confidence in the power of human reason, aided by a moral sense, to reach sound conclusions about the content of an absolute moral law. Cicero's clear teaching on the moral sense, which he depicted as an innate attraction to virtue that nature bestowed on every human, was Stoic, not academic. In his famous Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke rejected this Stoic doctrine in favor of the blank slate theory, though, curiously, without reference to Cicero.
Unfortunately, Stuart-Buttle's use of Cicero as a thematic device breaks down somewhat in the second and third chapters of the book. Shaftesbury largely ignored the Roman, whom he regarded as a dilettante, and Mandeville scarcely mentioned him. Thus, the chapters devoted to these philosophers appear to exist only to illustrate the type of neo-Stoic and Epicurean analyses that Middleton and Hume were at pains to demolish with Ciceronian tools. Whether this is sufficient justification for their existence is questionable.
Nevertheless, Stuart-Buttle's book about virtue possesses many virtues of its own. Its clear prose eschews the jargon that too often mars histories of philosophy. It offers enlightening information and provocative ideas. Above all, it demonstrates unequivocally that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain remained a society in which the parameters of moral discourse were largely set by the philosophers of antiquity.
