•  677
    One of the most significant disputes in early modern philosophy was between the moral rationalists and the moral sentimentalists. The moral rationalists — such as Ralph Cudworth, Samuel Clarke and John Balguy — held that morality originated in reason alone. The moral sentimentalists — such as Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson and David Hume — held that morality originated at least partly in sentiment. In addition to arguments, the rationalists and sentimenta…Read more
  •  235
    Sentimentalist pluralism: Moral psychology and philosophical ethics
    Philosophical Issues 18 (1): 143-163. 2008.
    When making moral judgments, people are typically guided by a plurality of moral rules. These rules owe their existence to human emotions but are not simply equivalent to those emotions. And people’s moral judgments ought to be guided by a plurality of emotion-based rules. The view just stated combines three positions on moral judgment: [1] moral sentimentalism, which holds that sentiments play an essential role in moral judgment,1 [2] descriptive moral pluralism, which holds that commonsense mo…Read more
  •  234
    Indeterminacy and variability in meta-ethics
    Philosophical Studies 145 (2): 215-234. 2009.
    In the mid-20th century, descriptive meta-ethics addressed a number of central questions, such as whether there is a necessary connection between moral judgment and motivation, whether moral reasons are absolute or relative, and whether moral judgments express attitudes or describe states of affairs. I maintain that much of this work in mid-20th century meta-ethics proceeded on an assumption that there is good reason to question. The assumption was that our ordinary discourse is uniform and dete…Read more
  •  223
    Presumed consent, autonomy, and organ donation
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 29 (1). 2004.
    I argue that a policy of presumed consent for cadaveric organ procurement, which assumes that people do want to donate their organs for transplantation after their death, would be a moral improvement over the current American system, which assumes that people do not want to donate their organs. I address what I take to be the most important objection to presumed consent. The objection is that if we implement presumed consent we will end up removing organs from the bodies of people who did not wa…Read more
  •  152
    abstract Many have held that there is some kind of incompatibility between a commitment to good end-of-life care and the legalization of physician-assisted suicide. This opposition to physician-assisted suicide encompasses a cluster of different claims. In this essay I try to clarify some of the most important of these claims and show that they do not stand up well to conceptual and empirical scrutiny.
  •  151
    Variability and moral phenomenology
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (1): 99-113. 2008.
    Many moral philosophers in the Western tradition have used phenomenological claims as starting points for philosophical inquiry; aspects of moral phenomenology have often been taken to be anchors to which any adequate account of morality must remain attached. This paper raises doubts about whether moral phenomena are universal and robust enough to serve the purposes to which moral philosophers have traditionally tried to put them. Persons’ experiences of morality may vary in a way that greatly l…Read more
  •  137
    Side constraints and the structure of commonsense ethics
    Philosophical Perspectives 23 (1): 305-319. 2009.
    In our everyday moral deliberations, we attend to two central types of considerations – outcomes and moral rules. How these considerations interrelate is central to the long-standing debate between deontologists and utilitarians. Is the weight we attach to moral rules reducible to their conduciveness to good outcomes (as many utilitarians claim)? Or do we take moral rules to be absolute constraints on action that normatively trump outcomes (as many deontologists claim)? Arguments over these issu…Read more
  •  117
    From Cambridge Platonism to Scottish Sentimentalism
    Journal of Scottish Philosophy 8 (1): 13-31. 2010.
    The Cambridge Platonists were a group of religious thinkers who attended and taught at Cambridge from the 1640s until the 1660s. The four most important of them were Benjamin Whichcote, John Smith, Ralph Cudworth, and Henry More. The most prominent sentimentalist moral philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment – Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam Smith – knew of the works of the Cambridge Platonists. But the Scottish sentimentalists typically referred to the Cambridge Platonists only briefly and in pass…Read more
  •  114
    On eating animals: Michael B. Gill
    Social Philosophy and Policy 30 (1-2): 201-207. 2013.
    This essay is a critical response to Loren Lomasky's essay in this volume: The essay argues that Lomasky both overestimates the value of eating meat and underestimates the harms to animals of practices surrounding meat eating. While Lomasky takes the fact that an animal would not have lived at all if it were not being raised for food to constitute a benefit for animals being so raised, this essay argues that it would be better for animals raised on factory farms to have never been born. It also …Read more
  •  109
    Moral phenomenology in Hutcheson and Hume
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 47 (4). 2009.
    Moral phenomenology, as i will use the term in this paper, is the study of our experience of morality. It is the study of morality “as experienced from the first-person point of view,” 1 the study of the “what-it-is-like features of concrete moral experiences,” 2 the study of introspectively accessible features that can be discerned by “a direct examination of the data of men’s moral consciousness.” 3A crucial part of moral phenomenology is the study of what it is like to make a moral judgment. …Read more
  •  98
    Paying for kidneys: The case against prohibition
    with Robert M. Sade
    Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 12 (1): 17-45. 2002.
    : We argue that healthy people should be allowed to sell one of their kidneys while they are alive—that the current prohibition on payment for kidneys ought to be overturned. Our argument has three parts. First, we argue that the moral basis for the current policy on live kidney donations and on the sale of other kinds of tissue implies that we ought to legalize the sale of kidneys. Second, we address the objection that the sale of kidneys is intrinsically wrong because it violates the Kantian d…Read more
  •  98
    Rationalism, Sentimentalism, and Ralph Cudworth
    Hume Studies 30 (1): 149-181. 2004.
    Moral rationalism is the view that morality originates in reason alone. It is often contrasted with moral sentimentalism, which is the view that the origin of morality lies at least partly in sentiment. The eighteenth century saw pitched philosophical battles between rationalists and sentimentalists, and the issue continues to fuel disputes among moral philosophers today.
  •  83
    Humean Sentimentalism and Non-Consequentialist Moral Thinking
    Hume Studies 37 (2): 165-188. 2011.
    Of the many objections moral rationalists have raised against moral sentimentalism, none has been more long-lived and central than the claim that sentimentalism cannot accommodate the non-consequentialist aspects of our moral thinking. John Balguy raised an early version of the non-consequentialist objection just two years after Francis Hutcheson published the first systematic development of moral sentimentalism. As Balguy understood it, Hutcheson's sentimentalism implied that what makes an acti…Read more
  •  82
    Lord shaftesbury [anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of shaftesbury]
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.
    Shaftesbury's philosophy combined a powerfully teleological approach, according to which all things are part of a harmonious cosmic order, with sharp observations of human nature (see section 2 below). Shaftesbury is often credited with originating the moral sense theory, although his own views of virtue are a mixture of rationalism and sentimentalism (section 3). While he argued that virtue leads to happiness (section 4), Shaftesbury was a fierce opponent of psychological and ethical egoism (se…Read more
  •  68
    Shaftesbury's two accounts of the reason to be virtuous
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 38 (4): 529-548. 2000.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 38.4 (2000) 529-548 [Access article in PDF] Shaftesbury's Two Accounts of the Reason to be Virtuous Michael B. Gill College of Charleston 1. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), was the founder of the moral sense school, or the first British philosopher to develop the position that moral distinctions originate in sentiment and not in reason alone. Shaftesbury thus stru…Read more
  •  68
    The religious rationalism of Benjamin whichcote
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 37 (2): 271-300. 1999.
    I. Introduction Most philosophers today have never heard of Benjamin Whichcote (1609-83), and most of the few who have heard of him know only that he was the founder of Cambridge Platonism.1 He is well worth learning more about, however. For Whichcote was a vital influence on both Ralph Cudworth and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, through whom he helped shape the views of Clarke and Price, on the one hand, and Hutcheson and Hume, on the other. Whichcote should thus be seen as a grandparent of bot…Read more
  •  67
    Hume’s Progressive View of Human Nature
    Hume Studies 26 (1): 87-108. 2000.
    How much of the “science of man” that Hume goes on to develop is a recapitulation of the work of the other British philosophers and how much is new? When is Hume borrowing the insights of those who came before and when is he innovating? It is difficult to answer these questions, and not just because the rules of attribution in the eighteenth century were looser than in ours. For at times the verve with which Hume writes can lead one to think that he is in the grip of a new discovery when he is i…Read more
  •  66
    Morality is Not Like Mathematics: The Weakness of the Math‐Moral Analogy
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 57 (2): 194-216. 2019.
    In both the early modern period and in contemporary debates, philosophers have argued that there are analogies between mathematics and morality that imply that the ontology and epistemology of morality are crucially similar to the ontology and epistemology of mathematics. I describe arguments for the math‐moral analogy in four early modern philosophers (Locke, Cudworth, Clarke, and Balguy) and in three contemporary philosophers (Clarke‐Doane, Peacocke, and Roberts). I argue that these arguments …Read more
  •  62
    Uncovering the historical roots of naturalistic, secular contemporary ethics, in this volume Michael Gill shows how the British moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries completed a Copernican revolution in moral philosophy. They effected a shift from thinking of morality as independent of human nature to thinking of it as part of human nature itself. He also shows how the British Moralists - sometimes inadvertently, sometimes by design - disengaged ethical thinking, first from disti…Read more
  •  55
    A Philosopher in his Closet
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 26 (2): 231-255. 1996.
    When a man of business enters into life and action, he is more apt to consider the characters of men, as they have relation to his interest, than as they stand in themselves; and has his judgement warped on every occasion by the violence of his passion. When a philosopher contemplates characters and manners in his closet, the general abstract view of the objects leaves the mind so cold and unmoved, that the sentiments of nature have no room to play, and he scarce feels the difference between vic…Read more
  •  51
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XXII, Number 1, April 1996, pp. 23-48 Fantastick Associations and Addictive General Rules: A Fundamental Difference between Hutcheson and Hume MICHAEL B. GILL The belief that God created human beings for some moral purpose underlies nearly all the moral philosophy written in Great Britain in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. David Hume attacks this theological conception of human nature on all fronts…Read more
  •  45
    Humean Moral Pluralism
    History of Philosophy Quarterly 28 (1): 45. 2011.
    Michael B. Gill offers a new account of Humean moral pluralism: the view that there are different moral reasons for action, which are based on human sentiments. He explores its historical origins, and argues that it offers the most compelling view of our moral experience. Together, pluralism and Humeanism make a philosophically powerful couple
  •  41
    Shaftesbury on life as a work of art
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26 (6): 1110-1131. 2018.
    ABSTRACTThis paper explicates Shaftesbury’s idea that we ought to live our lives as though they are works of art. I show that this idea is central to many of Shaftesbury’s most important claims, and that an understanding of this idea enables us to answer some of the most contested questions in the scholarship on Characteristics.
  •  39
    Moral rationalism is the view that morality originates in reason alone. It is often contrasted with moral sentimentalism, which is the view that the origin of morality lies at least partly in (non-rational) sentiment. The eighteenth century saw pitched philosophical battles between rationalists and sentimentalists, and the issue continues to fuel disputes among moral philosophers today.
  •  34
    Since 1998, physician-assisted suicide has been legal in the American state of Oregon. In this paper, I defend Oregon’s physician-assisted suicide (PAS) law against two of the most common objections raised against it. First, I try to show that it is not intrinsically wrong for someone with a terminal disease to kill herself. Second, I try to show that it is not intrinsically wrong for physicians to assist someone with a terminal disease who has reasonable grounds for wanting to kill herself.
  •  30
    Shaftesbury’s Claim That Beauty and Good Are One and the Same
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 59 (1): 69-92. 2021.
    ARRAY
  •  29
    A Humean Account of Moral Pluralism
    Iride: Filosofia e Discussione Pubblica 25 (3): 571-588. 2012.