This book is a major work in the history of ethics, and provides the first study of early modern British philosophy in several decades. Professor Darwall discerns two distinct traditions feeding into the moral philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, there is the empirical, naturalist tradition, comprising Hobbes, Locke, Cumberland, Hutcheson, and Hume, which argues that obligation is the practical force that empirical discoveries acquire in the process of deliberation. On the other hand, there is a group including Cudworth, Shaftesbury, Butler, and in some moments Locke, which views obligation as inconceivable without autonomy and which seeks to develop a theory of the will as self-determining.

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 distinctly Christian ideas and then from theistic commitments altogether. Examining in detail the arguments of Whichcote, Cudworth, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson against Calvinist conceptions of original sin and egoistic conceptions of human motivation, Gill also demonstrates how Hume combined the ideas of earlier British moralists with his own insights to produce an account of morality and human nature that undermined some of his predecessors' most deeply held philosophical goals.

"These two attractive volumes replace Selby-Bigge's well-known collection. . . . The present selection is superior in several respects. It is more inclusive, now that Hume, Hartley, Reid, and Cumberland are put in. . . . It is better arranged, the writers now appearing in chronological order. And besides reediting of the texts, the analytical index has been enormously enlarged and improved. . . . The book will be much more useful to students than its predecessor." -- British Book News

"These two attractive volumes replace Selby-Bigge's well-known collection. . . . The present selection is superior in several respects. It is more inclusive, now that Hume, Hartley, Reid, and Cumberland are put in. . . . It is better arranged, the writers now appearing in chronological order. And besides reediting of the texts, the analytical index has been enormously enlarged and improved. . . . The book will be much more useful to students than its predecessor." -- British Book News