Self-Love, Egoism and the Selfish Hypothesis: Key Debates from Eighteenth-Century British Moral Philosophy

Christian Maurer

Self-Love, Egoism and the Selfish Hypothesis: Key Debates from Eighteenth-Century British Moral Philosophy
Format
Hardback
Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Country
United Kingdom
Published
30 April 2019
Pages
256
ISBN
9781474413374

Self-Love, Egoism and the Selfish Hypothesis: Key Debates from Eighteenth-Century British Moral Philosophy

Christian Maurer

The dawn of the Enlightenment saw heated debates on self-love. Do people only act out of self-interest? Or is there a less pessimistic explanation for human behaviour? Maurer delves into the contributions to these debates from both famous and lesser known authors, including Lord Shaftesbury, Bernard Mandeville, Francis Hutcheson, Joseph Butler, Archibald Campbell, David Hume and Adam Smith, and puts them in their philosophical, theological and economic context. Maurer identifies five distinct conceptions of self-love and looks at their role within theories of human psychology and morality while drawing attention to the heuristic limits of our contemporary notion of egoism. He compares the central arguments and the different strategies intended to morally rehabilitate human nature and self-love before and during the Enlightenment.

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