menu

Thinkers

Earl of Shaftesbury

British Empiricism · Europe · 1671 to 1713

English writer who held that people have a natural sense of the good and the beautiful, which can be refined by culture.

What it is

Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671 to 1713), was an English philosopher and Whig politician. He was born in London, and his grandfather, the first Earl, had the philosopher John Locke put in charge of his education. He sat in Parliament and later in the House of Lords, and spent his last years in the Netherlands and in Italy, dying near Naples.

He was one of the most influential philosophers of his time. His ideas about human nature, virtue and beauty were widely read across Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and shaped later moral sense thinkers such as Francis Hutcheson.

The main ideas

  • Philosophy as the art of living. The point of philosophy is to make us better people, by helping us order our passions and humours. He called it a mastership in life and manners.
  • Made for harmony. Humans, he held, are designed to appreciate order and harmony, in nature and in character.
  • Virtue as love of the whole. Virtue means promoting the good of all humankind, and the virtuous person aims at a just and universal friendship with humanity.
  • A moral sense. We can feel approval and disapproval about our own and other people's feelings and actions. He called this the Sense of Right and Wrong, without making it a separate faculty.
  • Against Hobbes. He rejected the picture of people as moved only by self-interest, and the idea that morality is made by will alone.
  • Persuasion as method. His writing is more persuasive than argumentative, and he writes through different voices, so readers must decide how far each speaks for him.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine seeing someone treat a stranger with unexpected kindness and feeling at once that it is good, and then noticing that you feel admiration for the admiration itself. Shaftesbury would say that this feeling about our feelings is what gives us a sense of right and wrong. This is an illustration of his line of questioning, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711) is his main work, written in several literary voices.

Questions and criticism

  • A Stoic or not? Stoicism clearly influenced him, but commentators disagree on how far he is a Stoic through and through.
  • Not always an argument. His works rely on persuasion more than on premises and conclusions, which makes it hard to reconstruct his position.
  • Non-egoist or hidden egoist? Some read his view of motivation as clearly non-egoistic, while others argue that he still leaves a role for self-interest.

Close neighbours

John Locke was his tutor and friend, and Francis Hutcheson, who defended his ideas, took them further. The page on Thomas Hobbes shows the view of human motivation that he attacked, and the page on Epictetus shows a Stoic thinker of the kind who influenced him.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced

  • Francis Hutcheson · Hutcheson took up his idea of a moral sense and gave it a full account.

Influenced by

  • John Locke · Locke tutored him as a boy, though he later reacted against Locke's account of the mind.

Other British Empiricism thinkers

Sources we used

See where you stand Find them on the map

Something wrong or missing on this page? Tell us.