Wollaston, William (1659–1724)

views updated

WOLLASTON, WILLIAM
(16591724)

Born in 1660 at Coton-Clanford in Staffordshire, England, William Wollaston entered Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1674 as a pensioner. After receiving his MA in 1681, he took up the post of assistant master of Birmingham Grammar School. In his late twenties he unexpectedly came into a large inheritance and subsequently married a wealthy heiress with whom he had eleven children. Retiring to a life devoted to domestic matters, he began writing treatises on philosophical and ecclesiastical questions. In 1691 his The Design of Part of the Book of Ecclesiastes was published. His one important philosophical work, The Religion of Nature Delineated, was first published in 1724, with eight more editions following by 1759. Although he wrote many other treatises, he burned most of them toward the end of his life. He died in 1724, wealthy and esteemed. Queen Caroline had a bust of him placed along with those of Isaac Newton, John Locke, and Samuel Clarke in the royal garden at Richmond, England.

Wollaston is often grouped with Clarke as an unflinching defender of the kind of moral rationalism that David Hume, among others, opposed. Clarke, along with many other philosophers of the period, was motivated to write on moral philosophy in reaction to Thomas Hobbes's work, which he regarded as both wrong and dangerous. Wollaston was one of the few who did not join the debate with Hobbes; as a result, his work is, for the period, unusually free of polemics.

Wollaston's Criterion of Immorality

Clarke argued that wrong actions are unfit or inappropriate to the real nature and relations of things. At one point he characterizes evildoers as attempting "to make things be what they are not, and cannot be," which he thought was as absurd as trying to change a mathematical truth. Wollaston constructs his entire moral theory around this idea. But unlike Clarke, for whom the basic moral notions are fitness and unfitness, Wollaston argues that moral goodness and evil can be reduced to truth and falsehood.

His argument has two stages. In the first, he argues that we are able to say things not only with words but also with actions. Beginning by defining true propositions as those that "express things as they are," he argues that actions may express, declare, or assert propositions, by which he means something more than that we understand gestures such as laughing, weeping, or shrugging. To use his example, if one group of soldiers fires on another, the first group's actions declare that the second is its enemy. If it turns out that the second group is not the first group's enemy, its declaration is false. Since we can understand actions, theylike sentenceshave meaning, and whatever has a meaning is capable of truth and falsity.

Wollaston acknowledges that some actions have only conventional meaningtaking one's hat off when praying is a sign of reverence for Christian men but not for Jewish men. According to him, words always have a conventional meaning. He thinks, however, that many actions have a natural meaning that cannot be changed by agreement or force. For example, by using and disposing of something, I signify that it is mine. If it is not mine, my actions declare something false. When actions have natural meaning, Wollaston maintains that they express propositions more strongly than do mere words.

In the second stage of his argument, Wollaston proposes what he thinks is the basic criterion of immoral actions, "No act of any being, to whom moral good and evil are imputable, that interferes with any true proposition, or denies anything to be as it is, can be right" (1724, p. 13). Since immoral actions deny things to be what they are, they express false propositions. If I break a promise, I falsely declare that I never made one. If I am ungrateful, I falsely assert that I never received favors. To treat things as being what they are not is, for Wollaston, irrational in the sense that it is one of the greatest absurdities, "It is to put bitter for sweet, darkness for light, crooked for straight, etc." (p. 15).

Truth, Happiness and Reason

Wollaston goes on to try to show that "the way to happiness and the practice of reason" come to the same thing: they are both acting in conformity to truth (1724, p. 52). He thinks the nature of human beings is such that aim at their own happiness. Not only is happiness our natural good but we also have a duty to strive for our own happiness as well as the happiness of others. Anticipating Jeremy Bentham, Wollaston defines happiness as the "true quantity of pleasure": pleasures and pains may be measured in terms of their intensity and duration. We are happy when the sum total of pleasures exceeds the sum total of pains. Just as happiness cannot be achieved by anything that interferes with morality (truth), so the practice of truth (acting morally), Wollaston argues, cannot make a person unhappy. Morality and happiness are congruent, if not in this world, then in the afterlife.

Wollaston thinks that we are first and foremost rational creature. On his view, reasonor, more precisely, right reasonenables us to discover truth. When our actions are in accord with right reason, they express truths. To act according to right reason is thus the same as acting according to truth. It is reason's nature to command, he maintains, and as rational creatures, reason ought to govern us. Not only does reason enable us to discover which actions are morally good, but Wollaston also assumes that our motivation to act morally comes from reason. He argues that true happiness can be achieved only by pursuing means that are consistent with our rational nature, concluding that the "truest" definition of morality is "the pursuit of happiness by the practice of truth and reason" (1724, p. 52).

Belief in God underpins Wollaston's moral theory. God is the author of nature, including our nature as rational beings. The truths we should aim to mirror in our actions are God's truths. They are natural, however, because we are able to grasp them by reason unaided by divine revelation. Thus, there is, he claims, such a thing as natural religion.

Criticisms of Wollaston

Wollaston is perhaps best known today not because of what he wrote, but because of the criticisms Hume and others brought against his theory. While his theory was popular during his lifetime, it was, and continues to be, subject to misinterpretations and parodies. Some of this was fostered by Wollaston's tendency to state his views in rhetorical or even paradoxical terms, for example, saying that an evildoer "lives a lie" or that "the true quantity of pleasure differs not from that quantity of true pleasure " (1724, pp. 11, 36). To the annoyance of some commentators, he included many footnotes in which he quotes in the original from Greek, Roman, Hebrew, and Arabic sources.

While many objections to Wollaston are based on misinterpretations of his view, some are so hilarious that they should be taken as parodies rather than as serious criticism. John Clarke (1725), offers the following quip. If expressing truth is our aim, a person should "spend his time in thrumming over such worthy and weighty propositions as these, 'a man's no horse, a horse, no cow, a cow no bull, nor a bull an ass" (p. 19). Hume (1978), following the eighteenth-century sentimentalist Francis Hutcheson (2002), often takes Wollaston's criterion of wrong actions to be the intention to cause false beliefs in others. He illustrates this reading with the absurd example of someone walking by an open window and seeing Hume cavorting with his neighbor's wife and being caused to falsely believe she is his wife. Hume responds that if that is the case, then the wrongdoing is unintentional since the adulterer's intention is to satisfy his lust and passion, not to cause false beliefs in others. Furthermore, if he had taken the precaution of shutting the window, his actions would not have been immoral, since they would not have caused false beliefs in others.

Some criticisms of Wollaston are directed to his view that wrong actions express falsehoods. The most telling is that his criterion is circular. It is wrong for me to take off with your property, Wollaston says, because I falsely declare it to be mine, not yours. But if we ask why this is what my action means, the answer is that the fact that it is yours means that I should not steal it. In every case the truth that is supposedly denied by a wrong action already has moral content. Clarke (1725) was the first to raise the problem of circularity, but the best-known formulation is Hume's (1978). Richard Price, the eighteenth-century rationalist, and J. L. Mackie (1980), the late twentieth-century sentimentalist, offer similar versions.

Both Hume (1978) and Mackie (1980) object to Wollaston's theory on motivational grounds, arguing that reason alone cannot move us. Both also argue that while people often refrain from performing an action because they see that it is unjust or immoral, no one refrains because he or she thinks it expresses a falsehood. Hutcheson (2002) and the twentieth-century philosopher Joel Feinberg (1977) worry that the fact that truth and falsehood do not come in degrees implies that on Wollaston's view "all crimes must be equal." Wollaston foresaw this criticism and argued that an offense increases with the importance of the truth denied. By introducing the idea of the importance of truth, however, Wollaston abandons his claim that conformity to truth is the only criterion of wrongness. Despite these criticisms, however, philosophers such as Feinberg (1977) and Mackie (1980) find Wollaston's idea that actions have meaning to be philosophically interesting.

See also Action; Bentham, Jeremy; Clarke, Samuel; Ethics, History of; Evil; Feinberg, Joel; Hobbes, Thomas; Hume, David; Hutcheson, Francis; Locke, John; Mackie, John Leslie; Newton, Isaac; Price, Richard; Rationalism.

Bibliography

works by wollaston

The Design of Part of the Book of Ecclesiastes: Or, The Unreasonableness of Men's Restless Contention for the Present Enjoyments, Represented in an English Poem. London: James Knapton, 1691.

The Religion of Nature Delineated. London: n.p., 1724.

works about wollaston

Clarke, John. Examination of the Notion of Moral Good and Evil Advanced in the Religion of Nature Delineated. London: A. Bettesworth, 1725.

Feinberg, Joel. "Wollaston and His Critics." Journal of the History of Ideas 38 (1977): 345352.

Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. 2nd ed., edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1978.

Hutcheson, Francis. An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections: With Illustrations on the Moral Sense, edited by Aaron Garrett. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2002.

Joynton, Olin. "The Problem of Circularity in Wollaston's Moral Philosophy." Journal of the History of Philosophy 22 (1984): 435443.

Mackie, J. L. Hume's Moral Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980.

Tweyman, Stanley. "Truth, Happiness and Obligation: The Moral Philosophy of William Wollaston." Philosophy 51 (1976): 3546.

Charlotte R. Brown (2005)

About this article

Wollaston, William (1659–1724)

Updated About encyclopedia.com content Print Article