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ABSTRACT
Richard Price’s moral epistemology provides a distinctive account, not only of the sources of our moral knowledge, but also of its limits – that is, of the moral truths that we do not and even cannot know. According to this moral epistemology, the fundamental moral truths are necessary rather than contingent; if they are knowable at all, they are knowable a priori. In general, fundamental moral truths are akin to mathematical truths. Specifically, these necessary moral truths are grounded in the essences of act-types, which are knowable through ‘intuition’ if knowable at all. However, Price firmly rejects utilitarianism, recognizing several different ‘branches of virtue’, which can conflict with each other. As he argues, we cannot know the truth about act-types that exemplify such conflicting branches of virtue if the competing considerations are too finely balanced. This view of moral epistemology is compared with those of several other philosophers, including W. D. Ross. It is argued that Price has a more unified view than Ross: for Price, all moral knowledge flows from a priori intuition, but this is compatible with our being ignorant of many of the fine details of the fundamental truths of morality.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Russ Shafer-Landau, David McNaughton, Roger Crisp, members of the Southern California Epistemology Network, an anonymous referee, and one of this journal's co-editors, Alix Cohen, for helpful comments.
Notes
1 Citations of the Review will be from the third (1787) edition of this work; the first edition was published in 1758. Unattributed page citations are to the edition of D. D. Raphael (1974).
2 In the Review, Price cites Cudworth seven times (20n., 30n., 54n., 55, 88n., 90, 91n.) and Clarke ten times (90, 118, 286, 288n., 290, 290n., 291, 291n., 292, 292n.). In the second Appendix to the third edition of the Review, Price groups Clarke together with Isaac Newton and Joseph Butler as “three of the greatest [names] this world has ever known” (291n.). Strikingly, Price does not reveal first-hand knowledge of any modern Continental thinkers.
3 In addition to Plato (1, 31n., 33n., 52n., 54n., 55, 55n., 86n., 90n., 112, 165n., 217n., 230n.) and the pseudo-Platonic work Minos (109n.), which was then generally viewed as part of the Platonic corpus, he also cites the Middle Platonist Alcinous (217n.) and the Neoplatonist Hierocles (89n.); in all but four of these cases, he cites the original Greek text. The other ancient texts cited (all in the original Greek or Latin) are Aristotle’s Ethics (189n.) and Politics (61n.), Epictetus’ Discourses and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (145n.), Seneca’s On Benefits (62n.), and several works of Cicero (62n., 89n., 160n., 182n., 186n., 208n.). But these other ancient texts relate to other aspects of Price’s moral philosophy, and not to his moral epistemology. The ancient inspirations for his moral epistemology are distinctively Platonist.
4 These three tenets are evident in Cudworth (Eternal and Immutable Morality, Book IV, Chapter vi, §§1–4), and in Clarke (Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion, §§226–7).
5 This thesis, that fundamental moral principles that are knowable at all are knowable a priori, plays a crucial role in the work of many other philosophers – including most notably Kant (Grundlegung, 389).
6 This feature of Price’s metaethics is correctly analysed and emphasized by Schroeder (“The Price of Supervenience”).
7 As we shall see in Section 5 below, this is particularly clear in the case of Samuel Clarke, whose moral epistemology is otherwise quite similar to that of Price.
8 The translation cited is that of T. H. Irwin.
9 For an argument for this interpretation, see again Schroeder, “The Price of Supervenience”.
10 For an illuminating discussion of chaos theory and the butterfly effect, see Bishop, “Chaos”.
11 For an epistemology that makes creative use of the idea of such a spectrum of cases, see Williamson (Knowledge and its Limits, Chapter 4).
12 For example, one scholar who emphasizes this comparison is McNaughton (“Richard Price”).
13 For a contemporary moral philosopher who follows Ross in giving radically different accounts of the epistemology of these different kinds of moral beliefs, see Shafer-Landau (Moral Realism, Chapters 11 and 12), who labels these two kinds of beliefs “moral principles” and “verdictive beliefs”.
14 Most of Ross’s scholarly energies in the decades preceding 1930 were devoted to studying the works of Aristotle: he produced a translation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (1908), Aristotle, a full-length study of Aristotle’s philosophy (1923), a translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1924), and was editor-in-chief of Oxford University Press’ multi-volume translation of Aristotle’s complete works.
15 For this objection to Peacocke’s account of moral concepts, see Wedgwood, “Christopher Peacocke's The Realm of Reason”.