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Summary
Catharine Macaulay's discussion of freedom of the will in her Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth has received little attention, and what discussion there is attributes a number of different, incompatible views to her. In this paper the account of the nature of freedom of the will that she develops is related to her political aspirations, and the metaphysical position that she adopts is compared to those of John Locke, Samuel Clarke, Joseph Priestley, William Godwin, and others. It is argued that although Macaulay's position is ultimately ambiguous, she is most plausibly interpreted as following Locke's discussion of free will in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding and of inheriting, from him, the ambiguity that we find in her account.
Notes
1See for instance, Kate Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren (Oxford, 2005); Catherine Gardner, ‘Catharine Macaulay's Letters on Education: Odd but Equal’, Hypatia, 13 (1998), 118–37; Catherine Villanueva Gardner, ‘Catharine Macaulay's Letters on Education: What Constitutes a Philosophical System?’, in Rediscovering Women Philosophers: Philosophical Genre and the Boundaries of Philosophy (Boulder, CO, 2000), 17–46; Wendy Gunther-Canada, ‘The Politics of Sense and Sensibility: Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay Graham on Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France’, in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, edited by Hilda Smith (Cambridge, 1998), 126–47; Wendy Gunther-Canada, ‘Cultivating Virtue: Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft on Civic Education’, Women and Politics, 25 (2003), 47–70; Wendy Gunther-Canada, ‘Catharine Macaulay on the Paradox of Paternal Authority in Hobbesian Politics’, Hypatia, 21 (2006), 150–73; Philip Hicks, ‘Catharine Macaulay's Civil War: Gender, History, and Republicanism in Georgian Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 41 (2002), 170–99; Sarah Hutton, ‘Liberty, Equality and God: The Religious Roots of Catharine Macaulay's Feminism’, in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, edited by Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (Basingstoke, 2005), 538–50; Sarah Hutton, ‘Virtue, God and Stoicism in the Thought of Elizabeth Carter and Catharine Macaulay’, in Virtue, Liberty and Toleration: Political Ideas of European Women 1400–1800, edited by Jacqueline Broad and Karen Green (Dordrecht, 2007), 137–48; Sarah Hutton, ‘The Persona of the Woman Philosopher in Eighteenth-Century England: Catharine Macaulay, Mary Hays, and Elizabeth Hamilton’, Intellectual History Review, 18 (2009), 403–12; Connie Titone, Gender Equality in the Philosophy of Education: Catharine Macaulay's Forgotten Contribution (New York, 2004); Connie Titone, ‘Virtue, Reason, and the False Public Voice: Catharine Macaulay's Philosophy of Moral Education’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 41 (2009), 91–108; Susan Wiseman, ‘Catharine Macaulay: History, Republicanism and the Public Sphere’, in Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830, edited by Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Clíona Ó Gallchoir and Penny Warburton (Cambridge, 2001), 181–99.
2Most discussions completely ignore the contributions of women such as Macaulay and Catharine Trotter to eighteenth-century moral philosophy, conveying the false impression that eighteenth-century philosophy was an entirely masculine affair. See, for instance, James A. Harris, Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy (Oxford, 2005); Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’: 1640–1740 (Cambridge, 1995). For Trotter, see Patricia Sheridan, ‘Locke's Ethics and the British Moralists: The Lockean Legacy in Eighteenth Century Moral Philosophy’, (The University of Western Ontario, Ph.D. dissertation, 2002); Patricia Sheridan, ‘Reflection, Nature, and Moral Law: The Extent of Catharine Cockburn's Lockeanism in her Defence of Mr. Locke's Essay’, Hypatia, 22 (2007), 133–51.
3‘A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth by Catharine Macaulay Graham’, British Magazine and Review, August 1783, 127–29.
4Mary Wollstonecraft, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols (London, 1989), VII, 309–22; Bridget Hill, ‘The Links between Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay: New Evidence’, Women's History Review, 4 (1995), 177–92.
5Catharine Macaulay, A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (London, 1783), 236–38.
6William Godwin, Enquiry concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness, 3 vols (Toronto, ON, 1946), I, 306–12; Macaulay, Treatise, 98–101.
7Mary Hilton, Women and the Shaping of the Nation's Young: Education and Public Doctrine in Britain 1750–1850 (Aldershot, 2007), 67.
8Hilton, Women and the Shaping of the Nation's Young, 67, note 14.
9Basil Willey, The Eighteenth-Century Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period (London, 1962), 196–228.
10Godwin, Enquiry concerning Political Justice, I, 363; Macaulay, Treatise, 171–74.
11Godwin, Enquiry concerning Political Justice, I, 361–97.
12Martina Reuter, ‘Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft on the Will’, in Virtue, Liberty and Toleration, edited by Broad and Green, 149–70 (154). Reuter relies for her characterisation of rationalist compatibilism on Thomas Pink, Free Will: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2004).
13Harris, Of Liberty and Necessity.
14Samuel Clarke, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God: More Particularly in Answer to Mr. Hobbs, Spinoza, And their Followers. Wherein the Notion of Liberty is Stated, and the Possibility and Certainty of it Proved, in Opposition to Necessity and Fate, in The Works of Samuel Clarke D. D., edited by John Clarke, 4 vols (London, 1738), II, 565. Quoted by Harris, Of Liberty and Necessity, 50.
15Joseph Priestley, The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated; Being an Appendix to the Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit. To Which is Added an Answer to the Letters on Materialism, and on Hartley's Theory of the Mind (London, 1777), xxviii–xxix, 158.
16Karen O'Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2009), 166.
17O'Brien, Women and Enlightenment, 168.
18Hilton, Women and the Shaping of the Nation's Young, 72.
19Macaulay, Treatise, 169.
20John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford, 1975), book II, chapter 21, 263; Darwall, British Moralists, 156–72.
21For Macaulay as ‘patriot’ historian see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Catharine Macaulay: Patriot Historian’, in Women Writers, edited by Smith, 243–58.
22Catharine Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James I. to That of the Brunswick Line, 8 vols (London, 1763–1783), I, vii.
23Macaulay, History of England from the Accession of James I, II, 7–8.
24Macaulay, History of England from the Accession of James I, I, 274–75.
25Macaulay, History of England from the Accession of James I, III, 42.
26Macaulay, History of England from the Accession of James I, IV, 403–04.
27Catharine Macaulay, The History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time in a Series of Letters to a Friend (Bath, 1778), 4–5.
28Catharine Macaulay, An Address to the People of England, Scotland, and Ireland on the Present Important Crisis of Affairs (London, 1775).
29Catharine Macaulay, Loose Remarks on Certain Positions to be Found in Mr. Hobbes’ Philosophical Rudiments of Government and Society with a Short Sketch of a Democratical Form of Government in a Letter to Signor Paoli by Catharine Macaulay. The Second Edition with Two Letters One from an American Gentleman to the Author which Contains Some Comments on Her Sketch of the Demoncratical Form of Government and the Author's Answer (London, 1769), 35; Monica Letzring, ‘Sarah Prince Gill and the John-Adams-Catharine Macaulay Correspondence’, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 88 (1976), 107–11; Carla H Hay, ‘Catharine Macaulay and the American Revolution’, The Historian, 56 (1994), 301–16. Some of this correspondence is available at <http://www.gilderlehrman.org/>.
30Hay, ‘Catharine Macaulay and the American Revolution’, 313–14.
31Macaulay, History of England from the Revolution to the Present, 369.
32Macaulay, Treatise, 11–12.
33Macaulay, Loose Remarks, 22.
34Macaulay, Treatise, 128.
35Macaulay, Treatise, 252–56.
36For a detailed account of Hobbes's changing views see, Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge, 2008).
37John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, second edition (Cambridge, 1967), II.4.22, 301–02, II.6.54-59., 322–25.
38Philip Pettit, ‘Negative Liberty, Liberal and Republican’, European Journal of Philosophy, 1 (1993), 15–38 (32). Halldenius has claimed to place Locke in the tradition of republican thought ‘brought to our attention by Pettit, Skinner and others’; see Lena Halldenius, ‘Locke and the Non-Arbitrary’, European Journal of Political Theory, 2 (2003), 261–79. But what she says implies that the antonym of liberty, for Locke, is not domination, but arbitrary domination. Since arbitrary domination is that which is not in accord with the law of nature, he potentially allows any interference that can be justified on the basis of the moral law.
39Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.21.47., 263.
40Macaulay, Treatise, 17.
41For King's early objections to Locke's Essay, see Harris, Of Liberty and Necessity, 42–43.
42William King and Edmund Law, An Essay on the Origin of Evil by Dr. William King, Late Lord Archbishop of Dublin, translated by Edmund Law (Cambridge, 1731). King refutes determinism and agent causation libertarianism in chapter five, and presents his own position in chapter six. See also Harris, Of Liberty and Necessity, 42–46.
43Macaulay, Treatise, ix.
44Macaulay, Treatise, ix–x.
45Harris, Of Liberty and Necessity, 46–53.
46Macaulay, Treatise, xiii–xiv.
47Priestley, Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated, 6–7.
48For accounts of the views of these writers, see Harris, Of Liberty and Necessity, 55–63, 67–78, 108–27. See also Priestley, Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated, 149–65.
49Macaulay, Treatise, 194.
50Macaulay, Treatise, 189.
51Macaulay, Treatise, 171; Catharine Macaulay, Letters on Education: With Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects (London, 1790), 456.
52Macaulay, Treatise, 171–72.
53Macaulay, Treatise, xii. For the similarity to Edwards see Harris, Of Liberty and Necessity, 121–22.
54Macaulay, Treatise, 237–38. Repeated in Macaulay, Letters on Education, 482–83.
55See for instance Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford, 1994), 60–61 and the extensive literature referred to there.
56Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.21.47, 263; Darwall, British Moralists, 156–72.
57In a number of places Macaulay aligns Plato's doctrines with those of contemporary Christians, following the trajectory of André Dacier's Life of Plato, to which she refers. See Macaulay, Treatise, 31, 292–93, 313–16; André Dacier, The Works of Plato Abridged: With an Account of His Life, Philosophy, Morals and Politics, 2 vols, fourth edition (London, 1749).
58Price, quoted in Priestley, Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated, 61. Priestley is quoting from Richard Price, A Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals (London, 1758), 367.
59Priestley, Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated, 62–63.
60Macaulay, Letters on Education, 472.
61This follows Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.21.5, 236.
62Macaulay, Treatise, 150.
63Macaulay, Treatise, 470, 492.
64Priestley, Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated, 74–82.