Mandeville on self-liking, morality, and hypocrisy

ABSTRACT

I explore Mandeville’s account of moral judgement and its implications for the understanding of hypocrisy. According to Mandeville, we have a psychological need to like ourselves sufficiently, so as to carry on with our lives. Because our self-liking necessarily depends on the opinions others form of us, we are extraordinarily sensitive to praise and condemnation. The practice of moral judgement exploits this sensitivity. Hypocrisy is an intrinsic element of this practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Mandeville
• self-love
• self-liking
• sociability
• morality
• hypocrisy

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to three anonymous referees for useful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I also wish to thank Andreas Blank for his generous help and encouragement.

Notes

1 See Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature, 170.

2 See Monro, The Ambivalence of Bernard Mandeville, 149, 157, 25, 46, 47.

3 La Rochefoucauld, Collected Maxims, I.151.

4 FB I.42ff. FB I = Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, Vol. 1. FB II = Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, Vol. 2.

5 See Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature, 176 and references therein.

6 FB II.133. This idea of self-love, expressed in pretty much the same terms, is already in the Stoics: Cicero, De Officiis I.11. See Cicero, On Duties, 6. It should be contrasted with Mandeville’s earlier version in FB I.41, in which it stands for the satisfaction of desires and obtaining pleasure. Terminologically, “self-esteem” is best thought as a product of the passion of self-liking. An alternative terminology is rooted in a wider historical usage: Maurer, Self-love, Egoism and the Selfish Hypothesis, 8–12. However, as explained below, I disagree with Maurer (ibid., 61) that self-liking in FB II and Mandeville’s An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour is best interpreted as “excessive pride.” I also believe that self-love in FB II is the passion of self-preservation that may, under favourable circumstances, be accompanied by pleasure. Maurer has it in reverse: his view corresponds to the ideas in FB I. In FB II, there is, I think, a distinct change in Mandeville’s thinking about self-love.

7 FB II, 133.

8 See Hobbes, Leviathan, X.16.

9 FB II, 136.

10 Here I agree with Kapust, Flattery and the History of Political Thought, 141.

11 FB I, 42, 261; EOH 40. EOH = Mandeville, An Enquiry Into the Origin of Honour.

12 For Mandeville as a rigorist, see Maurer, Self-love, Egoism and the Selfish Hypothesis, 74–5; Kapust, Flattery and the History of Political Thought, 140; Scott-Taggart, “Mandeville: Cynic or Fool?” 227; Maxwell, “Ethics and Politics in Mandeville”; 244, Kaye, “Introduction” in Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, I, liii. For Mandeville as an utilitarian see Monro, The Ambivalence of Bernard Mandeville, 224; Heath, “Mandeville’s Bewitching Engine of Praise,” 226.

13 Quotations from the Fable follow Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, Vol. 1; Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, Vol. 2.

14 FB I, 42–3 (emphasis added; modified for readability).

15 Furthermore, in Mandeville’s view, language itself was created for rhetorical purposes, to persuade others of the speaker’s high worth, also to threaten them if they refuse to be so persuaded (FB II, 289). See Kapust, Flattery and the History of Political Thought, 146ff, for an extended discussion. Of course, as a theoretical claim, this is dubious even by Mandeville’s own rights. Sensitivity to praise and criticism, the very conceptions of praise and self-esteem, are possible only in a very advanced condition of sociability. Language should have enabled that condition in the first place, with praise, for example, being mediated by linguistic means.

16 See Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature, 173ff.

17 FB I, 47.

18 Cf. FB I, 43.

19 There is also the notion of “refined virtue,” similarly outside the scope of the Lawgivers’ intervention. I return to it below.

20 FB I, 48–9 (emphasis added).

21 An anonymous referee raised this question.

22 See e.g. Runciman, Political Hypocrisy, 49; Heath, “Mandeville’s Bewitching Engine of Praise,” 210; Douglass, “Mandeville on the Origins of Virtue,” 281.

23 See Maurer, Self-love, Egoism and the Selfish Hypothesis, 70–6.

24 See Douglass, “Mandeville on the Origins of Virtue,” 285; Douglass, “Bernard Mandeville on the Use and Abuse of Hypocrisy,” 5–6.

25 Douglass “Bernard Mandeville on the Use and Abuse of Hypocrisy,” 5–6.

26 See Monro, The Ambivalence of Bernard Mandeville, 189–90. See also Lovejoy’s comment on “racial superiority” above.

27 As observed already by the Stoics: Cicero, De officiis I.11.

28 FB I, 57.

29 See Mandeville, An Enquiry Into the Origin of Honour, 201–2.

30 Not to be confused with the semantic reductionism of (Good) and (Bad) described in Section 2.

31 FB I, 173–81.

32 Ibid., 57.

33 FB II, 139.

34 The situation described here conforms to the extant interpretations of self-deception. See e.g. von Hippel and Trivers, “The Evolution and Psychology of Self-Deception,” 4; Trivers, The Folly of Fools, 9; Bach, “Self-Deception.” Again, as in other cases, we need not assume that the agents have a conscious, explicit belief that they try to suppress.

35 See Szabados, “Hypocrisy.” As Szabados also shows, Mandeville is in good company: a similar error was committed in Ryle, The Concept of Mind.

36 The same problem vitiates, e.g. the concept of hypocrisy offered in Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable, 178.

37 EOH, 34–5 (emphasis added).

38 See the quote from FB I, 48–9, above.

39 See also the remark on “good Hypocrites” in EOH, 208.

40 EOH, 200–1.

41 See Whyman, Stanislavski: The Basics.

42 See von Hippel and Trivers, “The Evolution and Psychology of Self-Deception,” 4–5. By the same token, influential modern accounts of hypocritical criticism that correspond to Mandeville’s “malicious hypocrisy” trace its moral violation to self-deception and to the failure to examine one’s own character and past actions. See Wallace, “Hypocrisy, Moral Address, and the Equal Standing of Persons”; Dover, “The Walk and the Talk.”

43 EOH, 230–1.

44 FB II, 80.

45 EOH, 231. One might complain that this is still an oversimplified picture of a hypocrite. At some stage, Mandeville concedes, Cromwell sincerely believed his own rhetoric, yet he still had immoral goals and “blackest designs” (ibid., 231). But has he not, at this later stage, morphed into a single-minded fanatic, though he may have started as a hypocrite? This issue also bears on the historical accuracy of Mandeville’s description of Cromwell, who, we are told, “never wavered or hesitated” throughout the king’s trial (Firth, Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England, 231). For changing perspectives on Cromwell, see Davis, Oliver Cromwell, 44–64.

46 EOH, 202.

47 The same distinction in the same terms is in Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 155; that is, oddly, not mentioned by Runciman.

48 See Runciman, Political Hypocrisy, 53–4, 70.

49 See Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 264.

50 Ibid., 51. In earlier times, religiosity could play the role of politeness, as Mandeville observes in EOH, 232.

51 See Runciman, Political Hypocrisy, 51.

52 See Runciman, Political Hypocrisy, 52.

53 See Runciman, Political Hypocrisy, 54.

54 See Erasmus, “On Good Manners for Boys.”

55 Runciman, Political Hypocrisy, 52.

56 Ibid., 57.

57 See the quote from EOH, 201–2 above and the discussion there.

58 Runciman, Political Hypocrisy, 58, 63.

59 Ibid., 65.

60 See Douglass, “Bernard Mandeville on the Use and Abuse of Hypocrisy,” 2.

 

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Sandy Berkovski

Y. Sandy Berkovski is Assistant Professor of Philosophy in Bilkent University. His research interests straddle the issues in philosophy of language, moral psychology, and philosophy of science.