Mandeville and the Construction of Morality

Once considered primarily as a satirist, recent scholarship has drawn attention to the importance and originality of Bernard Mandeville’s moral philosophy and theory of sociability—and its influence on later philosophers including Rousseau, Hume, and Adam Smith. Mandeville’s close engagement with Epicurean writings, ancient and modern, is clear; less recognized is the extent to which he drew upon them to develop a naturalistic moral theory which could respond directly to Shaftesbury’s Stoic moral philosophy (and, less directly, to Locke’s Christian moral theology). In such a theory, God’s design, will, and sanctions played no meaningful role; but this did not preclude Mandeville from offering his own, strikingly original narrative of the intertwined histories of moral philosophy and moral theology. As had Locke, Mandeville drew particular attention to the individual’s craving for esteem and its importance in their habituation, in society, into norms of moral conduct to which they subsequently feel beholden.