Moral philosophy in the eighteenth century was principally concerned with three issues. First, was “the selfish hypothesis,” which maintained that all declarations of public interest were ultimately expressions of private interest. Second, was the explanation and justification of moral judgment. And third, was the character of moral virtue.

The selfish hypothesis, though largely a minority view, was defended equally by proponents of Mechanism (Thomas Hobbes, Bernard Mandeville) and Jansenism (Pierre Nicole). The mechanists considered man to be a machine, one whose parts functioned “every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follows from the arrangement of its counter-weights and wheels.” (Descartes, Treatise of Man, 108) The Jansenists took man to be inherently depraved; marked by original sin and destined, save the grace of God, for an eternity of hellfire. Despite fundamental disagreements between the Mechanists and Jansenists though, both groups congregated on a common view of human nature: one where man consists solely of an amalgam of passions that provoke and govern him without his control. The most forceful of these passions is self-love, which serves as the chief motivation for all human action. (Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: And Other Writings, 36) Man’s principal commitment to his own self-love undercuts genuine other-regarding action and stymies the opportunity for moral virtue.

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