Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T09:13:15.986Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘The ethics of belief’ and belief about ethics: William Kingdon Clifford at the Metaphysical Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2012

ROSE ANN CHRISTIAN
ROSE ANN CHRISTIAN
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Towson University, 8000 York Road, Towson, Maryland 21252, USA e-mail: rchristian@towson.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

As a member of the Victorian-era Metaphysical Society, W. K. Clifford contributed to debate about the prospects for morality in the absence of religion. Clifford thought its chances good. He presented a paper offering a ‘scientific’ approach to moral theory. In my discussion, I explore his proposal, using it to gain interpretative leverage on a paper he delivered before the Society only a year later, ‘The ethics of belief’. I set aside the quarrel with religion so prominent in this influential essay and discount its evidentialist epistemology, the better to reveal it for what it is: a powerful exercise in moral suasion.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , September 2012 , pp. 357 - 376
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adler, Jonathan E. (2002) Belief's Own Ethics (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Alan Willard (1947) The Metaphysical Society: Victorian Minds in Crisis, 1869–1880 (New York NY: Columbia University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chadwick, Owen (1975) The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Clifford, William Kingdon (1879) Lecture and Essays II, ed. Stephen, Leslie and Pollock, Frederick (London: Macmillan and Company).Google Scholar
Goodwin, Michael (ed.) (1951) Nineteenth Century Opinion (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).Google Scholar
Haack, Susan (1997) ‘The Ethics of Belief Reconsidered’, in Edwin Hahn, Lewis (ed.) The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm (Chicago IL: Open Court), 129–144.Google Scholar
Harvey, Van A. (1969) ‘Is there an ethics of belief?’, The Journal of Religion, 49, 41–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Irvine, William (1955) Apes, Angels, and Victorians: Darwin, Huxley, and Evolution (Cleveland OH and New York: Meridian Books, The World Publishing Company).Google Scholar
James, William (1979) ‘The will to believe’, in , James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press).Google Scholar
Kitcher, Philip (2004) ‘A pragmatist's progress: the varieties of James’ strategies for defending religion’, in Proudfoot, Wayne (ed.) William James and a Science of Religions (New York: Columbia University Press), 98–138.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Livingston, James C. (2006) Religious Thought in the Victorian Age: Challenges and Reconceptions (New York and London: Continuum).Google Scholar
Mandelbaum, Maurice (1971) History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turner, Frank Miller (1974) Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press).Google Scholar
Van Inwagen, Peter (2009) ‘Listening to Clifford's ghost’, in O'Hear, Anthony (ed.) Conceptions of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 12–35.Google Scholar
Wood, Allen W. (2002) ‘W. K. Clifford and the ethics of belief,’ in , Wood, Unsettling Obligations: Essays on Reason, Reality and the Ethics of Belief (Stanford CA: CSLI Publications), 1–40.Google Scholar