Earl of Shaftesbury: Merging Morals with Aesthetic Beauty

What does it mean for something to be truly beautiful? Is beauty simply in the eye of the beholder, or is it bound up with something deeper – something moral? Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), had a clear answer: beauty and goodness are inseparable. Writing at the dawn of the eighteenth century, Shaftesbury produced a philosophical vision that fused aesthetics with ethics, challenged the dominant mechanistic worldviews of his time, and laid the groundwork for modern aesthetic theory. His ideas remain surprisingly relevant today, especially as debates about art’s social responsibility continue to intensify.

Who was the Earl of Shaftesbury? 🔗

Anthony Ashley Cooper was born into one of England’s most prominent political families. Raised largely by his grandfather, the First Earl of Shaftesbury, he came under the educational supervision of none other than John Locke, who served as the family’s physician and advisor. Under the guidance of a governess chosen by Locke, the young Anthony became fluent in both Greek and Latin by the age of eleven – a classical foundation that would shape his entire philosophical outlook.

At sixteen, Shaftesbury embarked on the customary Grand Tour of Europe, spending considerable time in Italy, where he immersed himself in classical Roman art and architecture. These early encounters with antiquity reinforced his conviction that beauty, virtue, and reason were not separate concerns but deeply intertwined realities. Despite suffering from a chronic respiratory illness throughout his life, he channelled his energies into philosophical writing. His collected works – Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, published in 1711 – became one of the most widely read books of the eighteenth century.

Pushing back against Hobbes and Locke 🔗

To understand why Shaftesbury’s philosophy mattered, it helps to know what he was arguing against. The dominant intellectual currents of his day – particularly the work of Thomas Hobbes – portrayed human beings as fundamentally self-interested creatures whose social behaviour required external enforcement. According to Britannica, Shaftesbury believed that Hobbes had presented a one-sided picture of human nature. Selfishness is not the only natural passion. Alongside self-interest, human beings also feel benevolence, gratitude, sympathy, and generosity – emotions that create a natural pull toward virtue.

Shaftesbury was equally critical of aspects of Locke’s philosophy, despite his close personal connection to the man. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, Shaftesbury saw Hobbes as having set the agenda of British moral philosophy and Locke as having established its method – but he believed both had left something crucial out. His contribution was to show that moral goodness could be grounded in objective features of the world without resorting to purely self-interested motivation. The key was to think of moral goodness as analogous to beauty.

Beauty and morality as one 🔗

The heart of Shaftesbury’s philosophy is this bold claim: beauty and goodness are not merely related – they are, at their deepest level, the same thing. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy records, one of the most famous claims in Characteristicks is that beauty and good are one and the same. This was not a metaphor. Shaftesbury meant it literally, and built an entire philosophical system around it.

For Shaftesbury, when we perceive something as truly beautiful, we are responding to an underlying order and harmony that is also the foundation of moral virtue. Ugly motives – cruelty, selfishness, deception – produce what he called moral ugliness. Virtuous motives – benevolence, generosity, love of the public good – constitute what he termed “moral beauty.” This meant that aesthetic experience was never merely decorative. It was a window into the moral structure of the universe.

Three orders of beauty 🔗

Shaftesbury worked out a careful hierarchy of beauty. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, he distinguished three distinct orders of beauty. The first order comprises what he called “dead forms” – the physical objects we can see and touch, shaped by design and proportion. The second order is higher: it is the active, intelligent mind that gives form to these objects. The mind itself, through its creative power, imposes order on matter. The third and supreme order of beauty is the divine principle that gives form to the mind – the source from which all beauty ultimately flows. In this hierarchy, the beauty of a painting or a sculpture was real, but it pointed toward something greater: the mind of the artist, and beyond that, the rational order of the cosmos itself.

The moral sense: an innate capacity for goodness 🔗

One of Shaftesbury’s most influential contributions to philosophy was the concept of the moral sense. Britannica identifies Shaftesbury as the first philosopher to use the term “moral sense” – a natural human capacity to feel approval or disapproval of moral conduct, much as we feel pleasure or displeasure at beautiful or ugly things.

This was a significant departure from purely rationalist ethics. Rather than locating morality in abstract calculation, Shaftesbury argued that human beings are naturally equipped with a kind of inner compass. When we reflect on our own motives or the motives of others, we feel an emotional response – approval toward what is good and generous, condemnation toward what is cruel or selfish. This capacity does not eliminate reason; it works alongside it. But it means that moral life is not cold and mechanical. It is felt, experienced, and cultivated.

As the Stanford Encyclopedia’s entry on seventeenth and eighteenth century theories of emotion explains, Shaftesbury often compared moral sentiments to aesthetic evaluations, going so far as to identify proper taste in morals with proper taste in aesthetics. Both involve the perception of the natural fitness of things. Both require the cultivation of proper affective responses to an objective standard in the world.

Importantly, Shaftesbury did not see the moral sense as a fixed, automatic faculty. He argued that while the ability to recognize the good of one’s society is an innate capacity, it must nevertheless be developed through proper socialization and education. This placed significant weight on culture, upbringing, and the kind of aesthetic environment a person grows up in.

The Greek inheritance: virtue, harmony, and taste 🔗

Shaftesbury’s debt to ancient Greek thought is central to understanding his philosophy. New World Encyclopedia notes that much of Shaftesbury’s thought is rooted in a conception of the universe that had its sources in ancient Greece – a rationally governed cosmos in which genuine moral and aesthetic properties exist as objective features of reality. His education in Stoicism, especially the works of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, reinforced this picture of a universe shaped by reason and purpose.

From Plato, Shaftesbury inherited the idea that beauty, truth, and goodness are deeply connected. But where Plato tended to view art with suspicion – as a mere imitation of reality, several steps removed from truth – Shaftesbury gave art a more active and positive role. For him, the artist who embodies genuine virtue does not merely copy the world; they help shape the moral sensibility of their audience. Art was not a pale reflection of higher realities but a living force in the cultivation of a good society.

From Aristotle, Shaftesbury drew on the idea that beauty is grounded in harmony and proportion. But he extended this to moral life: a well-ordered character, oriented toward the common good, was as beautiful as a well-composed piece of music or a perfectly proportioned building.

The cultivation of societal taste 🔗

One of Shaftesbury’s most forward-looking ideas was his emphasis on the social dimension of taste. For Shaftesbury, taste was not merely a private matter of individual preference. It was something that could – and should – be cultivated collectively. The Online Library of Liberty explains that Shaftesbury argued there is a universal sense of beauty – a response to form and harmony – that exists across all known cultures. Art and music exist everywhere because humans everywhere respond to proportion and order.

This universal aesthetic sense, properly educated and refined, was the foundation of a society’s moral culture. Shaftesbury pointed to ancient Greece as the historical exemplar of this idea. Greek civilisation, at its best, had produced art, philosophy, and political life that all reflected a unified moral vision. The task of Enlightenment society, as he saw it, was to recover and renew that vision – to cultivate a public taste aligned not just with personal pleasure but with the common good.

Shaftesbury maintained that virtue is the promotion of the good of all humankind. As he wrote in Characteristicks, cited by the Stanford Encyclopedia, to love the public and promote the interest of the whole world, as far as lies within our power, is the height of goodness. Aesthetic cultivation was not an end in itself – it was in service of this broader moral and social vision.

Shaftesbury’s lasting influence 🔗

The Online Library of Liberty records that Characteristicks rivalled Locke’s Second Treatise as the most reprinted English-language book of the eighteenth century, going through ten editions. Its influence spread well beyond Britain. In Germany, thinkers such as Lessing, Goethe, Herder, and Schiller engaged deeply with Shaftesbury’s ideas. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that his concept of enthusiasm – the recovery of intuitive reason from mere discursive reasoning – fed directly into the Romantic movement’s celebration of creative imagination.

Within British philosophy, Shaftesbury’s moral sense theory directly shaped the work of Francis Hutcheson, who systematised it; David Hume, who subjected it to rigorous empirical scrutiny; and Adam Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments built an entire account of social ethics on the foundation of sympathy and moral feeling. A recent scholarly study from Princeton University Press argues that Shaftesbury’s view – that nature, religion, virtue, and art can all be truly beautiful, and that cultivating beauty is what makes life worth living – had a profound impact not just on aesthetics and moral philosophy, but on environmentalism and natural religion as well.

Even Immanuel Kant, whose aesthetic philosophy took a very different direction, was responding in part to the tradition Shaftesbury had established. Kant’s idea of disinterested aesthetic pleasure – the experience of beauty that is not tied to personal desire or utility – echoes Shaftesbury’s insistence that genuine aesthetic and moral judgement must transcend narrow self-interest.

Why Shaftesbury still matters 🔗

Shaftesbury’s synthesis of ethics and aesthetics raises questions that have not gone away. In a cultural moment when art is often treated as purely subjective – a matter of personal taste with no deeper moral stakes – his insistence that beauty is bound up with virtue and the common good offers a serious counterpoint. As scholars at Princeton University Press have noted, Shaftesbury’s philosophy is not merely of historical interest; it speaks directly to pressing contemporary questions about virtue, self-creation, and the role of art in public life.

Whether we are thinking about the ethics of artistic representation, the responsibility of artists toward their communities, or the kind of aesthetic environment that shapes moral character, Shaftesbury’s core insight remains a useful provocation: that how we experience beauty is not separate from who we are morally, and that a society’s taste is a measure of its soul.

What do you think? If beauty and moral goodness are truly connected – as Shaftesbury argued – does that mean we have a moral responsibility to cultivate our aesthetic sensibilities? And can a society with deeply refined artistic taste still be morally corrupt, or does genuine aesthetic cultivation always carry moral weight?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/
2. https://www.britannica.com/topic/ethics-philosophy/Shaftesbury-and-the-moral-sense-school
3. https://iep.utm.edu/shaftes/
4. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/shaftesbury/
5. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emotions-17th18th/LD6Shaftesbury.html
6. https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Anthony_Ashley-Cooper,_3rd_Earl_of_Shaftesbury
7. https://oll.libertyfund.org/publications/reading-room/2024-05-09-shaftesbury-s-theory-of-a-moral-sense-sets-the-direction-of-the-british-enlightenment-part-2
8. https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/shaftesbury-s-aesthetics-moral-philosophy
9. https://academic.oup.com/princeton-scholarship-online/book/46221
10. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691226613/a-philosophy-of-beauty