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Dafydd Mills Daniel

Ethical Rationalism and Secularisation in the British Enlightenment “A complex re-interpretation and resuscitation of Samuel Clarke’s ethics that seeks to distinguish him and the ‘Clarkeans’ from other Enlightenment rationalists and establish his thought as a viable alternative to what Daniel and many others see as the flawed legacy of the Enlightenment’s ‘thin’, complacent rationalism in the ethical domain.” —William J. Bulman, Associate Professor of History and Global Studies, Lehigh University, USA “A very welcome and masterful study of Samuel Clarke, who, despite the explosion of work on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British moral philosophy of the past thirty years, has been badly understudied. Daniel vigorously defends Clarke, puncturing widespread misconceptions and caricatures, and also provides a rich description and analysis of Clarke’s historical context.” —Stephen Darwall, Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy, Yale University, USA “An insightful, ambitious, and highly interesting work.  It offers a reading of Samuel Clarke’s ethical rationalism which rescues it from The Enlightenment’s secular legacy, makes explicit its religious commitments, and reconfigures the central notions of reason and conscience. An important resource for moral philosophy and moral theology, and for contemporary discussions of the limits of reason and nature.” —Fiona Ellis, Director of the Centre for Philosophy of Religion, University of Roehampton, UK “This is a brilliant re-reading of key Enlightenment discussions of the foundations of morality. Focusing on ethical rationalism and the attendant concepts of ‘right reason’ and ‘conscience’, it offers perceptive new insights into the secularization of moral discourse. This is an important text not only for historians of moral philosophy, but also for those interested in contemporary versions of ethical realism.” —Peter Harrison, Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland, Australia

“This valuable study deftly rescues Samuel Clarke, and the British tradition of ethical rationalism that grew up around him, from the sharply dismissive judgments so often rendered against them. Far from naively asserting the self-evidence of moral truths, Mills Daniel shows how Clarkean conscience serves as the site for active practical reasoning that draws critically on one’s own experiences, the opinions of others, moral theories, and traditional authorities. In transforming received understandings of ethical rationalism, Mills Daniel also skillfully demonstrates how proto-Kantian readings of Butler go awry; both Butler and the Clarkeans stand in a shared tradition of ‘recta ratio’ as reasoning to the law of reason that is simultaneously the law of human nature, the law of God, and the law of the universe. An important contribution to the history of modern moral thought.” —Jennifer A. Herdt, Gilbert L. Stark Professor of Christian Ethics, Yale University Divinity School, USA “At the beginning of the eighteenth cent