I

Richard Price was born in 1723 at Tynton in Glamorganshire. He attended various dissenting academies and was ordained to the nonconformist Presbyterian ministry at the age of twenty-one. He became chaplain to the Streatfield family of Stoke Newington, a post he held for twelve years. During this period he also officiated at various Meetinghouses in die vicinity and used the leisure time available in these circumstances to extend his studies in history, mathematics, economic and moral philosophy as well as in religion and theology. Of these studies the result that is most directly relevant to our concern for his views on the ethical foundations of die American Revolution was the publication, in 1758, of A Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals. A second edition appeared in 1769 and a third in 1787, just four years before his death at Hackney in 1791. My references will be to D. D. Raphael's edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), as Review followed by the page number.

After leaving the Streatfields in 1756 he served as morning and afternoon preacher at Stoke Newington before accepting a call as evening preacher to the Presbyterian congregation at Poor Jewry Lane in 1762. In 1770 he resigned from Poor Jewry Lane and shifted his service at Stoke Newington to evening in order to accept the pastorate at the Gravel-Pit Meeting House at Hackney, a post he occupied for the remainder of his life, also retaining the post at Newington until 1784.

Problems of moral philosophy and moral epistemology were basic concerns for him throughout his life and are the foundation of many of his views in other fields, particularly his sermons and political views. His ethical theory provides the basis from which I will discuss his three publications supporting the American cause. Before turning to those topics, however, it would be remiss not to mention the range and variety of his accomplishments.

His devotion to the pulpit and the associated practical duties had priority upon his energies throughout his life. It resulted in a series of sermons that are marked by intelligent concern for a variety of matters ranging from civil liberty and love of country to the security and happiness of a virtuous life, questions of immortality, and the relationship between God and truth. His duties were demanding enough that at one point he had to decline an invitation to edit the works of Sir Isaac Newton. But they did not prevent him from writing extensively on mathematical probability and a variety of other topics. In fact it was because of his contribution to the solution of a problem in the doctrine of chances, made as a result of being asked to examine the manuscript remains of his friend and fellow dissenting minister, the Reverend Thomas Bayes, F.R.S., that Price was elected a member of the Royal Society. His extensive actuarial work in numerous pamphlets and his two-volume Observations on Reversionary Payments have led more than one commentator to refer to him as the founder of life insurance and the father of old-age pensions. Although these titles may be extravagant, Price was much in demand for actuarial and financial advice. Requests came from as diverse sources as the president of Harvard University, Joseph Willard, about setting up a plan to pay annuities to the widows of Harvard professors and Congregational ministers in Massachusetts, to William Pitt, the Younger, when he was prime minister of Great Britain, about plans for a sinking fund. French statesmen, economists, and financiers, such as Turgot and Necker, sought his advice.

It is therefore not extravagant to refer to Price as philosopher, theologian, mathematician, and economist as well as "apostle of liberty" and "torchbearer of freedom." These phrases are used by two of his biographers who intend to emphasize his deep concern for liberty and freedom of the individual. Such concern is evident throughout his life and works but nowhere more than in his writings in support of the American cause. And these, in turn, are based on his ethical theory.

II

The main doctrines of Price's ethical theory may appropriately be considered in two main categories, epistemological and moral. In conscious opposition to the empiricism of Locke, Hutcheson, and Hume, particularly Hutcheson, Price maintains a rationalism according to which the understanding is a source of new simple ideas. This is of course not a refutation of the empirical theory that any new simple idea must originate in some manner of sensory experience, inner or outer, but an alternative to it. In support of his view Price argues that such ideas as equality, resemblance and difference, space, impenetrability, necessity, causation, and the like, cannot originate in any manner of sensory experience and that the knowledge we have in certain basic principles, for example, that one thing cannot be other than the thing it is, or that every new event must have some cause, cannot be accounted for satisfactorily in empirical terms alone. He maintains that the universality and necessity of these principles cannot be accounted for unless we have some ideas that are not derived from particular sensory experiences.

He uses the term "idea" vaguely, however; so the significance of his argument for the question whether the understanding can be a source of new simple ideas is not clear. But he does clearly hold, in the manner of Descartes, although his explicit references are to Plato and Cudworth, that there are certain principles that are known by rational intuition in the sense that they are ultimate in certain ways in certain contexts. This is also clear when Price applies his general epistemology to morals.

He argues, using a method later used by G. E. Moore and frequently referred to as "the open question" argument, that the idea of moral Tightness is a simple indefinable idea and is original to the understanding in the same way as the ideas of identity, impenetrability, causation, and the like. His emphasis is again, however, on the ultimacy of Tightness in the moral context. In a typical passage with a typical emphasis he says, "... if we will consider why it is right to conform ourselves to the relations in which persons and objects stand to us; we shall find ourselves obliged to terminate our views in a simple perception, and something ultimately approved, for which no justifying reason can be assigned" (Review, 127). In short, Tightness is the foundation of morality in the sense that coming to know that an act, situation, or relation is right brings to a conclusion the process of justifying its occurrence or existence. The process of successively answering the question why, from the moral point of view, something should be done, can go no further, Price maintains, than answering truly that it is right that it should be done. This is the role played by the rational intuition of Tightness (that is, by the "simple perception of something ultimately approved"). According to Price such an intuition is a moral ultimate; there is nothing more fundamental to appeal to, from the moral point of view, in justifying an act; and Tightness cannot be reduced to anything else of a nonethical kind.

This is Price's version of the autonomy of ethics. Rightness is original, irreducible, and fundamental. Obligation and fitness are to be understood as its equivalents in the sense that it is impossible to distinguish between what is right or fit to be done and what ought to be done, although, Price points out, the occasions on which general obligation can be met are subject to differences of time and circumstance. Combining his rationalism and this claimed equivalence, Price concludes that statements asserting that an act is right, fit or obligatory, if true, are necessarily true. In his epistemological language, "right is a species of necessary truth," or, in his ontological language, "right denotes a real character of actions." Another indication of the fundamental role of rightness is that other ethical concepts can be analyzed or explained in its terms, for example, merit or desert. To say that a person deserves happiness is to say that it is right for him to be happy. Thus, for example, if a person does what he thinks are his duties, on the basis of information available, clear understanding, and impartiality, then he deserves happiness. That is, according to Price, the proposition that practical virtue is meritorious is necessarily true, and is known by rational intuition. It is, furthermore, descriptive of the nature of things, not a description or expression of a subjective feeling.

As such a principle it is one of many available to rational intuition. This plurality of principles indicates that considerations of utility or general happiness cannot be the sole criteria in judging what is right. Some acts are right just because of their nature, not because of their consequences for pain or pleasure, despite Priestley. Some acts are right even though not done out of concern for the well-being of others. So benevolence cannot constitute the whole of virtue, despite Hutcheson. Instead, Price maintains, there are several "heads of virtue." He gives a list of six, indicating that he does not consider it complete: (1) duty to God, (2) duty to self, (3) beneficence, (4) gratitude, (5) veracity, (6) justice. That is, one knows by rational intuition, according to Price, that if an act is one which meets a duty to God then it is right—for that reason, by its own nature and "in the nature of things." Similarly for acts that are prudent, benevolent, grateful, veracious, or just.

Although Price is opposed to the view that there is some single principle of morals such as utility or benevolence he is not therefore ready to accept an ultimate pluralism. Although different obligations are often compatible they may, on occasion, conflict. In such cases of conflict, Price says, we must weigh the respective obligations to find which one outweighs, cancels, or takes priority over another. Price recognizes that such a process of "weighing" can be difficult and involves the complicated processes of considering alternatives, taking as many factors as possible into consideration, thinking as carefully as possible, and the like. In the end he believes, however, that the right thing to do can become evident to reason; that is, the process can conclude with a rational intuition. But even if it does not, the truth about which obligation does in fact have priority is not altered, according to Price. "The weakness of our discerning faculties cannot in any case affect the truth" (Review, 168n). This leads him to attribute unity to virtue, even though its different "heads" or principles are not reducible to any single principle. He does not explicate the details of this unity but I believe that he would say, if pressed, that the principles are unified in the sense that our knowledge of them and ability to weigh priorities are based on the ability of reason to know what is right. This is one sense, an important one, I believe, in which Price would say that reason and right are the "foundations of morals." I shall refer to these doctrines under the general heading of "The Principle of Plurality and Unity."

To conclude this analytical summary of his ethical views that are basic to his political views we may take note of his distinction between practical and absolute virtue. He identifies as abstract or absolute virtue what is right in itself, right for an agent in such and such circumstances to do and what he would judge he ought to do if he judged truly. He identifies as practical or relative virtue what the agent sincerely believes is right, and what he believes in his heart he ought to do, considering what he knows. In order to do what is practically virtuous, Price says, liberty, intelligence, and a regard for rectitude are severally necessary and jointly sufficient. Price means by "liberty" "the power of acting and determining" and says it is self-evident that there are no moral capacities where there is no such power. The concepts of virtue and vice are meaningless without free agency and free choice. Moral praise and blame are significant only if the agent is responsible for his acts. "Ought" implies "can" and the agent can do what he ought only if he is self-determined (Review, 181). Nor can an agent have any moral capacities unless intelligent enough to know good and evil. Otherwise, according to Price, there would be no point in judging a person's actions from a moral point of view. These capacities, liberty and intelligence, he says, are the conditions of virtue but it is a regard for the right, the intention to do what is right, that "gives it actual being in a character" (Review, 184). Reason is practical in the sense that knowledge of right and wrong is sufficient to bring about an act. It follows, according to Price, that the degree of virtue is determined according to the degree of concern to do what is understood to be right.

Finally, on the relation of Price's moral philosophy and his theology: He insists that all necessary truths, including those of morality, are a part of God's nature. They constitute God's understanding rather than being something independent that is understood by Him. He therefore is truth, and also wisdom, reason, eternity, power, and perfection. In light of the necessary truth that virtue ought to be rewarded and the factual truth that it often is not in this life, Price concludes, on moral grounds, that retributive justices requires ("proves") existence beyond this life—though not unending existence or eternal bliss. Here he turns to the Christian revelation and concludes, with the insertion of some analysis of mathematical probability, in a version of Pascal's wager, "that by such a course as virtue and piety require we can in general lose nothing but may gain infinitely and that, on the contrary, by a careless ill-spent life we can get nothing, or at best, (happen what will) next to nothing, but may lose infinitely" (Review, 274)."

There are many controversial points in Price's ethical theory and many issues that deserve critical examination. My concerns are primarily expository and interpretive, however, so I shall proceed to a consideration of some of the relationships between his moral philosophy, his political philosophy, and "the justice and policy of the war with America."

III

The most fundamental relationship is evident in the extension into his political philosophy and his judgments on the justice and policy of the war with America of the roles played in his moral philosophy by the concepts of reason, right, and liberty. In this section I shall be concerned primarily with reason and its fundamental role, in the next with right and liberty and theirs.

In Observations on Civil Liberty the knowledge of his leading principle, that civil liberty is the power of a civil society to govern itself, is gained through rational intuition. Its consequences—that a civil society that does not govern itself does not have civil liberty, that in a free state every man is his own legislator, that liberty in its most perfect degree can be enjoyed only in small states or where the will of each individual is represented in the assembly of governors, that no community can have any rightful power over the property or legislation of another without a just and adequate representation, and the like—are known by means of deduction.

This kind of epistemological foundation of the moral foundations of civil society is made even more evident in some of Price's replies to his critics in Additional Observations on Civil Liberty. Often clarifying his normative orientation as contrasted with his critics' concentration on descriptive and factual circumstances, he expands without significant substantive changes his earlier account of civil liberty and reaffirms its intuitive and deductive foundations. He proceeds to draw further deductive consequences when he says that it follows from this true account of what a state ought to be that no people can cede their liberty. The context makes clear that he is using descriptive terminology with normative import. His point would be clearer and less open to objection if he had been more explicit that no people who conform to his account of what a state ought to be can cede their liberty. He would be even clearer if he had said no people who conform to his account of what a state ought to be can consistently cede their liberty. This normative aspect does become explicit, however, when he asserts that the occurrence of events or the existence of factual circumstances that are incompatible with his account of civil liberty do not constitute arguments against that account. In short, in clarifying and defending his account it has become apparent that his intuitionism and deductivism amount to a claim to knowledge of moral matters that is characterized by defeasible necessity.