ABSTRACT
Shaftesbury was perhaps the first to transfer the center of ethical interest from the rational apprehension of either abstract moral distinctions or laws of divine legislation to emotional impulses that prompt us to perform our social duties. Shaftesbury's major contribution lies in the field of ethics. In his various attacks on the principle of egoism, central to Hobbes' social theory, he tried to assail the irreconcilable antagonism between social duty and self-love. Hobbes might have been right, argued Shaftesbury, were it possible to consider man as a wholly self-sufficient individual. The Sense of Right and Wrong therefore being as natural to us as natural Affection itself, and being a first Principle in our Constitution and Make; there is no speculative Opinion, Persuasion or Belief, which is capable immediately or directly to exclude or destroy it. Shaftesbury explicates the relationship between the virtuous, the beautiful and happiness.
