The dark side of recognition

Bernard Mandeville and the morality of pride

Bibliographic Data

ID21597759
AuthorsRobin Douglas (0000-0002-0939-6211, King's College London, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume32
Issue2
Pages284-300
Publication date2024-03-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0960-8788 • E-ISSN: 1469-3526
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/09608788.2021.1984202
OpenAlexW3205558721
LanguageEN
References cited19

This article reconstructs Bernard Mandeville’s pride-centred theory of recognition and advances two main arguments. First, I maintain that Mandeville really did regard pride as a vice and took the prevalence of this passion as evidence of our morally compromised nature. Mandeville’s account of pride may have been indebted to French neo-Augustinian moralists, yet I show that the moral connotations he associated with the passion are based on a naturalistic analysis of our moral psychology and do not depend upon endorsing any theological assumptions about our fallen condition. Second, I offer a qualified defence of Mandeville’s pride-centred theory against other eighteenth-century philosophers – Archibald Campbell, David Hume and Adam Smith – who presented the desire for social esteem in a more positive light. Even if there is nothing troubling about a moderate and well-regulated desire for esteem, I suggest that Mandeville’s analysis remains deeply unsettling in so far as it reveals the extent of pride behind our desire for recognition

Epistemology · Great Rift · Morality · Physics · Pride · Theology · Emile Durkheim and Sociology · Historical and Scientific Studies · Law in Society and Culture · Philosophy