CUMBERLAND, Richard.

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A Treatise on the Laws of Nature. First complete edition in English, originally published in Latin as De legibus naturae disquisitio philosophica in 1672, followed by an abridged translation by James Tyrrell in 1692. Cumberland's was the first full-length philosophical reply to Thomas Hobbes and a developed philosophical system in its own right."All moral concepts, Cumberland tries to show, are definable in terms of the single natural law that men secure their own welfare by pursuing the common good... Most of what were to be the leading eighteenth-century moral theories can be found somewhere suggested, if nowhere fully worked out, in De Legibus Naturae" (Encyclopedia of Philosophy II, p. 278). Cumberland's work was effectively a Christian system of ethics independent of revelation and based on the evidence of sense and experience. Thus, the foundation of moral laws is not the will of the sovereign, as Hobbes was seen to have argued. The book had a major impact on future moral philosophers, especially the Earl of Shaftesbury.

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