Mandeville on Pride and Animal Nature

Abstract

Mandeville's first publication-the thesis Disputatio Philosophica de Brutorum Operationibus (1689)-advocated the Cartesian position that both denied feeling and sensation, let alone thought, to nonhuman animals and stressed the inherent distinctiveness of the conscious sensory and inferential capacities of human agents. Yet his later writings subscribed to a directly opposed Enlightenment position. His translation of La Fontaine's Fables drew comparisons between humans and animal throughout, and by the time of the Fable of the Bees, Mandeville was clearly in the camp stressing the continuity of human and nonhuman animal nature, a tradition following Hobbes, Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld, and later to include Helvétius, de la Mettrie and Hume. The function of pride in Mandeville's ethics is examined in terms of this debate, framed by Bayle's famous 'Rorarius' entry in his Dictionary. With this background in place, Mandeville's claim regarding the psychological role of pride as the 'other Recompense…[of] the vain Satisfaction of making our Species appear more exalted and remote from that of other Animals' is then discussed. It is presented as a critique of Shaftesbury's discussion in the Characteristics relating to the norm of fulfilling one's human nature.

Honour and Interest: Mandeville on Chastity as an Artificial Virtue

“…In a late seventeenth century book of advice to his daughter, reviewing the traditional justification for female chastity grounded in the necessity to keep the lineage and the 'purity of blood,' George Saville remarked on the injustice, the unfairness, of men in making "in the utmost degree criminal in women" what for them is permissible. However, he continued, "whilst the point of honour continues to be so plac'd, it seems unavoidable to give your sex the greater share of the penalty" (SAVILLE, 1688, p. 34) The mass of didactic literature and conduct books for young ladies published in those years stressed that this double standard, the fact that men were permitted liberties of which no woman could ever avail herself and keep her honourable reputation, is in the nature of things (BRYSON 1998). As a matter of fact, English women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries lived under male domination.…”