Samuel Clarke's Fitness Theory on Moral Value and a Brief Comparison of it with the Theory of Existential Fitness

Abstract

A demonstration of the being and attributes of God [Clarke S; 1705] A discourse concerning the unchangeable obligations of natural religion, and the truth and certainty of the Christian revelation [Hume D; 1960] A treatise of human nature [Humphreys AR; 1947] The eternal fitness of things: An aspect of eighteenth-century thought [Hutcheson F; 2002] An essay on the nature and conduct of the passions and affections, with illustrations on the moral sense [Hutcheson F; 2004] An inquiry into the original of our ideas of beauty and virtue (1726( , 2004 2002] Moral agency and free choice: Clarke's unlikely success against Hume [Mesbah MT; 1994] Moral philosophy lessons [Mobini MA; 2013] Fittingness and ontological consistency as fundamental value [Mobini MA; 2020] God, value, rationality: A step towards the theory of existential fitness about value [Mobini MA; 2022] A typology of moral goodness in the theory of existential proportionality [Rawls J; 2000] Lectures on the history of moral philosophy [Sheridan P; 2007] The metaphysical morality of francis hutcheson: A consideration of hutcheson's critique of moral fitness theory [Taleqani SA; 2011] Examining David Hume's arguments against Samuel Clarke's moral rationalism [Yenter T; 2022] Samuel Clarke [Yenter T, Vailati E; 2021] Samuel ClarkeSamuel Clark has a completely rationalist explanation of ethics and uses the concept of fitness a lot to explain his view; hence, his moral theory is known as the fitness theory. Clark considers moral values and obligations to be based on fitness relations and believes that the reason can understand self-evidently a large part of these relationships, and the other part can be obtained through rational arguments or revelation. Critics have found some ambiguities and defects in Clarke's fitness theory. In this article, Clarkeian fitness theory is examined according to the criticisms raised, and then in a brief comparison with the theory of existential fitness, it is shown that the theory of existential fitness does not have these ambiguities and defects.