Boeker, Ruth. Catharine Trotter Cockburn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2023, 74 pp.

Ruth Boeker’s Catharine Trotter Cockburn is one of the most recent volumes published in the Elements on Women in the History of Philosophy series from Cambridge University Press. The aim of this series is to provide concise scholarly introductions to historical women philosophers while advancing original interpretive analysis. Like many of the philosophers examined in this series, Cockburn (1679–1749) was for a very long time left out of the standard narratives of the history of philosophy. However, her work has been the topic of growing interest to historians of philosophy in recent years. Cockburn’s prodigious body of work offers us not only a deepened understanding of some of the central philosophical debates of the eighteenth century but, more importantly, develops a challenging and deeply original philosophical theory that merits and rewards serious scholarly attention. Boeker’s volume provides a much-needed overview of the range of philosophical and theological issues that occupied Cockburn throughout her life.

Boeker begins in Section 1 with a brief biography of Cockburn along with concise summaries of each of her major philosophical works: A Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay of Human Understanding (1702); A Letter to Dr Holdsworth (1727); A Vindication of Mr. Locke’s Christian Principles (1727); Remarks Upon Some Writers (1743); Remarks Upon the Principles and Reasonings of Dr. Rutherforth’s Essay (1747). Boeker’s discussion throughout the remaining four sections draws on the full range of Cockburn’s works as well as her correspondence, which succeeds in underscoring the scope of Cockburn’s interests and the coherence of her philosophical viewpoint. Cockburn’s works are best described as polemical in style, which can make this kind of project challenging. In the first three of her works, Cockburn defends Lockean empirical principles against a number of his critics. In the final two works, Cockburn similarly defends the views of Samuel Clarke. However, despite the fact that her works are structured as defenses of other thinkers, Cockburn makes inventive use of their central principles. As Boeker’s discussion demonstrates, Cockburn was a skilled polemicist for whom critical analysis could be used to great effect as a springboard for her original philosophical positions.

In Section 2, Boeker discusses Cockburn’s epistemology and metaphysics. This section explores Cockburn’s views on topics including knowledge and its limitations, knowledge of God’s attributes, personal identity, the nature and immortality of the soul, substance, and space. Much of this section draws on Cockburn’s first philosophical work, the Defence. Though it is clear from the title that Cockburn sought to defend Locke’s empiricist principles against the anonymous author of a series of Remarks, Boeker aims to highlight the interesting nuances in Cockburn’s discussion of Locke’s ideas.^[1]

A case in point is Cockburn’s unique repurposing of Locke’s principle of reflection. Though Cockburn was committed to the empiricist view that we acquire ideas through sensation and reflection, she broadens the concept of reflection to include not merely Locke’s account of it as the source of ideas regarding the operations of the mind, but also to include ideas regarding human nature itself. Boeker explains that this expanded notion of reflection represents a key plank in Cockburn’s moral and religious philosophy and marks an important distinction between her own and Locke’s views in these areas. “Reflection,” according to Boeker, “is a central epistemic principle in [Cockburn’s] philosophy and […] reflection on human nature, in particular, equips us with important ideas” (11).

Boeker pays special attention in Section 2 to Cockburn’s views of the limitations of human knowledge. Cockburn believed in the human capacity for moral and religious knowledge and rebutted the charge of critics that empiricism was the high road to skepticism and a weakening of moral and theological assent. However, she was, Boeker writes, “attentive to the fact that human capacities are limited and that we are ignorant about many metaphysical facts” (14). This idea informs much of Boeker’s interpretive analysis. Boeker’s discussions of personal identity, the immateriality of the soul, and the ontology of space all highlight Cockburn’s restrained approach to metaphysical speculation and her attentiveness to the demands of an empiricist epistemology.

In Section 3, Boeker discusses Cockburn’s moral philosophy, including Cockburn’s metaphysics of morality and her moral fitness theory, her intellectualism, and her contributions to contemporary debates on the roles of self-interest, self-love, and benevolence in morality. Boeker’s discussion draws a useful distinction between Cockburn’s metaphysics of morality, which establishes the foundations of morality, and Cockburn’s account of the principles that motivate moral action.

Cockburn’s account of human nature is fundamental to her moral philosophy; for Cockburn, morality is grounded in our natures as sensible, rational, and social beings. As sensible beings, we seek pleasure and avoid pain, as social beings we desire and seek to promote the wellbeing of others, and as rational beings we have the capacity to make rational choices and act accordingly. More than this, Boeker explains, Cockburn holds that moral obligation arises from the facts of our specifically human nature. We are, for Cockburn, not only driven to act in accordance with the dictates of our human nature, but we ought at all times to aim for the most fitting expression of it. As Boeker writes, “[Cockburn] believes that it follows from the fact that humans are by nature sensible, rational, and social beings that they ought to act suitably or fittingly to their nature” (30). This is the cornerstone of Cockburn’s moral fitness theory, according to which all things stand in a certain relation to one another and form a system of beings. The natures of these beings determine what sort of relations things are going to have to one another and thereby dictate appropriate or fitting ways of acting. For Cockburn, Boeker writes, “[t]o ask what is fit or unfit for a being with a certain nature is to ask what a being with such and such a nature ought or ought not to do” (36).

Given the emphasis Cockburn places on the natural foundations of morality, Boeker considers whether Cockburn’s view is most effectively interpreted as a form of moral naturalism. I would like to take a brief detour here to consider Boeker’s discussion in some detail. In my own work (Sheridan 2018), as Boeker notes, I have argued that Cockburn espouses a non-reductive form of moral naturalism in response to the reductive naturalism exemplified by Hobbes and Mandeville. For these thinkers, morality is founded on non-moral facts of human psychology (namely, self-interest). Normative principles are imposed by an external authority and gain their obligatory force by sanctions that make it in the individual’s interest to obey. It might therefore seem that the contrast with Cockburn’s view lies in the fact that she locates normativity and moral obligation within our natures as rational, social, and sensible beings. Humans can, through reasoning and reflecting on the natures and relations of things, understand the principles and obligatory force of morality.

Boeker responds to this naturalistic reading of Cockburn by suggesting that the contrast drawn between Cockburn’s naturalism and that exemplified by Hobbes and Mandeville as, respectively, non-reductive and reductive is not as clear or useful as, perhaps, casting their differences in terms of moral realism. As Boeker explains, the moral realist affirms that “there are objective moral facts that are independent of human opinion” (38). On this basis, Boeker argues, Cockburn might more profitably be cast as a moral realist against Hobbes and Mandeville, but any further claim about her naturalism is not well-established; that is, Boeker suggests, a naturalist interpretation would need to make clearer whether the facts of human nature are, for Cockburn, “inherently moral and non-reducible to non-moral facts” (39).

In considering this question, Boeker references Karen Green’s argument against the naturalist interpretation. According to Green, Cockburn’s view rests ultimately on the will and authority of a supernatural agent, which both guarantees that our natures tend us to virtue and lends morality its obligatory force through explicit rewards and punishments. For this reason, Cockburn’s view is not, as Green puts it, “deeply naturalist” (Green 2015, 95). I would agree that God does play an important role for Cockburn in ensuring the veracity and obligatory force of moral laws (in fact, she is explicit that without God, humans would lack consistency in moral motivation). But is Cockburn committed to the idea that our natures derive their moral significance only by appeal to God’s creative will? That human nature dictates the terms of our moral obligations may not on its own answer this question, but the fact that rational reflection on our natures can yield moral knowledge for Cockburn without appeal to revelation seems to offer a compelling tip in the direction of a non-reductive naturalistic interpretation. That said, any naturalism imputed to Cockburn might still seem to be complicated by the fact that our natures are ultimately a result of God’s creative will. Jaqueline Broad has recently considered the facets of this debate, concluding that Cockburn offers us a “complex and nuanced picture of moral naturalism in this period” (Broad 2021, 124).

I would only add further that the complexity of the issue is, in part at least, a function of Cockburn’s seeming comfort with holding something like a naturalistic account of morality concurrently with a metaphysics of nature as an ordered, harmonious, and teleological system reflective of God’s creative will. It is for this reason, I would venture, that Boeker does not see how Cockburn’s position can be made to square with a metaethical subcategory like ethical naturalism, since “present-day moral naturalists tend to offer secular views” (39). Without conceding the naturalistic interpretation entirely, I will grant that Boeker is right to push on the interpretation in order to flesh out the multi-faceted nature of Cockburn’s position.

Following this discussion of the foundations of morality, Boeker explores Cockburn’s account of moral practice and the motivation to be moral. Although for Cockburn reflection on our natures and fitness relations carries obligatory force, people tend to require additional motivation to act morally. Boeker identifies three central principles at work in Cockburn’s account of moral motivation: the fitnesses of things; conscience or moral sense; and the will of God. Cockburn took her inspiration from William Warburton, whose 1738 work Divine Legation outlines these three motivational principles. Boeker explains that Cockburn broadly agreed with Warburton but rejected his prioritization of God’s will as having the most fundamental impact on people’s decisions to act. For Cockburn, Boeker writes, “the fitnesses of things have a more fundamental status insofar as they not only motivate, but also offer a foundation for morality” (42). That said, Cockburn was well aware that while many people recognize their obligations, they nevertheless fail to act on them. Conscience, or moral sense, assesses actions in light of our obligations, producing feelings of self-approval or self-condemnation that further motivate us to be moral. The will of God offers yet another layer of motivation through the sanctions that are attached to our voluntary actions. However, as Boeker explains, while these two principles offer additional layers of motivation, they “provide no foundation of morality” (42).

Boeker closes this section with a discussion of Cockburn’s contribution to contemporary debates regarding benevolence, self-interest and self-love. Boeker does an excellent job contextualizing Cockburn’s ideas on self-love and benevolence as natural expressions of human virtue by exploring the various thinkers with whom Cockburn directly engages in her writing. In opposition to the view that benevolence ultimately reduces to human self-interest, Cockburn sought to explain benevolence through the concept of self-love. This, she argued, was not selfishness or self-interestedness; self-love is a part of human nature that approves of our own behavior.

In Section 4, Boeker discusses Cockburn’s religious philosophy. While Boeker covers a number of topics, including the virtue of atheists, the roles of education and revelation in religious understanding, and resurrection and the afterlife, a central theme in this section is the relationship between religion and morality. For Cockburn, every rational person has the capacity to reflect on their natures and on the fitness relations in which they stand to others. In this way, morality is effectively independent of religion and discoverable by natural reason. In fact, Cockburn asserts on this basis that even atheists are capable of discerning their moral obligation and thereby can be held morally responsible for their actions.

At the same time, however, Cockburn affirms the importance of religious belief and Christian revelation for morality. Knowledge of God, Boeker writes, guarantees for Cockburn “the stable practice of virtue” (56). For Cockburn, then, atheists may be capable of discerning their moral obligations, but without belief in God, they will lack the constancy of moral practice that comes with belief. It is important to this picture that religious belief, for Cockburn, must be tethered to the dictates of natural human reason. It is rational belief, as opposed to enthusiasm, that provides steadfastness in the pursuit of virtue.

Section 5 explores the contemporary reception of Cockburn’s works by such thinkers as Locke, Leibniz, Toland, and the Bluestockings. As Boeker notes, Cockburn did not shy away from engaging some of the luminaries of her day, challenging their views and proffering unique and sophisticated original views in response to the issues she identified. Cockburn’s importance as a philosopher has not received the attention it deserves in the histories of British moral philosophy and Boeker rightly affirms that Cockburn offers us an opportunity to rethink the standard narratives about this period.

To conclude, Boeker’s book does an excellent job of reconstructing Cockburn’s views and revealing her argumentative strategies. Boeker is attentive to Cockburn’s intellectual milieu and provides the reader with detailed discussions of many of Cockburn’s interlocutors. This book is therefore a valuable resource for anyone coming to Cockburn for the first time, but also provides insightful interpretive analysis that contributes to the existing scholarship on Cockburn—in this way it is a resource that will be useful to scholars as well as to students coming to her for the first time.