NATURALISM, VIRTUE AND SOCIABILITY IN THE FABLE OF THE BEES
MANDEVILLE AND THE MORALISTS OF HIS TIME
Keywords:
Anatomy, Naturalism, Human nature, Sociability, Eighteenth Century, Commercial societyAbstract
By defending the general thesis that “private vices” were
indispensable to obtaining “public benefits,” Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable
of the Bees provoked outraged reactions and earned its author the reputation of
an enemy of virtue. Among the criticisms made against him, the one according to
which he had cunningly used a rigorist conception of virtue to demonstrate the
impossibility of any genuinely virtuous action stands out. Taking this criticism
as a motto and trying to see to what extent it can be pertinent or not, this paper
intends to examine the thesis contained in the subtitle of the Fable considering
the philosophical project in which it is inserted: that of an “anatomy of the
invisible part of man”. From there, we hope it will be possible to indicate what
questions The Fable of the Bees aims to answer and how it does answer them,
what place it holds for morality, as well as which are the consequences of the
Mandevillian critique of morals.
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