Everything about Richard Price totally explained
Richard Price (
February 23,
1723 –
April 19,
1791), was a
Welsh moral and political philosopher.
He was born at Tynton,
Glamorgan, the son of a dissenting minister. Educated privately and at a dissenting academy in
London, he became chaplain and companion to a Mr Streatfield at
Stoke Newington. Streatfield's death and that of an uncle in 1756 improved his circumstances, and on
June 16,
1757 he married Sarah Blundell, originally of Belgrave in
Leicestershire.
In 1744 Price published a volume of sermons, which gained him the acquaintance of Lord Shelburne; this raised his reputation and helped determine the direction of his career. It was, however, as a writer on financial and political questions that Price became widely known. In 1769, in a letter to
Benjamin Franklin, he wrote some observations on the expectation of lives, the increase of mankind, and the population of London, which were published in the
Philosophical Transactions of that year; in May 1770 he presented to the
Royal Society a paper on the proper method of calculating the values of contingent reversions. The publication of these papers is said to have helped draw attention to the inadequate calculations on which many insurance and benefit societies had recently been formed. In 1769 Price received the honorary degree of
D.D. from the
University of Glasgow. In
1771 he published his
Appeal to the Public on the Subject of the National Debt (ed. 1772 and 1774). This pamphlet excited considerable controversy, and is supposed to have influenced
William Pitt the Younger in re-establishing the sinking fund for the extinction of the national debt, created by
Robert Walpole in 1716 and abolished in 1733. The means proposed for the extinction of the debt are described by
Lord Overstone as "a sort of hocus-pocus machinery," supposed to work "without loss to any one," and consequently unsound.
Price then turned his attention to the question of the
American colonies. He had from the first been strongly opposed to the war, and in 1776 he published a pamphlet entitled
Observations on Civil Liberty and the Justice and Policy of the War with America. Several thousand copies of this work were sold within a few days; a cheap edition was soon issued; the pamphlet was extolled by one set of politicians and abused by another; amongst its critics were
Dr Markham, archbishop of York,
John Wesley, and
Edmund Burke; and Price rapidly became one of the best known men in England. He was presented with the freedom of the city of London, and it's said that his pamphlet had no inconsiderable share in determining the Americans to
declare their independence. A second pamphlet on the war with America, the debts of
Great Britain, and kindred topics followed in the spring of 1777. His name thus became identified with the cause of American independence. He was the intimate friend of Franklin; he corresponded with
Turgot; and in the winter of 1778 he was invited by Congress to go to America and assist in the financial administration of the states. This offer he refused from unwillingness to quit his own country and his family connexions. In 1781 he, solely with George Washington, received the degree of Doctor of Laws from
Yale College.
One of Price's most intimate friends was
Joseph Priestley, despite their taking the most opposite views on morals and
metaphysics. In 1778 appeared a published correspondence between these two liberal
theologians on the subjects of
materialism and necessity, wherein Price maintains, in opposition to Priestley, the free agency of man and the unity and immateriality of the human soul. Both Price and Priestley were what would now vaguely be called "
Unitarians," though they occupied respectively the extreme right and the extreme left position of that school. Indeed, Price's opinions would seem to have been rather
Arian than
Socinian.
The pamphlets on the American War made Price famous. He preached to crowded congregations, and, when Lord Shelburne acceded to power, not only was he offered the post of private secretary to the premier, but it's said that one of the paragraphs in the king's speech was suggested by him and even inserted in his words. In 1786 Mrs Price died. There were no children by the marriage, his own health was failing, and the remainder of his life appears to have been clouded by solitude and dejection. The progress of the
French Revolution alone cheered him. On the
19 April 1791 he died, worn out with suffering and disease.
Much of Price's most important philosophical work was in the region of ethics. The
Review of the Principal Questions in Morals (1757, 3rd ed. revised 1787) contains his whole theory. It is divided into ten chapters, the first of which, though a small part of the whole, completes his demonstration of ethical theory. The remaining chapters investigate details of minor importance, and are especially interesting as showing his relation to Butler and
Kant (ch. iii. and ch. vii.). The work is professedly a refutation of
Francis Hutcheson, but is rather constructive than polemical. The theory he propounds is closely allied to that of Cudworth, but is interesting mainly in comparison with the subsequent theories of Kant.
Right and wrong belong to actions in themselves. By this he means, not that the ethical value of actions is independent of their motive and end (see ch. vi), but rather that it's unaffected by consequences, and that it's more or less invariable for intelligent beings. II. This ethical value is perceived by reason or understanding (which, unlike Kant, he doesn't distinguish), which intuitively recognizes fitness or congruity between actions, agents and total circumstances. Arguing that ethical judgment is an act of discrimination, he endeavours to invalidate the doctrine of the moral sense. Yet, in denying the importance of the emotions in moral judgment, he's driven back to the admission that right actions must be "grateful" to us; that, in fact, moral approbation includes both an act of the understanding and an emotion of the heart. Still it remains true that reason alone, in its highest development, would be a sufficient guide. In this conclusion he's in close agreement with Kant;
reason is the arbiter, and right is (1) not a matter of the emotions and (2) no relative to imperfect human nature. Price's main point of difference with
Cudworth is that while Cudworth regards the moral criterion as a vanua or modification of the mind, existing in gere and developed by circumstances, Price regards it as acquired from the contemplation of actions, but acquired necessarily, immediately intuitively. In his view of disinterested action (ch. iii.) he adds nothing to Butler. Happiness he regards as the only end, conceivable by us, of divine Providence, but it's a happiness wholly dependent upon rectitude. Virtue tends always to happiness, and in the end must prodtice it in its perfect form.
Price was also friends with the mathematician and clergyman
Thomas Bayes. He edited Bayes' most famous work "Essay towards solving a problem in the doctrine of chances" which contains
Bayes' Theorem, one of the most fundamental theorems of probability theory. Price wrote an introduction to Bayes' paper which provides some of the philosophical basis of
Bayesian statistics.
Works
Besides the above-mentioned, Price wrote an
Essay on the Population of England (2nd ed., 1780) which directly influenced
Thomas Robert Malthus; two
Fast-day Sermons, published respectively in 1779 and 1781 ; and
Observations on the importance of the American Revolution and the means of rendering it a benefit to the World (1784). A complete list of his works is given as an appendix to Dr Priestley's
Funeral Sermon. His views on the
French Revolution are denounced by Burke in his
Reflections on the Revolution in France. Notices of Price's ethical system occur in
James Mackintosh's
Progress of Ethical Philosophy,
Jouffroy's
Introduction to Ethics,
William Whewell's
History of Moral Philosophy in England;
Alexander Bain's
Mental and Moral Sciences. See also T Fowler's monograph on Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. For Price's life see memoir by his nephew, William Morgan.
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