Conscience and Virtue, Selfdeceit and Vice

This dissertation has grown out of a simple observation. I happened to be reading selections from Bishop Joseph Butler's sermons and his dissertation On the Nature of Virtue around the same time that I was reading Jane Austen's Mansfield Park,, and was struck by the similarities I perceived between the two works. The more I read in each, the stronger was my sense of a general resemblance between Butler's and Austen's interests and convictions regarding the moral life of human beings. Personal interest alone would have been enough to encourage me to investigate the nuances and finer points of the two authors' shared ethic and moral psychology, but I am additionally persuaded of the value of such a project to both Austen scholars and those philosophers who are concerned with sustaining and nurturing a mutually beneficial dialogue between the works and disciplines of literature and philosophy. At its broadest, my aim here is to provide textual support from both authors for my claim that Mansfield Park expresses and endorses views about the moral nature of human beings and about the causes and effects of virtue and vice that strongly coincide with Butler's. Essentially, my argument rests on two observations. The first is that of the number and prominence of shared concepts between the two authors including: the nature and importance of moral judgment to moral behavior and the corresponding unreliability of reference to moral rules for producing moral behavior, the idea that there is a natural and beneficial hierarchical organization of motivational principles within an individual agent's psychology, and an appreciation of the dangerous connection between self-deceit and vice. My second observation is that the plot of Mansfield Park bears out these commitments beyond simply affirming them in particular characters whom Austen wants her reader to accept as moral role models or exemplars. That is, while it is true that Fanny Price, as an individual, demonstrates the value of judgment and critical reflection, and of successful moral action without reference to strict moral principles or rules, what seems to me to be more important is the fact that controversial elements of the plot of the novel seem to be expressions of Butler's views as well. Austen is worried about Edmund Bertram's infatuation with Mary Crawford because she, like Butler, is worried about the reinforcing effect of self-deceit on establishing morally problematic action a habit. This causes her to be anxious about the morality of her characters' efforts to perform the play "Lover's Vows". It seems to me that when we properly appreciate the moral thought underlying this worry, Austen's much-maligned `priggishness' regarding the play becomes more understandable and less alien than it first appears. In other words, when we have Butler's Sermons and the Dissertation Of the Nature of Virtue at hand when we read Mansfield Park we are less likely to be perplexed by events in the novel and the narrator's perspective on them for the simple reason that we have better access to the moral psychology Austen was working with.