## 1. Life



Godwin was born on 3 March 1756 at Wisbeach [now Wisbech],
Cambridgeshire, the seventh of thirteen children of John Godwin
(1723-1772) a dissenting minister, and his wife Anne
(c1723-1809), the daughter of Richard Hull, a ship-owner engaged
in the Baltic trade. As a minister Godwin's father was involved
in a number of conflicts with his congregations and the family moved
first from Wisbeach to Debenham, Suffolk and, in 1760 to Guestwick,
near Norwich, Norfolk, where they lived until his father's
death. The village was small and the revenue poor; to supplement their
income they took in pupils to whom John Godwin taught the
classics. The family's financial circumstances improved on the
death of Edward Godwin (1695-1764), Godwin's paternal
grandfather--also a dissenting minister and friend of Philip
Doddridge, in whose Academy Godwin's father and his uncle Edward
had been educated. Godwin's upbringing was rather gloomy. He
was not a robust child and his aunt "instructed me to compose
myself in sleep, with a temper as if I were never again to wake in
this sublunary world" ("Autobiography"
in *Collected Novels and Memoirs* (*CNM* hereafter),
1992, I, 12). At five he was reading *The Pilgrim's
Progress* with her, together with James
Janeway's *Account of the Conversion, holy and exemplary
lives and joyful deaths of several young children* (1671-2),
and hymns, catechisms and prayers written by Dr. Isaac Watts. One of
Godwin's earliest memories was of composing a poem entitled
"I wish to be a minister" (*CNM* I, 15), and a
favourite childhood entertainment was to preach sermons in the kitchen
on Sunday afternoons.



He was first educated by a Mrs. Gedge, an elderly woman, "much
occupied in the concerns of religion", with whom he read the Old
and New Testaments. After her death in 1764, he and his brother went
to Mr. Akers' school in Hilderston (now Hindolverston). Godwin
remained a religious enthusiast and dissenter--preaching to his
fellow schoolchildren, identifying some as "children of the
devil", and refusing to answer questions on the Collect of the
week, taken from the *Book of Common Prayer* (*CNM* I,
24). His success at Akers' reinforced his commitment to
intellectual activity and his aversion to physical toil, and
compounded his pride, for which he was frequently admonished by his
father. Despite his father's opposition, his resolution to
become a minister never wavered, and in 1767 he went to board with a
Mr. Samuel Newton, the minister of an independent congregation in
Norwich.



Newton was deeply influenced by the writings of Robert Sandeman
(1718-1771), a hyper-Calvinist who, scorned faith and presented
God as saving or damning a person solely "according to the right
or wrong judgment of the understanding" (*CNM* I, 30).
Godwin compared Newton in his Autobiography to Caligula or Nero for
his spiteful and violent treatment, and he left him in the early
summer of 1770, having abandoned his calling and decided to become a
bookseller. Six months at Hindolverston persuaded him to resume his
pupillage for a further, final year, after which he was pronounced fit
for entry into the Dissenting College at Homerton and discharged.
Homerton turned him down "on suspicion of Sandemanianism"
(*CNM* I, 41). The more tolerant Hoxton Academy, principally
run by Andrew Kippis and Abraham Rees admitted him. Hoxton was noted
for its Arminianism and Arianism (that is, for the belief that Divine
sovereignty was compatible with free will in man and for the rejection
of the divinity of Christ), but Godwin's Sandemanianism remained
stubbornly untouched, although he supplemented it with "a creed
upon materialism and immaterialism, liberty and necessity, in which no
subsequent improvement of my understanding has been able to produce
any variation" (*CNM* I, 42). In June 1778 he set out to
practice his vocation. He had a brief appointment in Ware, followed by
a period in London, apparently without income, before obtaining a post
in 1780 at Stowmarket, Suffolk. He held the post for two years, during
which time his religious beliefs underwent a revolution, moving
towards deism after he followed the suggestion of one of his
parishioners and read Holbach, Helvetius and Rousseau. Not
surprisingly, he fell into dispute with his congregation and moved to
London in 1782 where friends encouraged him to write for his
living.



Later that year he completed his first work, *The history of the
Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham* (1783), and by the
following year was contributing to the *English Review*,
"at two guineas a sheet". At the end of 1782 he returned
briefly to his original profession, being employed at Beaconsfield in
Buckinghamshire for seven months, during which he produced a volume of
sermons, *Sketches of History* (1783). When this appointment
broke down he returned to London and resumed his career as an
author.



Godwin's output between 1782 and 1784 included, in addition to
his *Life of Chatham* and his sermons, three novels, two
political pamphlets, a work on education, and a spoof of the critical
reviews. None made him much money and it was only when his former
tutor, Andrew Kippis, invited him to write the British and Foreign
History section for the *New Annual Register*, in July 1784,
that he was assured of an adequate income. He probably also made some
money from the pieces he wrote in 1785 for the *Political
Herald*, a Whig journal, edited by Dr. Gilbert Stuart. The
pamphlets, and his pieces for the *Political Herald*, reveal
him to be an extremely well informed commentator on contemporary
affairs. Between 1785 and 1793 Godwin published little save his work
for the *New Annual Register*. Nonetheless, in the summer of
1791, at the height of the debate on the French Revolution, sparked by
Edmund Burke's *Reflections on the Revolution in France*
(1790), he persuaded his publisher, George Robinson, to support him
while he wrote a work summarising recent developments in political
philosophy. The work grew from its original conception and was
eventually published in two volumes in February 1793 as *An Enquiry
Concerning Political Justice*. It is was an immediate success and
remains the founding work of philosophical anarchism. Although Godwin
drew on principles canvassed in the Revolution controversy, and on the
work of the *philosophes*, *Political Justice* was also
powerfully influenced by Godwin's Dissenting education and his
involvement in Dissenting circles around Kippis and Timothy and Thomas
Brand Hollis. His success soon made him a central figure in radical
political and literary circles of London; he become friends with John
Thelwall, Thomas Holcroft, and John Horne Tooke (all of whom were
indicted for Treason in 1794), he associated with a wide range of
other established writers such as Elizabeth Inchbald, James
Mackintosh, and Joseph Ritson, and he was sought out by a younger
generation of enthusiasts, including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge and William Hazlitt. In May 1794 Godwin's most
successful novel, *Things as they are, or The adventures of Caleb
Williams* was published, adding further to his literary
reputation, and in the October of that year his shrewd political
pamphlet, *Cursory Strictures on the Charge delivered by Lord Chief
Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury*, attacked the case for treason
constructed by Eyre against the leaders of the London Corresponding
Society and the Society for Constitutional Information, several of
whom were his close associates.



A second edition of Godwin's *Political Justice*, in
which some of the more rationalist and utopian statements of the first
edition were modified, was published at the end of 1795. Shortly
thereafter he became reacquainted with Mary Wollstonecraft, whom he
had first met briefly in 1791 at a dinner in honour of Paine at which
neither was much impressed by the other. Wollstonecraft had
subsequently lived in revolutionary France and had had a child in a
fraught relationship with Captain Gilbert Imlay, an American merchant.
Their second introduction was more successful. As a young man Godwin
had been very much the philosopher--austere in dress, with an
angular figure, an intense manner and piercing glance. While
approachable he was not socially adept: he both took offence easily
and gave it by his zealous commitment to the virtue of candour among
friends. Only with his increasing success did he come to meet a wide
range of clever women with political, literary and philosophical
interests--such as Helen Maria Williams, Elizabeth Inchbald,
Amelia Alderson, Maria Reveley, Mary Hays and Mary Robinson. This
contact had its effect. He cut his hair short in 1791 and adopted a
less ministerial style of dress; he also enjoyed an increasingly
extensive social life (albeit without any indication of
self-indulgence); and he even experimented in 1796 with holding a
dinner party (which included Parr's daughters, Wollstonecraft,
and Inchbald). He also developed a basic competence in flirtation. In
the last months of 1795 and first half of 1796, Reveley, Samuel
Parr's daughter Sarah, Alderson and Inchbald were all candidates
for his attention. Following their re-acquaintance in January 1796,
Wollstonecraft subsequently called on Godwin, unconventionally, in
April 1796; thereafter they met and corresponded regularly, and by
July they were much closer, becoming lovers in August 1796. Their
letters and notes provide a touching record of a philosophical
relationship gradually subverted by feelings which Godwin found hard
to accommodate intellectually and Wollstonecraft found hard to trust.
Wollstonecraft became pregnant in December and after much deliberation
over how to reconcile their actions to their principles, they married
in March 1797. Wollstonecraft's death following childbirth in
September 1797 left Godwin distraught and burdened with the care of
both the baby Mary (later Mary Shelley) and Fanny Imlay
(Wollstonecraft's illegitimate child )--and with a growing
burden of debt. He threw himself into work: he revised *Political
Justice* for a third, and final time, wrote a hurried memoir of
Wollstonecraft, prepared a collection of her works, and embarked on
his second major novel, *St Leon* (1799).
Wollstonecraft's influence on Godwin's thinking has been
detected by critics in his volume of essays, *The Enquirer*
(1798), and in the revisions made for the third edition of
*Political Justice*, published at the end of 1797. A rather
different sense of their relationship was recorded by him in his
*Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of
Women* (1798), and in his depiction of marriage in *St.
Leon* (1799). The *Memoirs* provoked a storm of controversy
by their revelations of Wollstonecraft's unconventional sexual
mores. Several of Godwin's past acquaintances spurned him, he
found himself increasingly the subject of attack by loyalist
newspapers, and his philosophical opinions were parodied and ridiculed
in novels, reviews and pamphlets. Godwin reacted with dignity. His
*Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr. Parr's Spital
Sermon* (1801), sought dispassionately to answer his critics and
to confess errors which he now recognized--and which had already
been acknowledged both in the revisions to the later editions of his
Enquiry, and in his comments in *St. Leon*. But the reply did
little to rescue him from the now overwhelming tide of reaction, and
incautious remarks in his discussion of Malthus' *Essay on
the Principle of Population* (1798) about exposing children and
abortion, were seized upon with glee by the reviewers. Godwin's
*Political Justice* was a product of the enthusiasm connected
with the French Revolution but by the end of the decade the author and
his works were being exuberantly denounced by loyalism and the forces
of reaction that increasingly dominated the British political and
literary scene. Hereafter, for most of the rest of his life, Godwinism
became a term of opprobrium. In the new, intolerant political climate
Godwin turned to literature and history. He tried his hand at drama
with two plays, *Antonio* (1800) and *Faulkener* (1807),
but with no success; in 1803 he wrote a two volume *Life of
Chaucer*; and two years later he produced a further novel,
*Fleetwood: or The New Man of Feeling* (1805). To cope with his
domestic responsibilities he looked for a new wife, approaching
Harriet Lee who found him too pressing, Maria Reveley too soon after
the death of her husband, and Sarah Elwes, a woman separated from her
husband, who was unable to marry. When a widow with two children, Mary
Jane Clairmont, leaned over her balcony in 1801 and asked "Is it
possible that I behold the immortal Godwin", his fate was
sealed.



In 1805, in an effort to establish his finances on a more secure
footing, his friends helped establish him as the proprietor of a
children's bookshop. Over the next ten years, writing mainly
under the pseudonym Edward Baldwin, Godwin produced a variety of books
for children: including collections of fables, myths, and bible
stories, histories of England, Rome and Greece, and various
dictionaries and grammars, but he wrote little of any real political
or philosophical significance for ten years.



In 1814 Godwin's domestic life was thrown into turmoil when
Percy Bysshe Shelley eloped to France with Godwin's
seventeen-year-old daughter Mary, accompanied by Mary's sixteen
year old stepsister, Clare Clairmont. The following decade was marked
by repeated family and financial crises, by the suicides of
Shelley's first wife, Godwin's stepdaughter Fanny, and of
his young protege Patrickson, and by the deaths of three
of Mary Shelley's children, followed hard by the death of
Shelley himself in 1822. Yet it was also a productive period for
Godwin. His *Lives of Edward and John Philips, nephews of
Milton* (1815), his chilling tale of madness, *Mandeville*
(1817), and his four volume *History of the Commonwealth*
(1824-8) each represent his fascination with the republicanism
of the civil war period. He also returned to the subject of education
in his *Letters of Advice to a Young American* (1818) and in
1820 he produced a lengthy critique of Malthus' *Essay*,
which won him some respect in some previously hostile quarters,
alongside the undisguised enmity of the *Edinburgh Review*. In
the last five years of his life he wrote two further novels, and he
returned to the philosophical and terrain of his earlier career in his
*Thoughts on Man* (1831), his most sustained piece of
philosophy since his *Enquirer* (1798). His final work,
unpublished in his lifetime, was a series of essays on Christianity,
in which he fulfilled an ambition, first noted in 1798, to 



> 
> 
> sweep away the whole fiction of an intelligent former world and a
> future state; to call men off from those incoherent and contradictory
> dreams, that so often occupy their thoughts, and vainly agitate their
> fears; and to lead them to apply their whole energy to practical
> objects and genuine realities. (*Political and Philosophical
> Writings* (*PPW* hereafter) IV, 417) 
> 
> 
> 



In 1833 Godwin finally received some recognition when he was given a
sinecure post by the then Whig government. Peel's subsequent
administration agreed to extend the post until Godwin died in April
1836.


## 2. Reputation



Hazlitt famously described Godwin's reputation in the 1790s in
an essay in his *Spirit of the Age*(1825): 



> 
> 
> No work gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the country as
> the celebrated Enquiry ... Tom Paine was considered for a time as
> Tom Fool to him, Paley and old woman, Edmund Burke a flashy sophist.
> Truth, moral truth, it was supposed had here taken up its abode; and
> these were the oracles of thought. 
> 
> 
> 



Godwin himself confirms the view. When travelling in the Midlands in
1794 he found that 



> 
> 
> I was nowhere a stranger. The doctrines of that work, (his Enquiry
> Concerning Political Justice) coincided in a great degree with the
> sentiments then prevailing in English Society, and I was everywhere
> received with curiosity and kindness. (Marshall, *William
> Godwin*, 1984: 121) 
> 
> 
> 



Only six years later, reflecting on his reputation, he wrote,



> 
> I have fallen (if I have fallen) in one common grave with the cause
> and love of liberty; and in this sense I have been more honoured and
> illustrated in my decline, than ever I was in the highest tide of my
> success. (*PPW* II, 165)
> 



Philosophically Godwin's greatest supporters were his
contemporaries, such as Thomas Holcroft and John Thelwall, and a
younger generation of men (and some literary women) who were attracted
to Godwin's intellectual rigour and his radical critique of the
social and political order. Many later abandoned him, Coleridge,
Wordsworth and Southey as part of a rising tide of loyalist reaction,
Shelley and Byron, for more personal and domestic reasons. However,
his philosophical anarchism had a profound influence on Robert Owen,
William Thompson and other utopians in the nineteenth century, and
there is also evidence of influence on the Chartist movement and on
popular labour movements for political reform in the 1840s (see
Marshall 1984: 390). His impact in literary circles was long lasting,
both through his political writings, and through his novels.
*Political Justice* was read and translated by Benjamin
Constant in France, and an abridged edition was translated into German
in 1803, along with the first three of Godwin's mature novels.
Marx and Engels knew of his work and cited him as having contributed
to a theory of exploitation, and as being widely read by the
proletariat. Later in the nineteenth century Anton Menger and Paul
Eltzbacher introduced Godwin's work to German audiences, leading
to further translation. Caleb Williams appeared in Russian in 1838,
and Chernyshevski, Kroptkin and Tolstoy all read and referred to him.
In the late nineteenth century the last book of *Political
Justice*, formally titled "Of Property", but dealing
with the prospects for progress in the human race and including his
attacks on marriage and co-operation, was reprinted as a socialist
tract, and the whole work was reprinted again in the 1920s. A critical
edition of the third edition with variants appeared in 1946, and an
edition of the 1793 text with both later variants and material from
the original manuscripts appeared in 1993. Biographies of Godwin have
also appeared regularly since the first by C. Kegan-Paul in 1876,
which drew heavily on the extensive manuscript sources. Philosophical
interest has been less pronounced, although since the 1940s a slow
trickle of books has emerged which have sought to do justice to
Godwin's essentially liberal political principles and to his
moral philosophy. That work has recognised the importance of thinkers
of the French Enlightenment, and more recently the Dissenting
inheritance which his education and early career provided. As a
result, the traditional view of Godwin as a strict utilitarian has
been increasingly challenged. Recent work in political philosophy on
the appropriate form and scope of impartiality has looked to Godwin,
most commonly to define a position to resist, but not exclusively
so. There has also been an upsurge of interest in Godwin amongst literary scholars and historians studying the romantic period, producing a range of work examining a much wider span of Godwin's corpus than has hitherto been the case and especially exploring the contribution that his Diary can make to understaning the political culture of London in the period.


## 3. Political Philosophy



Godwin's major philosophical treatise is his *Enquiry
Concerning Political Justice*. The work went through three
editions within 5 years, each with substantial changes. No further
edition was published in Godwin's lifetime, although a fourth
edition was certainly mooted and Godwin may have undertaken work
towards it. Although Godwin's other works shed light on changes
in Godwin's position after 1798, *Political Justice* is
the most coherent expression of his political philosophy.



The work began as an attempt to review recent developments in
political and moral philosophy, but it quickly became more ambitious
in scope:



> 
> In the first fervour of enthusiasm I entertained the vain imagination
> of "hewing a stone from rock" which by its inherent energy
> and weight should overbear and annihilate all opposition, and place
> the principles of politics on an unmoveable basis. (*CNM* I,
> 49)
> 



The discarded first draft centres on the work of Montesquieu and
Raynal, while the published work abandons the expository mode and
develops its own independent line of argument. Godwin begins by
defending the importance of political inquiry and refuting claims that
moral and political phenomena are a function of climate, national
character or luxury. He argues that character is a function of
experience and that the type of government under which people live has
an overwhelming impact upon their experience--bad government
produces wretched men and women. Although he is initially prepared to
endorse the *philosophe* and republican view that government
can have a positive impact on the development of virtue, this view is
soon set aside in favour of the argument that moral and political
improvement flows from progress in our understanding of moral and
political truth--a process to which there is no limit.



Book Two examines the basic principles of human society, equality,
rights, justice, and private judgment. Godwin follows Paine's
view in *Common Sense*, that "society is in every state a
blessing...government even in its best state is but a necessary
evil" (*PPW* III, 48), by seeing society as antecedent to
government with its principles setting the bounds of its legitimacy.
The basic moral principle is that of justice:



> 
> If justice have any meaning, it is just that I should contribute
> everything in my power to the benefit of the whole. (*PPW* III,
> 49)
> 



This principle is filled out by two further principles. The first,
equality, is used to establish that we are beings of the same nature,
susceptible of the same pleasures and pains, and equally endowed with
the capacity for reason. This is to endorse the *philosophe*
principle that birth and rank must not affect the way people are
treated--



> 
> the thing really to be desired is the removing as much as possible
> arbitrary distinctions, and leaving to talents and virtue the field of
> exertion unimpaired (*PPW* III, 65).
> 



But he also believes (as in the Fenelon case) that some have a
higher moral value than others. This judgment seems rigorously
consequentialist, in that we value them more if and only if they
contribute more to the general good (a position in line with
Godwin's rejection in Book Seven of all desert-based accounts of
punishment). Tensions are introduced into his account, however, by the
emphasis he places on intention in assessing a person's
action--



> 
> It is in the disposition and view of the mind, and not in the good
> which may accidentally and inintentionally result, that virtue
> consists. (*PPW* III, 193)
> 



and by his characterisation of the ideal agent as someone devoted to a
life of benevolence and virtue. In both instances he appeals to an
agent-centred account of virtue, more than to a consequentialist
account, and in doing so acknowledges a form of moral worth that is
not wholly reducible to consequentialist considerations.



The second principle to which he appeals, the doctrine of private
judgment, is advanced as the logical complement to the principle of
justice:



> 
> to a rational being there is but one rule of conduct, justice, and one
> mode of ascertaining that rule, the exercise of his understanding.
> (*PPW*, III, 72).
> 



Here again, although Godwin appeals in part to consequentialist
considerations to ground a duty to private judgment, it also plays an
integral part on his conception of what it is to be a fully rational
agent. When combined with the principle of equality, the principle of
private judgment issues in a basic constraint on certain types of
consequentialist intervention--each person acts morally only in
so far as each acts wholly on the dictates of his or her private
judgment. To effect real improvement we must work by appealing to the
rational capacities of each of our fellow citizens.



Book Three and the first part of Book Four develop Godwin's case
against existing theories of government, in each case making his case
by drawing on his opening argument that there is no intrinsic limit on
the development of human understanding and enlightenment. The
philosophical underpinning for this argument is given in the second
half of Book Four where Godwin examines the character of truth and its
relationship to virtue and goes on to discuss arguments relating to
freedom of the will, the doctrine of philosophical necessity, and the
character of moral motivation. He shows that men are capable of
recognising truth, and that, because mind acts as a real cause, they
will act on it when they perceive it clearly. Nothing beyond the
perception of truth is required to motivate our compliance with moral
principles. It is this which justifies the description of
Godwin's position as "rationalist", and it is on
this point--the motivating power of reason--that later
editions show a degree of retraction. One possible source for the
position is Richard Price's *Review of the Principal
Questions of Morals* (1756), but it is noteworthy that Godwin
himself later identified this "error" as a function of his
Sandemanianism. In *Political Justice*, however, Godwin builds
his argument on necessarian foundations laid by David Hartley and
Joseph Priestley, albeit he develops their position by insisting that
mind is the medium within which sensations, desires, passions and
beliefs contend--so that we should understand the conflict
between passion and reason as one of contending opinions. Such
contention can be assessed impartially by the mind which will assess
the true value of each claim and act on the judgment.



Books Five to Eight apply the principles of justice, equality and
private judgment in a critical examination of the institutions of
government, issues of toleration and freedom of speech, theories of
law and punishment, and, finally, the institution of property. In each
case, government and its institutions are shown to constrain the
development of our capacity to live wholly in accordance with the full
and free exercise of private judgment. In the final book Godwin
sketches his positive vision of the egalitarian society of the future,
one which, having dispensed with all forms of organised co-operation,
including orchestras and marriage, so as to ensure the fullest
independence to each persons' judgment, will gradually witness
the development of the powers of mind to the point that they gain
ascendancy over physiological process allowing life to be prolonged
indefinitely.



In 1800 Godwin wrote:



> 
> The Enquiry concerning Political Justice I apprehend to be blemished
> principally by three errors. 1. Stoicism, or an inattention to the
> principle, that pleasure and pain are the only bases upon which
> morality can exist. 2. Sandemanianism, or an inattention to the
> principle that feeling, and not judgment, is the source of human
> actions. 3. The unqualified condemnation of the private affections. It
> will easily be seen how strongly these errors are connected with the
> Calvinist system, which had been so deeply wrought into my mind in
> early life, as to enable these errors long to survive the general
> system of religious opinions of which they formed a part...The
> first of these errors...has been corrected with some care in the
> subsequent edition of Political Justice. The second and third owe
> their destruction to a perusal of Hume's *Treatise of Human
> Nature* in the following edition. (*CNM*, I, 54)
> 



This account is a fair characterisation of the changes which Godwin
made in the second and third editions. Sentiment and feeling are given
a much more powerful role, no longer to be expunged by the power of
truth; the private affections are allowed to play a part in moral
reasoning; and a more consistently utilitarian language is deployed
throughout the work. As a consequence, the rationalism which marked
the first edition becomes muted and, while the belief in progress is
maintained, the more utopian flights of the first edition are
omitted.


## 4. Moral Philosophy



One of the most powerful attacks on Godwin was that made in Dr. Samuel
Parr's "Spital Sermon" of 1800. It was
Godwin's advocacy of universal benevolence against which Parr
directed his energies, centring his attack on Godwin's early
dismissal of family feeling, gratitude and various natural sentiments.
For Godwin, these are passions unconstrained by judgment, and so
should not play a role in determining how we should act. He
exemplifies his case in what has come to be known as the "Famous
Fire Cause", in which the reader is asked to imagine being able
to save only one of two people in a fire, one of whom is the
Archbishop Fenelon, a benefactor to the whole human race, the
other of whom is the reader's parent (mother in the first
edition, father thereafter!). Godwin's view is that justice
demands that we act impartially for the greater good, which means
saving Fenelon. He never abandoned this case, nor the view that
it is our duty to act to bring about the greatest good. Just as a
judge should not be influenced by familial or private concerns in his
judgment, so too is the moral agent bound to judge impartially. In
replying to Parr, Godwin expresses regret that he had not appealed to
the still more persuasive case of Brutus executing his two
sons--a striking example, and a republican commonplace about
justice trumping paternal duties. As Godwin says, saving someone just
because they are a relation seems bizarre without some additional
judgment about their moral worth: a parent who is foolish or evil
cannot have an over-riding claim on us against the moral deserts of
all other members of the human race. That position, Godwin retains.
Moreover, in his *Reply to Parr*, he insists that these
extraordinary cases are unlikely to shake the domestic affections in
the ordinary intercourse of life. However, from the later editions and
other works, it becomes clear that he will admit, in the more normal
course of events, a much more substantial role to be played by our
natural affections and attachments. They provide us both with
information about how best we might benefit others, and a basic moral
motivation which can be relied on in normal cases and which can be
generalised beyond the narrow domestic sphere (a position much
indebted to Adam Smith's *Theory of Moral Sentiments*).
These changes are significant: it leaves us a less rationalist, more
philosophically robust, account of moral motivation and its
relationship to the principle of utility, and it does much to moderate
the utopianism of the first edition.



The impact of these changes on Godwin's over-all position is
more difficult to assess. What we see in the changes is a consistent
shift away from the rationalist account of moral motivation which
marked the first edition to a position which is much more sceptical
about the power of reason. This scepticism inevitably moderates
Godwin's belief in perfectibility, since it becomes more
difficult to argue for convergence on principles of morality and the
progressive development of knowledge. It also inevitably undermines
Godwin's faith in the triumph of mind over physiological
processes. That said, neither the doctrine of private judgment nor the
principle of utility depend on his earlier rationalism. The former is
defended by Godwin on the grounds that only free action has moral
value, and that the fullest possible exercise of private judgment is
required for one's actions to be free--further evidence of
Godwin's attempt to provide an agent-centred account of virtue
alongside his consequentialism. With this commitment private judgment
remains defensible even if there is a low probability that its
exercise will produce true beliefs, so long as no other better method
of tracking truth is available (which also becomes proportionately
less likely as one's scepticism increases). The defence might
require that cognitive status be attributed to moral judgments, but it
might also be possible to sustain the argument for private judgment
independent of the issue of ethical objectivity. The utility principle
might seem to call for an ability to make sound ethical judgments in
complex situations but, again, if we are sceptical about
people's ability to judge well, this does not entail (and seems
to deny) that there is a better way of judging. On both counts then,
Godwin's central principles remain intact despite the changes he
makes to the account of moral motivation and judgment. Moreover,
Godwin's view of man's progressive character might be
defended by placing greater weight on eliminating the baleful effects
of the social and political institutions of the European aristocracies
than on the epistemological dimensions of the account.



However, Godwin's endorsement of both the principle of utility
as the sole guide to moral duty and the principle of private judgment
as a block on the interference of others, is not without tensions. His
consistent doctrine is a combination of these two principles: that it
is each individual's duty to produce as much happiness in the
world as he is able, and that each person must be guided in acting by
the exercise of his private judgment, albeit informed by public
discussion. If the resulting doctrine is utilitarian it is a highly
distinctive form: it is act-utilitarian in that it discounts reliance
on rules (although see Barry's suggestion that his act-
utilitarianism gives way to motive utilitarianism, *Justice as
Impartiality* 224; and see Godwin's invocation of sincerity
as a partial rule constraint in the first edition, *PPW* III,
135-42); it is ideal, in that it acknowledges major qualitative
differences in the pleasures; and it is indirect, in that we can only
promote over-all utility by improving the understanding of our fellow
human beings. More troubling to the view that this none the less
amounts to utilitarianism is Godwin's insistence on private
judgment as a basic constraint, and his associated characterisation of
the fully moral agent in terms of the fullest possible development of
the individual's intellectual powers and potential. Indeed,
Godwin's account of pleasure, in terms of the development of
intellect and the exercise of its powers, means that the position
looks more like perfectionism than it does a form of hedonistic
utilitarianism (what is valued is the ideal as much as the pleasures
which are integral to it). Furthermore, it suggests that no
distinction can be drawn between the means that we adopt to promote
the general good and the character of the general good itself. That
is, what promotes the general good is the development of human
intellect, but the general good just is the development of the human
intellect. If that is true, Godwin's account cannot be
utilitarian because it cannot be consequentialist (because it cannot
separate the means to the end from the end which is sought).



Such issues of interpretation remain very much in dispute in studies
of Godwin (compare Clarke 1977 with Philp 1986 and Lamb 2009a), being
complicated by issues concerning the weight to be given to the
different editions of
*Political Justice* and Godwin's later writings. However,
even if a utilitarian reading of Godwin is accepted, it remains the
case that the doctrine is strictly a precept of individual moral
judgment. Because of his broader views as to the corrupting influence
of government, there can be no extension of the principle to politics.
Each of us must judge as best we can how to advance the good of all,
but every person is owed a respect for their private judgment which
precludes us from exercising authority over them. By invoking this
constraint, Godwin delivers utilitarianism from the more statist
approaches of Bentham and later utilitarians. It also ensures that the
doctrine retains a fundamentally egalitarian form. The constraint also
supports the view that Godwin reached his philosophical position less
through the *philosophes*, than by secularising Dissenting
arguments for the sanctity of private judgment and generalising their
application to every mode of human activity. This commitment also
provides support for a reading of Godwin's position which sees
it as concerned with individual moral perfectibility, couched in the
language of utility, rather than as strictly utilitarian.


## 5. A Philosophy of History



*Political Justice* condemns all government interference with
individual judgment. Godwin claims that over time history has seen
gradual progress as knowledge has developed and has spread and as men
and women have liberated themselves from their political chains and
their subordination to the fraud and imposture of monarchical and
aristocratic government and established religion. His optimistic
belief in the impotence of government against advancing opinion (which
partly glosses and extends Hume's comment that all government is
founded on opinion) is balanced by some sociologically perceptive
comments on the baleful influence that certain types of political
power have on those who exercise it or are subject to it. These
insights are also explored in The *Enquirer*, but it is in
Godwin's later novels, from *Caleb Williams* (1794)
onward, that it is given its fullest rein. As Godwin indicates in his
unpublished essay, "On History and Literature" (1798)
(*PPW* V, 290-301), literature can be used to show how
the cultures and institutions into which we are born come inexorable
to shape our lives, leading us to act in ways which destroy our
chances of happiness. The six mature novels effectively follow through
the critical enterprise launched in *Political Justice* by
their narrative histories of men who are brought to grief by the
aristocratic and inegalitarian principles of their societies.