Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
William Godwin (1756-1836) was the founder of philosophical anarchism. In his An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) he argued that government is a corrupting force in society, perpetuating dependence and ignorance, but that it will be rendered increasingly unnecessary and powerless by the gradual spread of knowledge. Politics will be displaced by an enlarged personal morality as truth conquers error and mind subordinates matter. In this development the rigorous exercise of private judgment, and its candid expression in public discussion, plays a central role, motivating his rejection of a wide range of co- operative and rule-governed practices which he regards as tending to mental enslavement, such as law, private property, marriage and concerts. Epitomizing the optimism of events in France at the time he began writing, Godwin looked forward to a period in which the dominance of mind over matter would be so complete that mental perfectibility would take a physical form, allowing us to control illness and ageing and become immortal.
Godwin's moral theory is often described as utilitarian. He clearly does play an important part in the history of utilitarianism, not least for his invocation of both British and French writers in the tradition, such as Joseph Priestley and d'Holbach and Helvetius, and for the way that his ethical theory is underpinned by a distinctive rationalist necessarianism on the basis of which he insisted on a strong form of first order impartiality. One of Godwin's lasting contributions to moral philosophy, ‘the famous fire cause’, in which we are asked to consider whom I should save from a burning room if I can only save one person and if the choice is between Archbishop Fénelon and a common chambermaid. Fénelon is about to compose his immortal Télémaque and the chambermaid turns out to be my mother. Godwin's conclusion that we must save the former relies on consequentialist grounds (see I Robot). However, since his account of the content of utility is inseparable from the development of truth and wisdom, and since we can best promote this through the full and free exercise of private judgment and public discussion, the resulting position looks more like a form of perfectionism than utilitarianism.
Godwin's philosophical importance rests principally on his Political Justice. He wrote other philosophical works, The Enquirer (1798) and Thoughts on Man (1831), but he has become perhaps better known for his novels, the most famous of which is Caleb Williams (1794), and for the part he played in literary London from 1783-1836 — from his heyday in the 1790s as the radical philosopher who married Mary Wollstonecraft, through the next forty years in which he was variously the butt of attacks by Thomas Malthus, Samuel Parr and a host of anti-jacobin scribes, friend of the romantic poets, publisher and author of children's books, father-in-law and sponger off Percy Bysshe Shelley, and historian of the Civil War, to his final anomalous position as a government pensioner supported by a Tory administration. His papers and his diary, which sparsely records what he read and wrote and whom he met, provide an immense resource for scholars of the romantic period.
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
"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).
Godwin
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
BOOK VII, OF CRIMES AND PUNISHMENTS, CHAPTER I
LIMITATIONS OF THE DOCTRINE OF PUNISHMENT WHICH RESULT FROM THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY
These arguments are merely calculated to set in a more perspicuous light a principle which is admitted by many by whom the doctrine of necessity has never been examined; that the only measure of equity is utility, and whatever is not attended with any beneficial purpose is not just. This is so evident that few reasonable and reflecting minds will be found inclined to deny it. Why do I inflict suffering on another? If neither for his own benefit nor the benefit of others, can I be right? Will resentment, the mere indignation and horror I have conceived against vice, justify me in putting a being to useless torture? 'But suppose I only put an end to his existence.' What, with no prospect of benefit either to himself or others? The reason in mind more easily reconciles itself to this supposition is that we conceive existence to be less a blessing than a curse to a being incorrigibly vicious. But, in that case, the supposition does not fall within the terms of the question: I am in reality conferring a benefit. It has been asked, 'If we conceive to ourselves two beings, each of them solitary, but the first virtuous, and the second vicious, the first inclined to be the highest acts of benevolence, if his situation were changed for the social the second to malignity, tyranny and injustice, do we not feel that the first is entitled to felicity in preference to the second? If there be any difference in the question, it is wholly caused by the extravagance of the supposition. No being can be either virtuous, or vicious, who has no opportunity of influencing the happiness of others. He may indeed, though now solitary, recollect or imagine a social state; but this sentiment, and the propensities it generates can scarcely be vigorous, unless he have hopes of being at some future time, restored to that state. The true solitaire cannot be considered as a moral being unless the morality we contemplate be that which has relation to his own permanent advantage. But, if that be our meaning punishment, unless for reform, is peculiarly absurd. His conduct vicious, because it has a tendency to render him miserable: shall we inflict calamity upon him, for this reason only, because he has already inflicted calamity upon himself? It is difficult for us to imagine to ourselves a solitary intellectual being, whom no future accident shall ever render social. It is difficult for us to separate, even an idea, virtue and vice from happiness and misery, and, of consequence, not to imagine that, when we bestow a benefit upon virtue, we bestow it where it will turn to account; and when we bestow a benefit upon vice, we bestow it where it will be unproductive. For these reasons, e question of desert, as it relates to a solitary being, will always have a tendency to mislead and perplex. (1793) (http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/godwin/Godwinbiblio.html)
From An Account of a Seminary
"The state of society is incontestably artificial; the power of one man over another must be always derived from convention of from conquest; by nature we are equal. The necessary consequence is, that government must always depend upon the opinion of the governed. Let the most oppressed people under heaven once change their mode of thinking, and they are free…. Government is very limited in its power of making men either virtuous or happy; it is only in the infancy of society that it can do any thing considerable; in its maturity it can only direct a few of our outward actions. But our moral dispositions and character depend very much, perhaps entirely, upon education." (1783) (www.infed.org/thinkers/et-good.htm)
Moral Philosophy
Godwin's advocacy of universal benevolence against which
Parr directed his energies, centering 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 Fénelon, 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 Fénelon.
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.
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. …It also inevitably undermines Godwin's faith in the triumph of mind over physiological processes
Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/godwin/