Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904) was an Anglo-Irish reformer who wrote about moral theory and moral epistemology, religion, evolution, duties to animals, feminism, welfare, mind and body, unconscious thought and aesthetics. In 1897 the American suffragist Frances Willard said of Cobbe that ‘distinguished critical authorities have assigned her the rank of greatest among living English women’. Cobbe’s biographer Ellen Mitchell agrees: ‘By the last quarter of the nineteenth century she was the most important British woman writer of intellectual prose’. Cobbe’s ideas were widely discussed – by Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick amongst others. Yet after her death Cobbe fell rapidly out of view, as has so often been the case for philosophical women.
In the last twenty years feminist scholars have rediscovered Cobbe, but they have focussed on her campaigning activity, especially for women’s suffrage and against animal experimentation. In this recent scholarship Cobbe is typically described as a journalist, a reformer and a campaigner. But she also wrote philosophical books and essays. Her first book was a two-volume philosophical treatise, the Essay on Intuitive Morals, in which she put forward an original and systematic moral theory. That theory provided the basis on which she subsequently addressed many practical and political issues, in light of which she revised her theory in turn. Her activism and philosophy informed and fed into one another.
To be sure, Cobbe was not a professional academic philosopher. That was not a possibility open to her when she began writing in the 1850s. But Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were not professional philosophers either. On the contrary they ‘were, and considered themselves to be, writers, polemicists, and thinkers’. No-one today, though, takes that to disqualify either Bentham or Mill from having been central figures for nineteenth-century British philosophy. Neither, then, should we take Cobbe’s campaigning and journalistic activities to disqualify her from being a philosopher; rather, they show that she wanted to put her philosophical theorising to practical use.
Cobbe develops her ethical theory in the Essay on Intuitive Morals which sets the direction for her subsequent thought. The Essay was published in 1855 and 1857 anonymously, then reissued in 1864 under Cobbe’s name, for by then she was well known. Cobbe starts out from the concept of duty. A duty, she argues, is something one is obliged to do or refrain from doing. Anything that is a duty is obligatory for all rational agents, i.e. all beings that are able both to grasp what is obligatory and do it because it is obligatory. A duty, then, is equivalent to an imperative or law. But in its concept, a law requires a law-giver; and a moral law requires a supremely good law-giver – God. Thus Cobbe argues for the existence of God from the concept of duty: ‘the abstract law of right is resumed in One righteous will’ (Intuitive Morals vol. 1: 14).
God, then, has created us as rational agents able and required to follow the moral law. Yet evidently God has also created us finite and embodied, and so there are always liable to be conflicts between our immediate interests and the requirements of the moral law. In these conflicts, we are susceptible to the temptation to put our interests first. God has made us this way, however, because it is the necessary condition of our being able to choose to obey the moral law freely, and to advance towards virtue by putting rational obligations above self-interest. In addition, because we are finite, we can suffer or be happy. Given this, Cobbe further deduces that the moral law tells us to love our neighbours as ourselves, i.e. to foster others’ happiness – for God, being good, does not want anyone to suffer needlessly.
Although God is supremely good and has created us as rational agents capable of virtue, suffering and imperfection as well as wrongdoing abound. There must therefore be an afterlife in which our souls continue to develop morally, until ultimately a state of complete virtue and happiness will be reached. So for Cobbe, ultimately, we must be immortal if morality is to be possible; she went on to call this the moral argument for immortality. We must be immortal to be able to make moral progress, and so realise God’s purpose for us, beyond the imperfections of this world.
Evidently, Cobbe is heavily influenced by Kant, but there are key differences, as Sandra Peacock shows. First, whereas Kant begins from freedom, Cobbe begins from duty. Second, Cobbe treats the moral law as being commanded by God, so that it is a religious law throughout. Thus she makes religion and morality co-extensive: ‘Morality necessarily includes Religion, and … the same Intuition which teaches us disinterested obedience to the Law because it is Right, teaches us also disinterested Obedience to that Will which is Righteous’ (Intuitive Morals vol. 1: 193). On her account, there can be no atheist morality. Third, Cobbe claims that the concepts of duty, God and immortality and their immediate implications are known intuitively. Intuitionists generally are divided into rationalists, for whom basic moral truths are known a priori, and sentimentalists; Cobbe is on the rationalist side. That duties are laws binding on all rational agents is intuitive for her in that it is immediately known to follow directly from the concept of duty. Indeed, Cobbe’s whole approach is to start with the concept of duty and derive its immediate consequences; from there she derives a comprehensive account of our further moral and religious obligations.
In Intuitive Morals Cobbe criticised the dominant moral theory in nineteenth-century Britain, utilitarianism. Cobbe’s critique runs as follows. For utilitarianism, the good consists in the general happiness, and the reason why this is and can be known to be good is because everyone in fact wants their own happiness. But as everyone wants their own happiness, they either will in fact or ought to pursue that. So people either have no possibility of or no grounds for pursuing the general happiness except when it happens to coincide with their own happiness. Yet the two often conflict. Since utilitarians nonetheless hold that we ought to promote the general happiness, they need another, non-utilitarian account of the source of this requirement. That is, they need to show why we have a duty to promote the general happiness irrespective of our own interests. Thus, what is needed is an account of the independent obligating force of duty. This central role of duty returns us to Cobbe’s moral theory, on which there is (with utilitarianism) a duty to promote the welfare and minimise the suffering of others, but where (against utilitarianism) this duty derives from the transcendental obligating force of the moral law.
Cobbe’s moral theory is an original synthesis of Kantianism, intuitionism, theism and anti-utilitarianism. Cobbe has sometimes been misunderstood because she herself claimed to be ‘popularising’ Kant – despite immediately adding that rather than giving exact exposition she was actually synthesising several ethical theories into a new whole (Intuitive Morals vol. 1: vii). Reviewing several books by Cobbe in 1865, Francis Newman said she had underplayed her own originality – which, for Newman, consisted above all in her view that ‘the moral and the religious are intimately, indissolubly combined’. Compare Jerome Schneewind in 1965, castigating Cobbe for giving an inaccurate popularisation of Kant – ‘largely expository, … more enthusiastic than accurate, … [and full of] confusion’. The difference in tone between Newman and Schneewind illustrates how Cobbe was taken more seriously by philosophers in the nineteenth than the twentieth century – as were, incidentally, such other nineteenth-century women as George Eliot and Harriet Martineau.
Cobbe’s integration of morality with religion may seem unappealing to contemporary secular-minded philosophers. But Cobbe’s position led her to develop a number of interesting arguments regarding science, practical ethics and atheism. Initially Cobbe favoured an accommodation between religion and science, and she accepted Darwinian evolution and took it to be compatible with God’s having originally created the world. However, by the 1870s her belief in the compatibility of science and religion was breaking down.
This breakdown came from several directions. For one, vivisection became standard practice in British science over the nineteenth century, and many scientists including Darwin explicitly defended it. In 1863 Cobbe argued that vivisection was permissible under certain limitations. We have a duty to reduce the sufferings of others including animals, but humans’ principal duties as rational agents are to other rational agents, so animals can be made to suffer if this is necessary for either basic human needs or higher human purposes such as truth-seeking – although only insofar as this is strictly necessary, thus using anaesthetics wherever possible.
Having led the British campaign for legal regulation of vivisection in the 1870s, Cobbe changed her philosophical position after 1876 when new regulations became law, for she thought that they actually served not to protect animals but only to provide vivisectionists with legitimacy. Her new view, expressed in ‘Zoophily’ (1882), was that vivisection was wrong absolutely, violating our duty to cultivate feelings of sympathy and compassion for suffering others. This was part of a turn in her thought away from rational agency and towards the emotions of sympathy and compassion. God was now primarily the God of love, whom we must love partly by loving our neighbours, including animal neighbours. Science, on the other hand, Cobbe now saw as encouraging a spirit of cruelty and promoting the ‘survival of the fittest’ (Herbert Spencer’s phrase), whereas her Christian ethics of compassion centred on compassion for the weak and those in need.
Cobbe also observed with dismay the rise of scientism – the extension of science into every practical and theoretical arena. She was unhappy about the rise of agnosticism and atheism, which often claimed a scientific basis and went hand-in-hand with the view that morality could be upheld and even strengthened when put on new, non-religious, scientific foundations – usually utilitarian. Cobbe disagreed; as she saw it, morality had Christian underpinnings without which it could not survive. First she grounded morality on religion on the basis that the moral law requires a divine law-giver; then that the ethics of compassion requires a God of love; and finally she came to hold that the whole of horizon of meaningful, value-laden life requires reference to transcendence.
In developing these views Cobbe particularly engaged with other women, including George Eliot, whom Cobbe admired. To Cobbe, the fact that there are virtuous agnostics such as Eliot showed not that virtue is possible without Christianity but that the conduct of these agnostics is still tacitly shaped by a Christian inheritance. ‘In Christendom every idea and every feeling have imperceptibly been built up on the theory that there is a God. We see everything with Him for a background’ (‘Magnanimous Atheism’, 49). Over time, if this background died out, the moral consequences would be disastrous. Intriguingly, Cobbe referred here to a remark by the Unitarian minister James Martineau (Harriet Martineau’s estranged brother) that: ‘If it could be known that God was dead, the news would cause but little excitement in the streets of Berlin or Paris’. Cobbe replied: on the face of it, yes; but underneath, the impact of the ‘news’ is epochal and catastrophic. Going on to debate the matter with another woman philosopher of the time, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), Cobbe maintained that secular ethicists ‘have imagined that they had merely to choose between morality with religion, or morality without religion. But the only choice for them is between morality and religion together, or the relinquishment both of morality and religion’ (‘Agnostic Morality’, 793).
We may not agree with Cobbe’s conclusions, but hopefully we can agree that she had an original and distinctive philosophical perspective. Over time, she elaborated its bearings on a wide range of issues – in practical ethics and politics; in aesthetics; in moral epistemology; in metaphysics, addressing amongst other things the mind-body relation and the nature of God and the afterlife; and in culture and history, where she considered how far there had been moral progress in history. The scope and coherence of Cobbe’s thought show that she was a systematic, comprehensive and ambitious nineteenth-century philosopher. Much of her work is freely available on the internet, particularly from the HathiTrust digital archive.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or Associate Editor Julinna Oxley.
Alison Stone
Alison Stone is Professor of Philosophy at Lancaster University (UK). She has published books on Hegel, feminist philosophy, and popular music and is co-editing, with Lydia Moland, the Oxford Handbook of American and British Women Philosophers in the Nineteenth Century.
