I was going to put up a few more pages on Lady Mary Shepherd and William Whewell at H.L., but since I have a headache, I'm going home. Let me know what you think of the current pages, though. It's up to three pages for LMS and two for WW; I hope to start putting in some sort of commentary apparatus next week.
Lady Mary Shepherd
William Whewell
(All the pages can be reached from the sidebar menus at these two sites.)
Future pages that will be added will include Whewell's discussion of why the utilitarian's principle of utility is like the principle of least action, a discussion of the role of law in morality, and Shepherd on the existence of God.
One of the reason I am interested in Whewell's moral philosophy, by the way, is that he provides a powerful set of responses to utilitarianism, or, as I like to call it (usually to annoy utilitarians), moral Paleyanism or moral design theory. But more generally, it really is something of a travesty that in our current education of philosophy students in ethics they have all heard of Bentham and never heard of Whewell, despite the fact that Whewell has ten times the philosophical genius of Bentham.
