The philosophical anarchist William Godwin (1756–1836) has long been celebrated and excoriated for what Charles Lamb later dubbed “the famous fire cause.”1 Lamb refers to one of the most audacious propositions in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), Godwin’s major philosophical work. Suppose you were given the choice of saving Archbishop Fénelon or his chambermaid from a burning palace. (Fénelon was the author of Les aventures de Télémaque (1699), a thinly veiled attack on the French monarchy.) According to Godwin, the truly benevolent individual would save Fénelon because of his superior value to humanity—even if the chambermaid were one’s wife or mother: “What magic is there in the pronoun ‘my,’ to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth?”2