Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond. By Daniel Carey. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 276p. $85.00.

Daniel Carey rehabilitates a dispute among John Locke, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Francis Hutcheson “focused on the problem of diversity and the question of whether any moral consistency could be located in mankind” (p. 1). Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in distinct ways respond to Locke's attack on innateness, the idea that “God had implanted ideas or predispositions in the soul which guided the moral actions and beliefs of mankind” (p. 51). Shaftesbury and Hutcheson do so by evoking a “Stoic conception which saw nature as a fund of normative ideas, predispositions, or prolepses that embraced benevolence, sociability, disinterested affection, and the divine, explaining our attachments to friend, family, and nation” (p. 200).