Chapter 8 focuses on how the strand of legal argument traced in Chapter 7 was deployed by a number of pro-imperialist writers in England in reply to Price, Paine and the American colonists in 1776. The first to take up the claim that liberty is nothing other than absence of restraint were the lawyers John Lind and Richard Hey, and they were soon followed by a large number of other critics of Price, among whom the most prominent were Adam Ferguson, John Welsey and later William Paley. The chapter focuses in particular on three objections generally raised against Price’s account of liberty. The first was that his definition confuses the state of being unfree with that of merely lacking security for the liberty you possess. The second was that he connects liberty with an unviable concept of inalienable natural rights. The third was that, by defining liberty as absence of dependence, and then equating dependence with slavery, he commits himself to a morally indefensible definition of slavery. He forgets that slaves are not merely subject to the will of their masters, but that the chief horror of slavery is that they are also regarded as being their master’s property.

Darwin’s assertion in his Autobiography that the “old argument of design…as given by Paley…fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered” underlines an antithesis between two competing ways of explaining the appearance of design in nature, in one case laden with theological connotations, in the other providing a license for the expansion of scientific naturalism. The contrast between the two has often structured accounts of Darwin’s achievement and has made it easy to suppose that he had been consistently motivated by the desire to refute Paley’s argumentation. The chapter will highlight evidence for significant changes over time, from Darwin’s Cambridge days when he had been “charmed” by Paley’s reasoning about design that, at the time, he considered “so conclusive”, through  to the time of his writing  On the Origin of Species when the conclusion was still “strong in my mind” that there was an intelligent First Cause and when he was still defining “nature” as the “laws ordained by God to govern the universe”, a trope consonant with Paley’s theism. The diachronic trajectory falsifies any claim that Darwin had always been fighting against Paley.  Throughout the chapter, it will be stressed that the fact that Darwin’s theory of natural selection could be presented as a refutation of Paley does not logically mean that it had been devised specifically and deliberately to serve that end.

As soon as newspapers, catering to England’s new urbane peoples, began describing common executions, the crowds attending them were seen as indifferent to their moral message. By the middle of the eighteenth century, execution rituals seemed equally problematic. Critics perceived hangings to be so frequent, so large-scale and so brutalizing to an even minimally refined sensibility as to defeat their deterrent purpose. In 1783, London officials sought to redress these problems by devising a new execution ritual, staged immediately outside the prison and courthouse. Within four decades, this quintessentially urban execution ritual had been adopted in almost all other English counties, even as cities on the continent pointedly moved executions outside urban centres. Yet still executions seemed ineffective. Following a particularly intense crisis in the 1780s, England’s traditional ruling elites sought to preserve the “Bloody Code” by reducing the scale of hangings to historically low levels.

Whig and revisionist historians alike have argued that the efforts of Samuel Romilly and James Mackintosh to reform criminal law between 1808 and 1821 were easily thwarted by a resolute Tory ministry and an ambivalent public opinion. The cause of reform was in fact more powerful than either perspective allows. Urbane public opinion lamented England’s increasingly unique adherence to a wide-ranging death penalty and viewed its victims in more compassionate terms than ever before. Conservatives clung to William Paley’s arguments that a selectively enforced “Bloody Code” was both genuinely deterrent and preferable to either preventive policing or the wider use of secondary punishments. There were limits to the logic of the positions espoused by reformers and conservatives alike. By the 1820s, however, there was good reason to believe that the reform cause was already won in the House of Commons and that victory in the Lords was at least conceivable.

We discuss the basics of evolutionary theory and some of the evidence for it. We also discuss common objections: species are separated by unbridegable gaps, complex structures can't evolve, and irreducible complexity. We also discuss the practical successes of evolution.

Chapter 3 examines the decisive break between religious and secular utilitarianism in the thought of William Paley and Jeremy Bentham. Paley, the better known and more widely respected thinker of the two at the time, is in many ways the paradigm case of the theological version of morality as legislation. Paley, like Locke, used human legislative deliberation as a paradigm of rationality for thinking about the content of the divine law. Bentham’s project must be understood in part as motivated by a desire to reject the theological assumptions of theories like Paley’s that stood in the way of radical reform. It also encouraged a reframing of moral expression as a kind of legislative act. Bentham saw reputational sanctions as one substitute for religious motives for moral action, but this also required a perspectival shift towards a legislative approach when making moral statements.

This concluding chapter revisits the four main themes of the book and ties them into important theories and ideas that emerged after 1750.