Can You Feel Right and Wrong or Think It Through?
The Playwright Who Impressed John Locke
In 1702, a 23-year-old London playwright did something unexpected. She had already seen two of her plays performed to cheering audiences, but now she put down her scripts and picked up a philosophical pen. Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679–1749) had read the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) and was so impressed that she wrote a whole book defending his ideas. Locke himself was stunned — a young woman, self-taught in philosophy, had understood his work deeply and fought off his critics with sharp arguments. He sent her a generous gift of money and books to show his thanks. That book, A Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay of Human Understanding, launched Cockburn into a lifelong project: building a moral theory that could explain how we know right from wrong, why we feel it matters, and what makes an action truly good.
Cockburn never went to school for philosophy. As a girl she taught herself to write, studied French and Latin, and devoured logic — then turned to writing plays. That independent spirit stayed with her. Over the next decades, she would produce works that blended the most powerful ideas of her time into something all her own. She defended the rationalist theory of Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), tangled with critics who thought morality was just about rewards and punishments, and insisted that our moral feelings need a guide: reason. Her story is about a woman who stepped into a world of powdered wigs and learned gentlemen and showed that a keen mind could hold its own — and maybe even finish the puzzle they had all been working on.
Can Reason Discover Right and Wrong?
Cockburn’s first philosophical battle was about whether we can know moral truths the way we know facts about the natural world. The anonymous author of a pamphlet against Locke claimed that Locke’s empiricism — the view that all knowledge comes from experience — left morality in the dark. If all ideas come from what we see, hear, and touch, how could we ever know something as invisible and certain as a moral duty? The critic argued that Locke’s system made moral ideas shaky, no more certain than guesses about the size of God or the fate of the soul.
Cockburn shot back by unlocking a tool Locke himself had handed her. Locke said experience has two channels: sensation, which gives us ideas of the world outside, and reflection, which gives us ideas of our own minds in action. When you notice yourself thinking, doubting, wanting, or reasoning, you are reflecting. Cockburn argued that by reflecting on how our minds work, we can discover something crucial: human nature. And if human nature is designed by God, then reflecting on it shows us the patterns of life God built in. Morality, for Cockburn, is grounded in that nature, so moral truths are as solid as the fact that a triangle has three sides. Reason — not just feeling — can demonstrate them. This made her a moral rationalist: someone who believes morality is discovered by thinking rather than just by sensing or emoting.
She also added a surprising ingredient early on. Cockburn introduced the idea of conscience, which she described as a “sudden affection.” This wasn’t an alternative to reason. It was more like a quick flash of feeling that arises naturally, almost instinctively, but that still leans on a rational grasp of moral law. The pamphleteer had wanted conscience to be an instant detector of right and wrong — a direct, emotion-based moral sense that needs no thinking. Cockburn replied that conscience is real and important, but it’s not the primary source of moral knowledge. It’s the feeling side, a companion to understanding. Later, she would expand this idea into a full-blown moral sense theory — but one that always kept reason in charge.
Fitness: Actions That Fit Your Human Nature
In the years after her defence of Locke, Cockburn threw herself into a related debate. A powerful theory called moral fitness had grown famous thanks to Samuel Clarke. Moral fitness held that certain actions are simply fit or suitable given what kind of beings we are, while other actions are unfitting. Just as a key fits a lock or a branch bends with the wind, helping others fits a rational, social creature; wanton cruelty does not. These fitness relations aren’t invented by human opinion or even by God’s will alone. They flow from the essential natures of things.
Cockburn saw that Clarke’s picture matched what she had been saying all along about human nature. In her book Remarks upon some Writers (1743), she defended Clarke against critics who wanted to root morality entirely in God’s commands enforced by rewards and punishments. Those critics said: moral rules are just God’s will, and the reason we should obey them is that God will reward the good and punish the bad. Fitness relations, they argued, were not really basic; they were just fancy ways of talking about what God happens to like.
Cockburn turned this criticism around. She argued that a fitness view actually gives a deeper, more stable account of why God’s commands and our interests align. God designed human nature with certain needs, desires, and capacities. What is naturally good for us — what helps us flourish as the kind of beings we are — is what God’s law points to. So natural good and evil are fundamental ideas in morality. When reason grasps that friendship is fit for social animals, it isn’t just logging a command; it’s recognizing something true about the world. Moral obligation, for Cockburn, grows out of the demands of our natures. We should act as is proper for rational and social beings, not just because we fear a penalty, but because it’s what suits who we really are.
When Your Moral Sense Whispers — and Reason Listens
By the time Cockburn wrote her last philosophical work, she was ready to name that companion to reason outright: the moral sense. But she was keen to explain what she didn’t mean. Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) had made the moral sense famous by arguing that it alone is the source of our moral judgments — we sense goodness and badness as directly as we taste sweetness or bitterness. Cockburn thought that gave too much weight to bare feeling and not enough to rational understanding.
For Cockburn, the moral sense is a natural human faculty that produces moral affection — a motivating push toward what is good and a recoil from what is evil. She called it a “sudden affection” to capture how quickly it can stir. But she insisted this sense functions properly only when it works with the “natural perceptions of the understanding.” That is, your feelings of approval or guilt are not blind instincts; they presuppose at least an implicit grasp of what reason has shown to be fitting. If your reason is confused about what truly benefits a human being, your moral sense may guide you badly. Cockburn’s moral sense is like a well-tuned instrument that plays the melody reason has already composed.
This allowed her to solve a problem she spotted in Clarke’s fitness theory. Clarke explained what makes actions right and how we know it, but said less about why we feel pulled to do it. Cockburn answered: the moral sense supplies the pull. In her view, moral obligation isn’t a cold rational deduction; it’s felt. But it’s a feeling shaped by insight, not a raw emotional twitch. This also kept her at arm’s length from Hutcheson’s version, which she worried left morality at the mercy of whatever a person happened to sense — a kind of instinct that could not be corrected by thinking. For Cockburn, your heart can be your compass, but your mind must check the stars.
Why This Still Matters: Head vs. Heart in Everyday Decisions
You have probably felt a sudden pang that something is unfair before you could explain why. Or maybe you have spent a long time puzzling over a tricky choice — whether to keep a promise that suddenly seems costly, or whether a white lie really harms anyone — and then felt a twist of guilt or relief once you made up your mind. Cockburn’s philosophy takes both experiences seriously. She would say that your reason works out the fitness of your choices: what really honors your nature as a person who lives with others. And your moral sense gives you an automatic affection that pushes you toward the fitting action or pricks you when you fall short.
Her blend of moral rationalism, fitness theory, and moral sense still echoes today. Contemporary thinkers debate whether morality is more about principles we can defend with arguments or about emotional responses we can’t help but feel. Some say both, but they disagree about which one should drive. Cockburn’s answer offers a middle way: let reason take the lead, but don’t ignore the quiet, sudden affection that might be telling you something your mind hasn’t fully caught up to yet. That affection isn’t the final word — but it often gives the first one.
Think about it
- Think of a time you felt sure something was wrong even before you could explain why. Later, could you find reasons that matched that feeling? Where do you think the feeling came from?
- If two people use reason carefully and still end up disagreeing on a moral question, does that mean reason alone can’t settle moral issues? What else might be involved?
- Can you imagine a rule that goes against basic human nature — say, a rule that forbids all kindness? Would you say that rule is automatically wrong? Why or why not?
