Political Philosophy and Ethics discussion

"What did Socrates mean by his Daemon? He was too wise to believe, and too honest to pretend that he had real and familiar converse with a superior and invisible being. He probably considered the suggestions of his conscience, or reason, as revelations, or inspirations from the Supreme mind, bestowed, on important occasions, by a special superintending providence."

Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 12, 1813, in The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, ed. Lester J. Cappon (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 385.

What Thomas Jefferson and other deistic Founders meant by "providence" is not entirely clear.

Excerpt from Alan E. Johnson, The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience (Pittsburgh: Philosophia Publications, forthcoming) (copyright © 2015 by Alan E. Johnson, all rights reserved):

Roger Williams had a profoundly ethical approach to the world. Although his ethical sense was based on the life and teachings of Jesus, it was not necessarily limited to a religious perspective. As Baptist ethicist Paul D. Simmons observed in a book published in 2000, "Ethics is a common ground for discussions between Baptists and humanists. The Roger Williams tradition among Baptists provides a sympathetic and at times compatible, if not always consistent, point of interest and identification with humanism."108 Thomas Jefferson, who did not accept the theology of the New Testament, wrote to John Adams that one must strip the artificial theology of Jesus's epigones out of the New Testament, and "[t]here will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man."109 Jefferson undertook this task for himself and his friends.110


108. Paul D. Simmons, introduction to Freedom of Conscience: A Baptist/Humanist Dialogue , ed. Paul D. Simmons (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 12.

109. Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 12, 1813, in The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, ed. Lester J. Cappon (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 384.

110. See ibid., 384n72; Thomas Jefferson, The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English, with essays by Harry R. Rubenstein, Barbara Clark Smith, and Janice Stagnitto Ellis (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2011).

I have posted here an essay entitled "Deism, Unitarianism, and the US Founders." Among other things, this article addresses Thomas Jefferson's views on theology and ethics.

I have reviewed the definitive Smithsonian edition of The Jefferson Bible: The Life & Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English by Thomas Jefferson here.

Some (perhaps all) of the other editions purporting to be the “Jefferson Bible” (a misnomer that Jefferson himself never used) do not accurately reproduce Jefferson’s manuscript, with at least some of them restoring passages in the Gospels that he had deliberately redacted.

Although Jefferson rejected the theology of the New Testament, he extolled the ethics of Jesus in this redacted version of the Gospels and elsewhere in his writings. Jefferson followed the innate moral sense school of Scottish philosophers Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, and others (see section 3.2 of https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/je...), which has its contemporary manifestation in the writings of such scholars as Jonathan Haidt. I critique this concept of ethics on pages 13–19 of my book Reason and Human Ethics (these pages are freely available on the internet at https://www.academia.edu/82835731/Exc...).