This Day in Philosophy — 13 August: the death of Jeremy Taylor

The English clergyman and writer Jeremy Taylor died on 13 August 1667 at Lisburn, in Ireland, at the age of fifty-three. He had been baptised at Cambridge in 1613.

Writing inside a civil war#

Taylor's productive years fell in the most turbulent period in England's history. Civil war, the execution of the king, the rule of Cromwell — an age in which religious difference turned directly into political violence.

The Liberty of Prophesying (1647), written in those conditions, is counted among the early texts of toleration. Its argument rests on a kind of epistemic humility that still sounds familiar: human reason cannot reach certainty on contested questions of theology. And to coerce another person over a matter that is not certain offends against reason and conscience alike.

The rules of conscience#

Taylor's most interesting work philosophically is Ductor Dubitantium (1660). Its subject is casuistry: the problem of how general moral principles are to be applied to particular cases.

Casuistry now tends to carry a pejorative ring — the art of bending a rule. Its actual function was something else. Principles are abstract, and life is full of detail. The rule against lying is clear enough; but what of a lie told to save a person's life? What is to be done when two duties collide?

Taylor's answer puts conscience at the centre. Conscience, for him, is not a list of commands arriving from outside; it is the practical judgement an agent makes about his own situation. Knowledge of the rules is the material of that judgement, and cannot take its place.

The line to the present#

The argument did not close; it merely moved. In medical ethics, legal ethics and the ethics of artificial intelligence the question asked today is the same one: how is a general principle to be applied to the concrete case in front of us — and how is the power of judgement that does the applying to be trained?

Taylor's prose, moreover, is counted among the classics of English literature; Holy Living and Holy Dying were long read not only as devotional works but as models of style.