Wollaston, William (1660–1724)

William Wollaston, a popular eighteenth-century English moral philosopher, is often grouped with Samuel Clarke as a staunch defender of the kind of moral rationalism that David Hume later opposed. Wollaston’s project, as he describes it, is to find a rule to distinguish right actions from wrong. He complains that previous philosophers have either overlooked this task or proposed rules which are imprecise, incomplete or misleading. The rule he proposes is fidelity to truth. Actions, he argues, express propositions and so may be true or false. Moral actions express truths and immoral actions express falsehoods. He thinks this rule explains other widely held views about morality, for example, that we should live in accordance with nature, right reason or the will of God. His most remembered (and most misunderstood) claim is that an evildoer ‘lives a lie’.