Richard Price

Moral philosopher and Unitarian minister, born in Tynton, Monmouthshire, SE Wales, UK. A preacher in London, he established his reputation with the Review of the Principal Questions in Morals (1758). He was admitted to the Royal Society in 1765 for his work on probability. His Observations on Reversionary Payments (1771) helped to establish a scientific system for life-insurance and pensions. Among his many other influential books is An Appeal to the Public on the Subject of the National Debt (1772).

Richard Price is also the name of a novelist and screenwriter, an American historian at the College of William and Mary, a British historian at the University of Maryland, College Park, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia, and a theoretical physicist at the University of Texas at Brownsville

Richard Price (February 23, 1723 – April 19, 1791), was a Welsh moral and political philosopher.

He was born at Tynton, Glamorgan, the son of a dissenting minister.

In 1767 Price published a volume of sermons, which gained him the acquaintance of Lord Shelburne; It was, however, as a writer on financial and political questions that Price became widely known. In 1769, in a letter to Benjamin Franklin, he wrote some observations on the expectation of lives, the increase of mankind, and the population of London, which were published in the Philosophical Transactions of that year; In 1769 Price received the degree of D.D. This pamphlet excited considerable controversy, and is supposed to have influenced William Pitt the Elder in re-establishing the sinking fund for the extinction of the national debt, created by Robert Walpole in 1716 and abolished in 1733. The means proposed for the extinction of the debt are described by Lord Overstone as "a sort of hocus-pocus machinery," supposed to work "without loss to any one," and consequently unsound.

Price then turned his attention to the question of the American colonies. He had from the first been strongly opposed to the war, and in 1776 he published a pamphlet entitled Observations on Civil Liberty and the Justice and Policy of the War with America. and Price rapidly became one of the best known men in England.

One of Price's most intimate friends was Joseph Priestley, despite their taking the most opposite views on morals and metaphysics. In 1778 appeared a published correspondence between these two liberal theologians on the subjects of materialism and necessity, wherein Price maintains, in opposition to Priestley, the free agency of man and the unity and immateriality of the human soul. Both Price and Priestley were what would now vaguely be called "Unitarians," though they occupied respectively the extreme right and the extreme left position of that school. Indeed, Price's opinions would seem to have been rather Arian than Socinian.

The pamphlets on the American War made Price famous. In 1786 Mrs Price died.

Much of Price's most important philosophical work was in the region of ethics. It is divided into ten chapters, the first of which, though a small part of the whole, completes his demonstration of ethical theory. The remaining chapters investigate details of minor importance, and are especially interesting as showing his relation to Butler and Kant (ch. The theory he propounds is closely allied to that of Cudworth, but is interesting mainly in comparison with the subsequent theories of Kant.

Right and wrong belong to actions in themselves. By this he means, not that the ethical value of actions is independent of their motive and end (see ch. This ethical value is perceived by reason or understanding (which, unlike Kant, he does not distinguish), which intuitively recognizes fitness or congruity between actions, agents and total circumstances. Arguing that ethical judgment is an act of discrimination, he endeavours to invalidate the doctrine of the moral sense. Yet, in denying the importance of the emotions in moral judgment, he is driver back to the admission that right actions must be "grateful" to us; that, in fact, moral approbation includes both an act of the understanding and an emotion of the heart. Price's main point of difference with Cudworth is that while Cudworth regards the moral criterion as a vanua or modification of the mind, existing in gere and developed by circumstances, Price regards it as acquired from the contemplation of actions, but acquired necessarily, immediately intuitively. Happiness he regards as the only end, conceivable by us, of divine Providence, but it is a happiness wholly dependent upon rectitude.

Price was also friends with the mathematician and clergyman Thomas Bayes. He edited Bayes' most famous work "Essay towards solving a problem in the doctrine of chances" which contains Bayes' Theorem, one of the most fundamental theorems of probability theory. Price wrote an introduction to Bayes' paper which provides some of the philosophical basis of Bayesian statistics.

Works

Besides the above-mentioned, Price wrote an Essay on the Population of England (2nd ed., 1780) which directly influenced Thomas Robert Malthus; and Observations on the importance of the American Revolution and the means of rendering it a benefit to the World (1784). Notices of Price's ethical system occur in James Mackintosh's Progress of Ethical Philosophy, Jouffroy's Introduction to Ethics, William Whewell's History of Moral Philosophy in England; Alexander Bain's Mental and Moral Sciences. For Price's life see memoir by his nephew, William Morgan.