Tucker, Abraham (1705–74)

Like many of his eighteenth-century British contemporaries, Abraham Tucker was an empiricist follower of John Locke. Tucker held that the mind begins as a blank slate and remains nothing more than a passive receptacle for ‘trains’ of ideas with ‘a motion of their own’. In his moral philosophy Tucker proposed that the motive of all our actions is the prospect of our own satisfaction, and that the maximization of everyone’s satisfaction is the ultimate moral good. (The latter view became a central tenet of the utilitarians who followed him.) According to Tucker, God ensures that our self-interested motivation will be congruent with morality, for God has arranged that we will be rewarded for good and punished for evil – either in this world or in the next. Among those most influenced by his work was the utilitarian and philosophical theologian William Paley.