Fielding after Mandeville: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundation of “Good Nature”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Literary scholars often take at face value Henry Fielding’s most overt rejections of Bernard Mandeville, a writer he associated with egoism and who argued that self-interest is at the core of all virtuous action. Yet Fielding’s rejections are not decisive, tending instead towards ad hominem attacks, insubstantial objections, and unexpected accommodations of egoist arguments. Throughout his corpus, Fielding exhibits a creeping Mandevilleanism: egoist thought frequently gets uncredited airing in his works. Fielding’s debt to egoism is clearest in his attempts to define “good nature,” his highest term of approbation, which appears throughout his writings. Like Mandeville, Fielding understood that self-interest motivates virtuous action. The two writers diverged on whether the social goods of self-motivated action should be recognized, ultimately, as virtuous deeds. For Mandeville, self-interest cancels out the virtue of the act; for Fielding, a mislaid emphasis on motivation fails to account for the disposition of the actor, the consequent good produced, and the socially cohesive nature of mutual empathy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".