The British moralists on human nature and the birth of secular ethics

"Michael Gill uncovers the historical roots of naturalistic, secular ethics, showing how the British moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries disengaged ethical thinking first from Christian ideas and then from theistic commitments altogether. He also shows how the British moralists completed a Copernican revolution in moral philosophy, a shift from thinking of morality as independent of human nature to thinking of it as part of human nature itself."--Jacket.