Abstract

This thesis challenges a key assumption of criticism of Percy Bysshe Shelley since 1970; namely, that the poet's absorption of a philosophical skepticism implies an advocacy of a skeptical ethics. For Shelley the specifically epistemological skepticism developed within the first book of A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume proves indispensable in clearing the mind of its "superstition" and in opening a "vacancy" in which a properly ethical faculty might be exercised. To assume that an epistemological skepticism serves as its own ethic, however, is to characterize Shelley as a proponent of a utilitarianism or an "emotivism"---both forms of so-called "pernicious casuistry." ;Inspired by Shelley's study of ancient Greek philosophy, his ethic focuses on the fit performance of socially valued roles; and it emerges in distinct contrast to emotivism, the passional ethic developed in the final book of Hume's Treatise. Hume proposes this emotivism, which characterizes a given action's moral valence via the "feeling" or "passion" that one experiences in contemplating it, as a means of suppressing the radical political and moral implications of his own epistemological skepticism; namely, that "there is nothing which the human mind can conceive which it may not execute" once an impersonal "reason" has been destroyed within moral thinking. Hume's reactionary ethic unskeptically reinstates a received moral inheritance and, with it, the notion of personal identity to which traditional moral attributions apply. ;Shelley's stage drama of 1819, The Cenci, indicts emotivism as the cause of the "sad reality" of contemporary England; I extrapolate a positive ethics of radical selflessness via contrast to the restless pursuit of self that the antagonists Beatrice and Count Cenci exhibit. Shelley associates this radical selflessness with the "one mind" of theater, a collective event in which the individual self dissolves along with the personal pronouns of "I, you, and they." The Cenci evidences Shelley's "awakening" to a dramatic mode, one predicated on action and on exercise of the moral faculties, and a concomitant critique of the lyrical mode typical of William Wordsworth, one predicated on passivity or suffering