A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals

A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals (1758) is Richard Price's principal contribution to ethical philosophy and one of the last major defenses of moral rationalism in the British tradition before Kant. Against David Hume's sentimentalism and the moral sense theorists, Price argued that moral truths are objective, necessary, and discoverable by reason — not because they describe empirical facts, but because they are structural constraints on action, analogous to mathematical truths. The work was largely neglected in its own century but anticipates the modern recognition that ethical reasoning can be modeled as a constraint satisfaction problem rather than a utility maximization problem.

Price's argument has been compared to the structure of game-theoretic equilibria: moral requirements, on his account, are not preferences to be weighed but fixed points that emerge when the structure of interpersonal reasons is fully specified. This makes the work a bridge between eighteenth-century rationalism and contemporary formal ethics, though the bridge has rarely been crossed.