Abstract: At the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century，Shaftesbury was confronted with not only the growing moral crisis of the commercial society and the need for a humanistic foundation for a liberal republican government program，but also the question of how to define the modern man with his expanding individuality，to bridge the gap between the individual and the society，and to reconstruct a free and virtuous general order. This required him to develop，after Hobbes，a competing theory of human nature，and thereby to construct a new moral philosophy. For this purpose，Shaftesbury drew on natural theology and Stoicism to articulate a conception of divine order that opened up the possibility of a free and virtuous civil society. Subsequently，Shaftesbury put forward a view of human nature with natural affection as the first principle，and then empirically clarified the “sociability not for self-love” that was naturally inherent in human nature，providing a powerful defense of the self-sufficiency of society itself. Finally，through the socio-psychological mechanisms of “common sense”and “moral sense”，the possibility of a moral order was illustrated on the basis of universal human nature. In addition to this body of theoretical work，Shaftesbury explicitly argued that a sufficiently free and tolerant public sphere was essential to the true realization of a good moral order. Shaftesbury’s moral philosophy set a theoretical tone for the later Scottish Enlightenment and for the Anglo-American social theory that treated the “social”logic as a means of settling individuals and constructing order. His ideas are still of value to us today in many ways.

Key words: Shaftesbury, moral philosophy, moral order, theory of human nature, natural affection, sociability