Richard Cumberland (1631–1718) was an English philosopher and bishop of Peterborough from 1691.
In 1672, he wrote De legibus naturae (On natural laws), propounding utilitarianism and opposing the egoistic ethics of Thomas Hobbes. It has been described as a restatement of the doctrine of the law of nature as furnishing the ground of the obligation of all the moral virtues. The work is heavy in style, and its philosophical analysis lacks thoroughness; but its insistence on the social nature of man, and its doctrine of the common good as the supreme law of morality, anticipate the direction taken by much of the ethical thought of the following century. (From The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).)
Cumberland was a member of the latitudinarian movement, along with his friend Hezekiah Burton of Magdalene College, Cambridge.
His grandson was the dramatist Richard Cumberland
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