Considerations about the moral psychology of Samuel Pufendorf

Abstract

The idea of this study is to show that Pufendorf’s perceptive reflection on the psychological and
physical capacities of human nature also matters for his description of how people adopt sociability as their moral standard in practice, not merely as important facts to be taken into account when tracking the normative content and limits of natural law norms. The central argument advanced in this article is that Pufendorf’s natural law theory includes a mechanism by which social interaction, guided by but not reducible to political governance, habituates people to internalize moral norms and to govern their passions and actions so as to maintain and cultivate sociability.