John Gay

John Gay (1699 to 1745) was an English philosopher, biblical scholar and Church of England clergyman, a cousin of the poet of the same name. Educated at Blundell's School and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, he was a Fellow there from 1724 to 1732, lecturing in Hebrew, Greek and ecclesiastical history, before becoming Vicar of Wilshamstead. His short Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality, first printed as a preface to Edmund Law's translation of William King's Essay on the Origin of Evil in 1731, argues that virtue is conformity to a rule of life that promotes the happiness of others. Gay's greatest happiness principle sits between the egoism of Hobbes and Hutcheson's moral sense theory, and the Dissertation is counted among the seminal works of English utilitarianism. David Hartley credited Gay's stress on association of ideas as the origin of his Observations on Man.