Price, Richard (1723–1791)

Richard Price was a British moral and political philosopher and statistician. His most important work in the area of ethics was A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, in which he argued that morality is inherent within actions and can be discerned through the use of reason. Price also was a dissenting minister and a founding member of the Unitarian Society in 1791. He is best known to history, however, for staunchly defending the American and French Revolutions.

The son of a Calvinist Congregational minister, Price was born on February 23, 1723, in Wales and was educated at a dissenting academy in London. In 1758, Price became a chaplain in the London district of Stoke Newington. The English Dissenters with whom Price identified objected to ...