How do moral concepts get created and taken up in society? What do women’s rights and animal welfare have to do with each other? How do people who are unable to access formal education practice philosophy? To think about these problems we can turn to British philosopher Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904). Largely erased from history, Cobbe’s work has recently started to be retrieved and promises to not just shake up the history of philosophy but to also illuminate pressing issues in current moral, social, and political philosophy.

Unable to attend or teach university because she was a woman, Cobbe nonetheless was a successful author. She published several popular books and dozens of articles in Fraser’s Magazine, Westminster Review, and Theological Review, and for six years, three times a week, wrote editorials for The Echo, reaching 100,000 readers of the London evening newspaper. A prominent activist, she was instrumental in the passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act (1878), which allowed women to separate from abusive spouses. She also fought to eradicate the practice of vivisection (experimentation on live animals) and founded the Victoria Street Society (1875; now the National Anti-Vivisection Society) and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (1898; now Cruelty Free International).

Cobbe provided one of the main philosophic alternatives to the utilitarian ethics of John Stuart Mill. Her first book, Essay on Intuitive Morals (1855), used the ethics of Immanuel Kant to critique happiness based ethical theories, such as utilitarianism, and to argue instead for a duty to follow rational moral law. Parallel to Mill’s utilitarian championing of the cause of women, Cobbe developed a Kantian feminist philosophy based on the notion of women as ends in themselves and a duty to pursue liberty. Although she was not a formal professor, she taught moral concepts and philosophic analysis through her diverse forms of public writing. For example, in “Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors. Is the Classification Sound? A Discussion on the Laws Concerning the Property of Married Women” (Fraser’s Magazine, Dec. 1868) she adopted the point of view of an impartial spectator in order to get her readers to rationally critique customs. She artfully used humour to communicate the point of view of reason, imagining an extra-terrestrial being who witnesses a marriage ceremony and remarks, “Pardon me; I must seem to you so stupid! Why is the property of the woman who commits Murder, and the property of the woman who commits Matrimony, dealt with alike by your law?”

Cobbe also corresponded with Charles Darwin. She sent him Kant to read and he praised her account of animal consciousness as the best he had seen. Responding to his insights, Cobbe developed a theory of “heteropathy,” or pleasure in the pain of others and identification with perpetrators. This was a novel attempt to combine the insights of Darwin with Kantian ethics. In works such as “Heteropathy, Aversion, Sympathy” (Theological Review, Jan. 1874), she argued that heteropathy is natural. As she explained, “The most tender-hearted of fox-hunters and fowlers tell us that they sympathize so much with the hounds that they have no time to feel for the fox.” She thought that we work to counteract heteropathy because reason tells us that it is our moral duty to have sympathy and moral concern for all.

Cobbe used her account of women as ends in themselves and heteropathy to analyse domestic violence as a form of torture. Through essays such as “Wife-Torture in England” (1878), Cobbe helped pass the Matrimonial Causes Act. Cobbe asked her readers to consider why “Punch and Judy” was the national street drama for more than two centuries and why it is a common assumption that it is worse to assault a strange woman than one’s own wife. Following her theory of heteropathy, Cobbe realized that it was a difficult task to communicate moral harm without counter-productively causing readers to feel resentment toward victims and sympathy for accused perpetrators . Rather than make emotional appeals which might backfire, she instead adopted a more detached approach, such as listing an overwhelming number of concise police reports.

Cobbe extended her analysis of heteropathy and torture to the vivisection of animals and became a driving force in the women-led animal welfare movement. Cobbe argued that animals also have their own ends, though unlike persons, this is happiness, not rational virtue. In works such as “The Right of Tormenting” (1888) she took on the medical establishment, which had adopted a utilitarian defence and turned sympathy inward; i.e., sympathy was extended to researchers who had to torture animals in order to serve the greater good. Cobbe resigned from her writing posts when publishers refused to condemn vivisection. Turning to pamphlets to spread her moral arguments, she used testimony and pictures of vivisection from medical school textbooks and scientific journals to build the concept of animal torture. She also wrote the preface to The British Vivisectors’ Directory: A Black Book for the United Kingdom (1890), a directory listing the names, affiliations, and evidence of the torture conducted by some of the most prominent members of society. This strategy backfired as sympathy was extended to perpetrators and Cobbe was shunned. In contrast, Wilkie Collins, who used Cobbe’s research to write his novel Heart and Science (1883), explained in letters to her that he must use sympathetic villains to get readers to stay with the moral argument.

Divorce law, the education of women, protections against domestic violence, and protections against animal cruelty have come a long way since Cobbe’s time, aided by laws she helped pass and movements and organizations she helped found. However, there is still wide-spread violence toward women and animals. We still face the problem of how to call attention to moral wrongs without losing the audience or triggering resentment toward victims and sympathy for the accused. Cobbe provides a model for the teaching of moral philosophy through diverse media and, in her successes and failures, shows how public philosophy can create social and political change.

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