A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure…

1725 CE

A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain, a philosophical pamphlet by Benjamin Franklin, published in London in 1725, argues that an omnipotent, benevolent God is incompatible with notions of human free will and morality.

The second portion of the pamphlet goes on to formulate that all motivations are derived from pain and that pain is met with an equal amount of pleasure.

He then concludes that this means that man cannot be superior to animals because we are all equal in God’s eyes.

Franklin acknowledges how offensive this idea would be to the reader.

The point of the pamphlet seems to be that Christian Calvinism, which Franklin was raised with as a child, cannot logically be a moral way to live.

Benjamin Franklin's father, Josiah Franklin, is a tallow chandler, a soap-maker and a candle-maker.

Josiah was born at Ecton, Northamptonshire, England, on December 23, 1657, the son of Thomas Franklin, a blacksmith-farmer, and Jane White.

As clerk of the court, he had at one point been jailed for disobeying the local magistrate in defense of middle-class shopkeepers and artisans in conflict with wealthy landowners.

Ben Franklin will emulate his grandfather in his battles against the wealthy Penn family, owners of the Pennsylvania Colony.

Josiah Franklin had seventeen children with his two wives.

He married his first wife, Anne Child, in about 1677 in Ecton and emigrated with her to Boston in 1683; they had three children before emigrating, and four after.

Josiah was married after Anne's death to Abiah Folger on July 9, 1689, in the Old South Meeting House by Samuel Willard.

Benjamin, their eighth child, was Josiah Franklin's fifteenth child and tenth and last son, born on Milk Street, in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 17, 1706, and baptized at Old South Meeting House.

His mother Abiah as born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, on August 15, 1667, to Peter Folger, a miller and schoolteacher and his wife Mary Morrill, a former indentured servant.

The Folgers had been among those that had fled to Massachusetts to establish a purified Congregationalist Christianity in New England, sailing for Boston in 1635, when King Charles I of England began persecuting Puritans.

Josiah had wanted Ben to attend school with the clergy, but only had enough money to send him to school for two years.

He attended Boston Latin School but did not graduate: his schooling had ended when he was ten, and he has continued his education through voracious reading.

After working for his father for a time, at twelve he became an apprentice to his brother James, a printer, who taught Ben the printing trade.

James, when Ben was fifteen, had founded The New-England Courant, the first truly independent newspaper in the colonies.

Franklin, when denied the chance to write a letter to the paper for publication, had adopted the pseudonym of "Mrs. Silence Dogood", a middle-aged widow.

"Mrs. Dogood"'s letters were published, and became a subject of conversation around town.

Neither James nor the Courant's readers were aware of the ruse, and James was unhappy with Ben when he discovered the popular correspondent was his younger brother.

Franklin left his apprenticeship without permission, and in so doing became a fugitive at age seventeen by running away to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, seeking a new start in a new city.

When he first arrived he worked in several printer shops around town.

However, he was not satisfied by the immediate prospects.

While working in a printing house, Franklin had after a few months been persuaded by Pennsylvania Governor Sir William Keith to go to London, ostensibly to acquire the equipment necessary for establishing another newspaper in Philadelphia.

Finding Keith's promises of backing a newspaper to be empty, Franklin works as a typesetter in a printer's shop in what is now the Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great in the Smithfield area of London.