Nicolas Malebranche, writing in 1674, feared that Montaigne's popularity reflected a dangerous and growing tendency: a propensity to approach moral philosophy less as the product of reasoned philosophical argument (argument of a kind that would promote some single, unified, logical position) and more as the emotive expression of individual imaginations (imaginations productive of pluralist, unsettled visions of ethical goodness). Half a century later, Matthew Prior endorsed the very quality Malebranche had vilified, adding that its dominance was inescapable:

Perhaps more significantly, Francis Hutcheson's associate, James Arbuckle, asserted in 1726 that moralists typically ‘imagine the rest of the World … as themselves’, ‘Selfish and designing Persons’ reducing all goodness to expressions of ‘Interest’ and men of ‘Integrity’ supposing that a ‘noble Disposition runs thro’ the whole Species'. Arbuckle thought it difficult to prove either of these accounts ‘universal’ but deemed the latter the more ‘amiable Conception’ and one that, ‘tho it should really prove a mistaken Notion, yet would there be an advantage to Mankind in believing’.