The phenomenon of diversity – whether in morality, social custom, or religious belief – played an important but in many ways neglected part in the debate between leading philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Locke's attack on innateness in the first book of the Essay established as a key point of contention the issue of whether any unities existed in moral outlook or conceptions of the divine. His denial of universal consent, together with his sceptical view of essences, expressed elsewhere in the Essay, left open the possibility that, in practice, human beings regulated themselves only according to socially received notions (fashion, opinion, reputation, etc.) rather than anything higher. Reason was the ultimate resource for mankind, in Locke's view, but human nature alone did not supply us with inclinations toward virtue and away from vice, nor did it provide conceptions of the Deity.

Shaftesbury and Hutcheson attempted to repair the damage and to recall a Stoic conception which saw nature as a fund of normative ideas, predispositions, or prolepses that embraced benevolence, sociability, disinterested affection, and the divine, explaining our attachments to friend, family, and nation. Their assumption of a profound unanimity in the world required them to address the testimony of human difference cited by Locke and the unsociable portrait of human motivation. On this subject they developed alternative strategies, with differing strengths and weaknesses, which brought innateness back into play in a new form.