Abstract:This article reevaluates Phillis Wheatley as a theological thinker whose evangelical conception of disinterestedness informed her evolving position on slavery. By reading Wheatley's poetry and letters alongside her correspondent Samuel Hopkins's sermons and antislavery treatises, I argue that Wheatley's shift toward writing against slavery after 1770 reflects a similar change in her theology: that she, like Hopkins, stopped discussing slavery as an "advantageous sin" as she formulated an evangelical ethical theory of disinterestedness that anticipated Hopkins's philosophy of "disinterested benevolence." In contrast to the civic republican conception of disinterestedness, which argues that persons can only promote the general public's interests after they have set aside private passions, evangelical disinterestedness requires persons to radically abandon their individual will through conversion and work on God's behalf to alleviate others'—and particularly marginalized figures'—suffering. Departing from the scholarship that argues that she was apathetic about her own enslaved condition, this article posits that because evangelical disinterestedness allowed Wheatley to present herself as a devout subject who cared for others' needs more than her own, she was able to base her post-1770 critique of slavery entirely on accounts of other African persons' suffering.

中文翻译：

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菲利斯·惠特利、塞缪尔·霍普金斯和无私慈善的兴起

摘要：本文重新评价了菲利斯·惠特利 (Phillis Wheatley) 作为一位神学思想家，其无私的福音派观念影响了她对奴隶制不断发展的立场。通过阅读惠特利的诗歌和信件以及她的通讯员塞缪尔·霍普金斯的布道和反奴隶制论文，我认为惠特利在 1770 年之后转向反对奴隶制的写作反映了她神学的类似变化：她和霍普金斯一样，不再将奴隶制视为“有利的罪恶”因为她制定了一个福音派的无私伦理理论，该理论预见了霍普金斯的“无私仁慈”哲学。与公民共和主义的无私主义概念相反，该概念认为人们只有在抛开私人激情之后才能促进公众的利益，福音派的无私要求人们通过皈依和为上帝工作来彻底放弃他们的个人意志，以减轻他人——尤其是边缘人物——的苦难。与争辩说她对自己被奴役的状况漠不关心的奖学金不同，本文假设，由于福音派的无私使惠特利将自己展示为一个比自己更关心他人需求的虔诚主体，因此她能够立足于自己的职位-1770 年对奴隶制的批判完全基于其他非洲人的苦难。