Richard Price FRS (23 February 1723 – 19 April 1791) was a British moral philosopher, Nonconformist minister and mathematician.

He was well-connected and fostered communication between many people, including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington, Mirabeau and the Marquis de Condorcet.

[1] Born in Llangeinor, near Bridgend, Wales, Price spent most of his adult life as minister of Newington Green Unitarian Church, then on the outskirts of London.

[2][5] Leaving the academy in 1744, Price became chaplain and companion to George Streatfield at Stoke Newington, then a village just north of London.

[2][6] Streatfield's death and that of an uncle in 1757 improved Price's circumstances, and on 16 June 1757 he married Sarah Blundell, originally of Belgrave in Leicestershire.

[9] When, in 1770, Price became morning preacher at the Gravel Pit Chapel in Hackney, he continued his afternoon sermons at Newington Green.

James Burgh, author of The Dignity of Human Nature and Thoughts on Education, who opened his Dissenting Academy on the Green in 1750 and sent his pupils to Price's sermons.

Price met Shelburne in or shortly after 1767,[14] or was introduced by his wife Elizabeth Montagu, a leader of the Blue Stocking intellectual women, after the publication of his Four Dissertations in that year.

[21] Price was visited by Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine;[22] other American politicians such as John Adams, who later became the second president of the United States, and his wife Abigail; and British politicians such as Lord Lyttleton, Lord Stanhope (known as "Citizen Stanhope"), and William Pitt the Elder.

When Lindsey resigned his living and moved to London to create an avowedly Unitarian congregation Price played a role in finding and securing the premises for what became Essex Street Chapel.

Price maintained, in opposition to Priestley, the free agency of man and the unity and immateriality of the human soul.

[30] The Rational Dissenters appealed to Wollstonecraft: they were hard-working, humane, critical but uncynical, and respectful towards women,[31] and proved kinder to her than her own family.

[35] The support Price gave to the colonies of British North America in the American War of Independence made him famous.

In early 1776, he published the pamphlet Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America.

[38] Additionally, he denounced the "cruel, wicked and diabolical" slave trade while highlighting the contradictions in Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, stating, “if there are any men whom they have a right to hold in slavery, there may be others who have a right to hold them in slavery.”[39] Among its critics were Adam Ferguson,[40] William Markham, John Wesley, and Edmund Burke; and Price rapidly became one of the best known men in England.

Price exhorted the public to divest themselves of national prejudices and embrace "universal benevolence", a concept of cosmopolitanism that entailed support for the French Revolution and the progress of "enlightened" ideas.

[50] The Society's Committee of Correspondence, which included Michael Dodson, took up the contact that was made with French Jacobins, though Price himself withdrew.

Price rejected traditional Christian notions of original sin and moral punishment, preaching the perfectibility of human nature,[57] and he wrote on theological questions.

[2] In 1769, in a letter to Benjamin Franklin, he made some observations on life expectancy, and the population of London, which were published in the Philosophical Transactions of that year.

[7] Price's views included the detrimental effects of large cities, and the need for some constraints on commerce and movement of population.

[62] In particular, Price took an interest in the figures of Franklin and Ezra Stiles on the colonial population in America, thought in some places to be doubling every 22 years.

[66] The quantitative form of Price's theory on the contrasting depopulation in England and Wales amounted to an approximate drop in population of 25 per cent since 1688.

His book Observations on Reversionary Payments (1771) became a classic, in use for about a century, and providing the basis for financial calculations of insurance and benefit societies, of which many had recently been formed.

This pamphlet excited considerable controversy, and is supposed to have influenced William Pitt the Younger in re-establishing the sinking fund for the extinction of the national debt, created by Robert Walpole in 1716 and abolished in 1733.

The means proposed for the extinction of the debt are described by Lord Overstone as "a sort of hocus-pocus machinery," supposed to work "without loss to any one," and consequently unsound.

[75] When Brand returned to finance and fiscal matters, Alteration of the Constitution of the House of Commons and the Inequality of the Land Tax (1793), he used work of Price, among others.

This ethical value is perceived by reason or understanding, which intuitively recognizes fitness or congruity between actions, agents and total circumstances.

He admits that right actions must be "grateful" to us; that, in fact, moral approbation includes both an act of the understanding and an emotion of the heart.

In this conclusion he is in close agreement with Kant; reason is the arbiter, and right is Price's main point of difference with Cudworth is that while Cudworth regards the moral criterion as a νόημα or modification of the mind, existing in germ and developed by circumstances, Price regards it as acquired from the contemplation of actions, but acquired necessarily, immediately intuitively.

Throughout the American War, he preached sermons on fast-days and took the opportunity to attack Britain's coercive policies toward the colonies.