沙夫茨伯里继承了新柏拉图主义的"内在形式"（inward form）说，发展出以情感和教化之思辨为核心的道德哲学与审美话语，并以"神圣秩序"的展现为人类共同体的价值观提供了辩护。沙夫茨伯里的"特征"哲学表达出对个人主义原则最早的承认，也带入了如何培养"绅士"及"文雅哲学"的问题，而审美活动和情感陶冶在其中尤其占有重要地位。人类学与神学在这种道德和审美教化观上的结合，造就了他独特的人本主义自然神论。在人类伦理生活世界被后现代主义和解构主义日渐分离的今天，沙夫茨伯里对道德感等情感能力的倚靠恰恰展现出近代道德哲学的本源之一，也为反思日益衰落的教化传统提供了一条古老而又有新意的路径。

Shaftesbury inherits the Neo-Platonist doctrine of "inward form" and develops his own moral philosophy and aesthetic discourse centering on emotions and Bildung, which also defends the value of human community by "divine order". Shaftesbury's philosophy of "character" shows the earliest recognition of individualism and touches the issue of the cultivation of "gentlemen" and "civil philosophy", in which aesthetic activities and emotional cultivation are important. The combination of anthropology and theology in the views of moral and aesthetic Bildung forms his unique natural theology based on humanism. When the human ethical world is increasingly separated by postmodernism and deconstructionism today, Shaftesbury's thinking about moral sense and emotional capacity just shows one of the origins of modern moral philosophy, and also provides us with an old while innovative path to the reflection on the declining tradition of Bildung.