  However, it is her moral theory that is most prominently emphasized throughout her works. Cockburn was mainly concerned with grappling with the defects and strengths of some of the predominating issues in moral theory at this time. Cockburn’s own position is an amalgam of three dominant strains of eighteenth-century morality: moral rationalism, moral fitness theory and moral sense theory. Moral rationalism is, broadly speaking, the view that morality is the result of a rational process, whereby the mind reasons about moral ideas and creates moral rules (although many thinkers, like Cockburn, argued that the mind, by this process, is actually in some way discovering eternal moral rules).  Moral fitness theory is a rationalist theory that includes the notion that the human mind is able to grasp the various moral relations that result from the essential natures of things in the universe; e.g., the nature of humans and God creates a relation that necessitates the allegiance of humans to their superior (this view was made most famous by Samuel Clarke). Moral sense theory is the view that humans possess a special sensory ability that can determine, pre-rationally, what is good or evil (This view was made most famous by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson). However, for many theorists, like Cockburn, this sensory information is not definitive – but is seen as an aid to moralizing that can, and should, be corrected by reason.