Francis Hutcheson

Hutcheson, Francis (1694–1746)

Francis Hutcheson is best known for his contributions to moral theory, but he also contributed to the development of aesthetics. Although his philosophy owes much to John Locke’s empiricist approach to ideas and knowledge, Hutcheson was sharply critical of Locke’s account of two important normative ideas, those of beauty and virtue. He rejected Locke’s claim that these ideas are mere constructs of the mind that neither copy nor make reference to anything objective. He also complained that Locke’s account of human pleasure and pain was too narrowly focused. There are pleasures and pains other than those that arise in conjunction with ordinary sensations; there are, in fact, more than five senses. Two additional senses, the sense of beauty and the moral sense, give rise to distinctive pleasures and pains that enable us to make aesthetic and moral distinctions and evaluations.

Hutcheson’s theory of the moral sense emphasizes two fundamental features of human nature. First, in contrast to Thomas Hobbes and other egoists, Hutcheson argues that human nature includes a disposition to benevolence. This characteristic enables us to be, sometimes, genuinely virtuous. It enables us to act from benevolent motives, whereas Hutcheson identifies virtue with just such motivations. Second, we are said to have a perceptual faculty, a moral sense, that enables us to perceive moral differences. When confronted with cases of benevolently motivated behaviour (virtue), we naturally respond with a feeling of approbation, a special kind of pleasure. Confronted with maliciously motivated behaviour (vice), we naturally respond with a feeling of disapprobation, a special kind of pain. In short, certain distinctive feelings of normal observers serve to distinguish between virtue and vice. Hutcheson was careful, however, not to identify virtue and vice with these feelings. The feelings are perceptions (elements in the mind of observers) that function as signs of virtue and vice (qualities of agents). Virtue is benevolence, and vice malice (or, sometimes, indifference); our moral feelings serve as signs of these characteristics.

Hutcheson’s rationalist critics charged him with making morality relative to the features human nature happens at present to have. Suppose, they said, that our nature were different. Suppose we felt approbation where we now feel disapprobation. In that event, what we now call ‘vice’ would be called ‘virtue’, and what we call ‘virtue’ would be called ‘vice’. The moral sense theory must be wrong because virtue and vice are immutable. In response, Hutcheson insisted that, as our Creator is unchanging and intrinsically good, the dispositions and faculties we have can be taken to be permanent and even necessary. Consequently, although it in one sense depends upon human nature, morality is immutable because it is permanently determined by the nature of the Deity.

Hutcheson’s views were widely discussed throughout the middle decades of the eighteenth century. He knew and advised David Hume, and, while Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, taught Adam Smith. Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham, among other philosophers, also responded to his work, while in colonial America his political theory was widely seen as providing grounds for rebellion against Britain.

1 Life and works

Francis Hutcheson was born on 8 August 1694 near Saintfield, County Down, Ireland. Although often taken to be the founder of the Scottish Enlightenment, he always considered himself an Irishman. Hutcheson studied first at a classical school in Saintfield, then at an academy in Killyleagh, and finally, for two years, at Glasgow College. Ordained as a minister in the Presbyterian Church of Ireland, Hutcheson followed instead an academic career. In the early 1720s he established a dissenting academy in Dublin, where he remained until called to Glasgow as Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1729. This position he held until his death, having in 1745 declined an offer of a similar position at Edinburgh.

In Dublin, Hutcheson came under the influence of Robert Molesworth, himself a philosophical disciple of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. In the mid 1720s Hutcheson published papers outlining some of his own views, and others criticizing Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville, as well as his first book, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725a). This work he initially described as a defence of Shaftesbury against an attack by Mandeville. His Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections: with Illustrations on the Moral Sense appeared in 1728. His next work was probably A System of Moral Philosophy, written by 1738 but published only posthumously in 1755. His last major work was his Philosophiae moralis institutio compendiaria (1742a), a translation (Hutcheson himself was probably the translator) of which, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, appeared in 1747, the year of his death.

Hutcheson corresponded with, and probably met, David Hume, and gave Hume advice, some of which he took, regarding the third volume of his Treatise of Human Nature. Notwithstanding these connections, Hutcheson apparently opposed Hume’s efforts to be appointed (in 1745) to the chair of moral philosophy in Edinburgh. Hutcheson’s students at Glasgow included Adam Smith, author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776).

2 The foundations of morality and the moral sense

Much of Hutcheson’s early work may be seen as a contribution to a long-standing debate about the foundations of morality. For over a century before Hutcheson joined the debate, moral theorists had offered fundamentally incompatible accounts of the origin and nature of morality. Every participant in this debate accepted the fact that there are moral phenomena to explain. No participant denied, for example, that there is a set of moral terms (such terms as, in English, ’good’, ’evil’, ’virtue’, ’vice’, ’right’, ’wrong’, ’just’, ’unjust’) that are competently used by ordinary speakers. Even those philosophers who were said to have denied that morality has a foundation assumed that it is to rational beings (principally humans) and their actions that this set of terms applies, and supposed that ordinary humans do so apply the terms, however much they may disagree about which term to use in any given situation. The controversy raged, however, over the proper characterization of such moral phenomena. For many writers, it was not merely a matter of providing a causal explanation of these phenomena. Even cynics and sceptics could do that. Rather, these writers, who tended to think of themselves as moral realists, demanded that a proper understanding of morality be a part of this explanation. Having concluded that moral differences are both real and unique, they insisted that one could be said to have given an account of the foundations of morality only if one could trace these real and unique moral differences to some set of objective and unique natural or transcendental features adequate to ground such differences in a non-reductive way.

Hutcheson’s work illustrates this latter demand. In a preview of his influential Inquiry, he says that his new work will include an essay on the foundations of morality, a needed antidote to the socially poisonous views of those (most notably Hobbes, Samuel Pufendorf and John Locke, as we later learn) who suppose that the ‘foundation of virtue’ is nothing more than fear of punishment. In the Inquiry itself Hutcheson develops his criticism of these ‘selfish moralists’ (egoists, as we would say), and also makes explicit his deeply felt objections to Mandeville’s claim that what is called virtue is simply ‘the Political Offspring which Flattery begot upon Pride’ (1725a).

Although his philosophy owes much to Locke’s empiricist approach to ideas and knowledge, Hutcheson was far from satisfied with Locke’s account of our moral ideas and our moral psychology. According to Locke, our normative ideas – of beauty and virtue, for example – are complex ideas of mixed modes, and, although formed out of the materials of experience, have no objective reference. These ideas, Locke says, are constructed by our minds, and are neither copies of anything real, nor even made according to the pattern of any real existence. Hutcheson found this anti-realist account of the origin of our moral ideas seriously flawed. Moreover, he also complained that Locke’s account of human pleasure and pain was too narrowly focused. Locke had failed to note that there are pleasures and pains other than those that arise in conjunction with ordinary sensations. Indeed, Locke had failed to note that there are more than five senses, and that our additional senses – the sense of beauty and the moral sense – give rise to distinctive pleasures and pains (to approbations and disapprobations) that enable us to make moral distinctions and moral evaluations. Human nature is considerably more complex than Locke had supposed.

As to Hutcheson’s disagreement with Hobbes and Mandeville, Hutcheson can be seen to have rejected their pessimistic, cynical view of human nature – in effect, that humans are inherently corrupt – and to have adopted in its place the more optimistic view that human nature incorporates a substantial element of goodness. More particularly, while Hobbes and Mandeville argue that all human acts are motivated by self-interest, Hutcheson argues that humans have, and actually do act from, other-regarding motives, and that the ‘selfish theory’ – the view that all motivations are self-interested – cannot account for many features of our moral experience. Hutcheson sees the selfish theorists as maintaining that we act only from a regard for our own pleasure, and hence that those things that we call ‘good’ are simply those things that give us pleasure, and that the actions we call ‘morally good’ or ‘just’ are simply those actions that correspond to whatever laws politicians happen to have promulgated. As a matter of pure speculation these claims may be comprehensible, but a more careful survey of our moral evaluations shows them to be false.

Hutcheson notes in the Inquiry, for example (1) that although both a generous action and a productive field give us pleasure, there is a significant difference in the pleasures derived from these two things. Our approbation of them differs in such a way that we would think it quite odd or senseless to say that the field is virtuous, but entirely sensible to say that the action is virtuous (1725a: 114–5, 119, 140–41); (2) that while reading history we learn of temporally distant individuals who cannot contribute to our interests or pleasure, and that, as the actions of these individuals vary, so do our responses: we feel approbation toward some, and disapprobation or indifference toward others; (3) that while we benefit from the actions of an individual who treasonously betrays his country to ours, we none the less morally disapprove of that individual and his actions; (4) that while we ourselves may be bribed to perform an action which we think to be morally wrong, we cannot be bribed to feel that this same action is right or that we are right to undertake it; (5) that we sometimes feel a moral indignation toward a person who has caused us no injury at all, while on other occasions we find that, although someone has acted in such a way as to injure us, we feel no moral indignation.

Facts of this sort, Hutcheson concludes, establish beyond doubt that the selfish theory is mistaken. They show that there are natural (immediate and unlearned) differences in our responses to actions or events, differences that cannot be accounted for by this theory. Our moral approvals and disapprovals are more subtle than these philosophers have thought. We find that we naturally and routinely make reliable distinctions (1) between natural good and moral good; (2) between moral good and moral evil; and (3) between things that are immediately good and those only ‘advantageous’ or instrumentally good. Given these important facts, the question becomes, as Hutcheson typically frames it: ‘What feature of human nature is presupposed by the fact that we can and do make these distinctions?’ His answer: ‘The moral sense’. Had we, he writes in the Inquiry, no moral sense enabling us to perceive the moral qualities of agents and actions, we could not respond to them as we do. Without a moral sense we might have developed an abstract idea of virtue, but we would not, as we do, actively approve and esteem those who reveal themselves to be virtuous. Had we ‘no Sense of moral Good in Humanity…Self-Love, and our Sense of natural Good’ would cause us, contrary to fact, always to approve, for example, of the traitor who benefits our cause, and always to disapprove the courageous patriot who harms our cause. But that is not the case; the facts do not fit the egoists’ theory. Rather, such facts reveal that ‘there is in human Nature a disinterested ultimate Desire of the Happiness of others’, an inherent benevolent, and hence moral, concern.

Humans have also an inherent cognitive power that enables them to respond differently to benevolence and self-interest. The human mind is formed in such a way that it can approve or condemn actions or agents without concern for its own pleasure or interest. Just as the Creator has ‘determin’d us to receive, by our external Senses, pleasant or disagreeable Ideas of Objects, according as they are useful or hurtful to our Bodys …[so] he has given us a moral Sense, to direct our Actions, and to give us still nobler Pleasures’. Thus if two individuals contribute in similar ways to our wellbeing, but the one acts ‘from an ultimate Desire of our Happiness, or Good-will toward us; and the other from Views of Self-Interest, or by Constraint’, we have, we find, significantly different responses to these two individuals and their acts. In response to the one we feel gratitude and approbation; to the other we are indifferent. Or, if we know that an individual has benevolent dispositions but has been prevented from exercising them, we count that individual as morally good even though they have not been able to act – even though they have done nothing to benefit us. The nature and complexity of these responses show that we must have a perceptual power, a moral sense, for without such a sense we would assess fields and agents or patriots and traitors only with regard to our own interests and wellbeing.

In the third edition (1729) of the Inquiry Hutcheson explicitly denied that he meant to identify virtue and vice with feelings or sentiment. The moral sense relies upon feelings to distinguish virtue or vice, but moral qualities are themselves independent of the observer who feels approbation or disapprobation of them. The ‘admired Quality’, he says, is a quality of the agent judged, and entirely distinct from the approbation or pleasure of either the approving observer or the agent, and the moral perceptions (the idea or concept) involved ‘plainly represents something quite distinct from this Pleasure’. Feelings play a cognitive and a motivating role, but virtue is constituted by the benevolent disposition that gives rise to approbation, and vice by the malevolent or sometimes indifferent dispositions that give rise to disapprobation.

Gilbert Burnet and John Balguy, two early rationalist critics, pronounced themselves satisfied with Hutcheson’s good intentions and even with his fundamental conclusion, namely that virtue and vice are, contrary to Hobbes, Locke, and Mandeville, fundamentally real. Burnet, in his Letter to the London Journal (1969–71, vol. 7: 6) could not agree, however, that Hutcheson had found ‘the true and solid foundation’ of morality, while Balguy (1728–9), all praise for Hutcheson’s good nature and good sense, regrets that he makes serious mistakes – mistakes that ‘lie at the Foundations of Morality, and like Failures in Ground-work, affect the whole Building’.

Burnet’s fundamental complaint is that Hutcheson’s account of moral good and evil explains these notions only relatively – only as good or evil things relate to us or affect us – and gives us no guarantee that good and evil have an immutable foundation in the nature of things. Balguy objected that Hutcheson had rested virtue or morality on two features of human nature, a natural affection (a concern for others) and an instinct (the moral sense). These are, he granted, features of humankind, and it is right of Hutcheson to try to represent virtue as something that flows ‘unalterably from the Nature of Men and Things’. But, he went on, Hutcheson portrays morality as something arbitrary, dependent upon human features ‘that might originally have been otherwise, or even contrary to what they now are; and [that] may at any time be alter’d, or inverted, if the Creator pleases’ (1728: 292). Moreover, in Hutcheson’s hands morality is resolved into ‘mere Instinct’. If we are motivated to what we call virtuous acts by an instinct, of what moral merit are the resulting actions? These actions seem to be necessitated, while virtuous acts are always free acts. If Hutcheson should reply that these instincts do not ‘force the Mind, but only incline it’, then, says Balguy, it will be reason, and not the moral sense, that decides our actions and thus serves as the foundation of morality.

Hutcheson undertook to meet these objections in a series of letters to the London Journal (1725b) and in the second part of his Essay of 1728. As an ordained clergyman of the Westminster Confession, Hutcheson was unwilling to deny the creative freedom of the Deity. Consequently, he could not in one sense deny that his theory of the moral sense made morality dependent upon the free choice of the Deity. But he could and did argue that, were the Deity’s basic nature not in its own way similar to our kindest affections and best moral nature, then he would not have been motivated to create us in the particular manner in which he did actually create us. On the other hand, if we suppose that the Deity does have an analogously kind and moral nature, then we see at once that this would have motivated him to create us as he did. As long as we are satisfied that the Deity is unchanging, and that his is the best nature possible, we can see that our own natures are nothing like the merely arbitrary result of some divine whim. Our natures are, in any relevant sense, necessary and necessarily fixed or unchanging.

To the charge that he had made morality dependent on an instinct that effectively eliminates the free choice required of moral behaviour, Hutcheson replied by distinguishing between instincts of body and certain mental powers or ‘affections’. The latter, he insists, are no more destructive of morality than is the ‘Determination to pursue Fitness’ that, according to his opponents, characterizes the divine will. Virtue, Hutcheson argues, can be real and meritorious even though perceived by a sense, and chosen because of an affection or instinct. It is not necessary that reason play these roles. Hutcheson’s critics were not satisfied by these replies (Richard Price (1758) was to pose similar objections some thirty years later; see Price, R.), but Hutcheson’s responses show how far he was from being the moral noncognitivist some commentators have supposed. He undertook to determine the origin of our moral ideas in order ‘to prove what we call the Reality of Virtue’ (1725a: xi). That his inquiry led him to argue that our moral concerns and evaluations depend on certain fundamental dispositions and feelings – that morality has its origin in certain senses and affections found in human nature – should not prevent us from recognizing this realist intent.

3 Practical ethics and influence

Although Hutcheson’s later works, his System and his Short Introduction, reveal his continuing commitment to the moral sense theory and all that presupposes, these works more noticeably reflect his need, after 1729, to offer lectures on a broad range of moral issues – issues of practice as well as principle – to largely adolescent audiences. Making extensive use of writers in the modern natural law tradition (Grotius, Pufendorf, and Richard Cumberland, for example), as well as of Cicero, Hutcheson in these works focuses principally on such practical issues as our duties to God, to humanity, and to ourselves; the law of nature and the rights of individuals; property and contracts; marriage and parenting; and civil government.

Hutcheson’s contemporaries and students remembered him as earnestly concerned with civil and religious liberty. He was, for example, an outspoken critic of the Aristotelian or classical theory of slavery, and also of the justification of slavery by conquest. Arguing that there are no natural slaves nor ought there to be slaves by conquest, Hutcheson insists that the ‘natural equality of men’ consists chiefly in the fact that ‘natural rights belong equally to all’, and that the laws of God and nature prohibit even the most powerful from depriving the least powerful of their rights, or from inflicting any harm on them. The least talented humans have the use of reason and thus have vastly greater capacity for happiness or misery than do animals. All humans ‘have strong desires of liberty and property, have notions of right, and strong natural impulses to marriage, families, and offspring, and earnest desires of their safety…. We must therefore conclude, that no endowments, natural or acquired, can give a perfect right to assume powers over others, without their consent’. This, he adds, ‘is intended against the doctrine of Aristotle, and some others of the ancients, "that some men are naturally slaves"’ (1755, I: 299–301). Equally abhorrent is the view that those taken prisoner in a just war may be justly enslaved as punishment or security against further offence. No ‘damage done or crime committed can change a rational creature into a piece of goods void of all right, and incapable of acquiring any [rights]’ (1755, II: 202–3). Those who claim that Africans were better off as slaves than they would have been if left in Africa have let custom and the prospect of profit stupefy their consciences until they have lost all sense of natural justice (1755, II: 84–5).

At the heart of Hutcheson’s political theory is his endorsement of the principle that the safety of the people is the supreme law. He insists that there are specifiable limits to the powers of the state, and that citizens retain the right to resist the excesses of any form of government and even the right to overthrow and replace a government. Consequently, any government that fails to function for the ‘safety and happiness of the whole body’ can be legitimately abolished (1742b: 303). Hutcheson explicitly applied these principles to colonies. Colonial subjects also have a right to legitimate – that is, beneficial – government. If they fail to receive such government, and are oppressed, they may justly overthrow their oppressor: ‘the people’s right of resistance is unquestionable’ (1742b: 292).

Hutcheson’s writings had a substantial influence in the eighteenth century. His claim that ill-governed colonies have the right to rebel was widely and effectively repeated in colonial north America, and may rightly be taken as having provided many patriots with a philosophical rationale for rebellion. His published views on natural equality and natural rights were reprinted in colonial Philadelphia, where they added philosophical weight to the anti-slavery movement. His moral sense ethics, although much criticized by rationalists, gained partial allegiance from David Hume. His best-known student, Adam Smith, learned from him both moral and economic theory, and credits Hutcheson as ‘being the first who distinguished with any degree of precision in what respect all moral distinctions … are founded upon immediate sense and feeling’ (Smith 1759: 321). Even Immanuel Kant, a moralist so apparently different, was initially attracted by, and always respectful of, Hutcheson’s contributions to moral theory. And if Jeremy Bentham thought the theory of the moral sense was simply totally unconvincing, he none the less adopted as fundamental to his utilitarian theory a principle that Hutcheson had enunciated, namely ‘that Action is best, which procures the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers’ (1725a: 181).