Abstract
Hutcheson’s theory of morality shares far more common ground with Clarke’s morality than is generally acknowledged. In fact, Hutcheson’s own view of his innovations in moral theory suggest that he understood moral sense theory more as an elaboration and partial correction to Clarkean fitness theory than as an outright rejection of it. My aim in this paper will be to illuminate what I take to be Hutcheson’s grounds for adopting this attitude toward Clarkean fitness theory. In so doing, I hope to bring to light an otherwise unexpected continuity between moral sense theory and the moral rationalism to which it is usually opposed, and, in so doing, draw attention to the anti-sceptical realism that lies at the heart of both accounts.
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Notes
Schneewind, J.B., The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): p. 340. Similar views are held by a number of commentators – for example, see Jensen, Henning, Motivation and the Moral Sense in Francis Hutcheson’s Ethical Theory (The Hague, Nijhoff, 1971): p. 68 and Kemp Smith, Norman, The Philosophy of David Hume (London: MacMillan and Company, 1966): p. 38.
All in-text references to the Demonstration to: Clarke, Samuel, ‘Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God,’ in The Works (1738), Volume 2 (Reprinted, New York: Garland, 1978).
All in-text references to the Discourse to: Clarke, Samuel, ‘A Discourse concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation,’ in The Works (1738), Volume 2 (Reprinted, New York: Garland, 1978).
Boyle speaks of the ‘course of nature’ as the order God imposed on the motions of material things. In his essay, The Excellency and Grounds of the Corpuscular or Mechanical Philosophy, he writes, ‘in the beginning, [God] so guided the various motion of the parts of [matter] as to contrive them into the world he designed they should compose; and established those rules of motion and that order amongst things corporeal, which we call the laws of nature’; in The Scientific Background to Modern Philosophy, Michael R. Matthews, ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989): 111.
For Clarke, the broad category ‘things’ includes physical things in the universe and their relations to each other, human-human relations, and human–divine relations. He is not careful to specify these variations. He usually refers to human relations when offering specific examples, however, his general discussions of fitness always refer broadly to the category of ‘things’ in the universe.
Jensen, Henning, Motivation and the Moral Sense, 68.
All in-text references to the IMS refer to: Hutcheson, Francis, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002).
While this is not a new reading of Hutcheson it has been the subject of some debate, most notably in David Fate Norton’s response to Norman Kemp Smith. In his seminal work, The Philosophy of David Hume, Kemp Smith offers what is arguably the more ‘standard’ subjectivist interpretation of Hutcheson’s moral theory, according to which Hutcheson views moral judgments as non-cognitive and purely sensory, in a way analogous to secondary-quality ideas. He concludes that for Hutcheson, moral judgements are involuntary and bear no connection to the extra-mental world on which they are based, standing, as Kemp Smith puts it ‘in a merely de facto connexion to their antecedents.’ (26) Moral judgments, on this account, are based on the ‘manifest’ world and not on any mind-independent reality.
Fate Norton replies that Kemp Smith has simply ‘misread’ Hutcheson (Fate Norton, David, David Hume: Common Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) 59). Norton points most notably to the fact that Hutcheson was concerned more with the refutation of skepticism than he was with refuting rationalism, and that it is this former motivating concern that Kemp Smith has not sufficiently appreciated in his reading of Hutcheson. Norton argues that for Hutcheson moral ideas are, like ideas of duration and number, representative concomitant ideas. In the very same way that events in the physical world are known via affective states, moral events are known via the feelings they raise in us. They are ideas that arise when we perceive actions or affections of agents that are, for Hutcheson, clearly mind-independent. The case for Hutcheson’s moral realism is strengthened by the teleological assumptions upon which his theory rests. As Norton points out, the natural affections arising from our perceptions of events in the world are intrinsically bound up for Hutcheson with the providential order of a divine and benevolent creator. This is a point I take up in the last section of this paper.
While at times Hutcheson does seem to think of the moral sense as somehow distinct from the internal senses (e.g., of beauty, honor, and harmony), he will also, at times, use ‘internal sense’ as a banner heading that includes the moral sense. Hutcheson generally discusses moral sense in terms entirely analogous to those he uses in reference to the internal senses of beauty, honor and harmony: they are all internal (as opposed to external senses), they all involve perceptions attending complex ideas, and each particular sense approves relevant instances of order and disapproves relevant instances of disorder; or, as Hutcheson puts it, they all approve ‘uniformity amidst variety’. In fact, Hutcheson seems to presuppose much of his internal sense theory in his discussion of the moral sense.
All in-text references to Inquiry I and Inquiry II refer, respectively of the first and second treatise, to: Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two Treatises, Fourth Edition (1738) (Reprinted, England: Gregg International Publishers, 1969).
Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002): Preface, 8.
Ibid.
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Sheridan, P. The Metaphysical Morality of Francis Hutcheson: A Consideration of Hutcheson’s Critique of Moral Fitness Theory. SOPHIA 46, 263–275 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-007-0033-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-007-0033-4