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Hutcheson's Moral Sense Theory Reconsidered*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2010

David Fate Norton
David Fate Norton
Affiliation:
McGill University
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Extract

There is no more central feature of Francis Hutcheson's moral philosophy than his theory of the moral sense. In the past this sense or faculty was widely understood to be a distinctive and independent sense devoted to the apprehension of moral qualities, but William Frankena has in recent years challenged this traditional view of Hutcheson's theory, and offered in its place an emotivist interpretation. Without question Frankena's study was of the first importance, in that it seems to have overturned the much too simplistic traditional view of the moral sense. Unfortunately, however, Frankena's own interpretation of the moral sense is as inadequate and misleading as the view he overturns, for he concludes that the moral sense is not at all a cognitive faculty, that it does not, that is, apprehend moral qualities, but, rather, is a faculty that enables and motivates us to feel, express, and evoke moral emotions. The moral sense, he argues, is “the source of the feelings involved” in moral approbation or disapprobation, and this approbation is “wholly non-cognitive, very much as it is on Ayer's more recent [emotivist] view … This, I shall show, is much too narrow a view; Hutcheson did not limit the moral sense to a single function, nor did he — lacking as he did twentieth-century perspectives — find it either necessary or desirable to assume that the domains of the cognitive and the emotive (or affective) were mutually exclusive.

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Articles
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Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , March 1974 , pp. 3 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1974

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References

1 “Hutcheson's Moral Sense Theory,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XVI (June, 1955), 356–375Google Scholar. Abbreviated HMST hereafter. For a useful recapitulation of earlier interpretations of Hutcheson, see HMST, 366–367.

2 The importance of Frankena's study can be seen in the discussions of Hutcheson which have appeared subsequent to his. See especially Dickie, George T., A Critical Interpretation and Evaluation of the Main Features of the Moral Sense Philosophy of Francis Hutcheson … (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles, 1959)Google Scholar; Blackstone, W. T., Francis Hutcheson and Contemporary Ethical Theory (Athens, Georgia, 1965)Google Scholar; Peach, Bernard, “Editor's Introduction,” to Francis Hutcheson, Illustrations on the Moral Sense (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971)Google Scholar; and Jensen, Henning, Motivation and the Moral Sense in Francis Hutcheson's Ethical Theory (The Hague, 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I do not discuss these studies in this paper. However, see The Journal of the History of Philosophy, IV (April, 1966) and X (January, 1972), and Dialogue XIII (June, 1973), for my reviews of Blackstone, Peach and Jensen.

3 HMST, 372. Frankena realizes, of course, that Ayer differs significantly in that he does not posit a unique moral faculty as the source of these reactions.

4 HMST, 368. It must also be said, of course, that it is generally consistent with eighteenth-century usage to use so “clearly” an affective or emotive term as “feeling” in the explication of cognitive processes. Thomas Reid, for example, who was surely influenced by Hutcheson, argues that sensations are feelings, and that, though we may tend to think that “feeling a pain” and “seeing a tree” are categorically different, this is in fact not the case. Sensation, whether of pain, odor, color, sound, etc., is a feeling due to objects affecting the mind. The odor of a rose “affects” the mind in a certain way, he says, “and this affection of the mind may be conceived, without a thought of the rose, or any other object. This sensation can be nothing else than it is felt to be. Its very essence consists in being felt… There is no difference between the sensation and the feeling of it — they are one and the same thing.” Works of Thomas Reid, ed. SirHamilton, Wm. (8th ed., Edinburgh, 1905), Vol. I, 182–83, 310Google Scholar. See also I, 319, where Reid argues that seeing, as much as any other sensation, is a feeling.

Malebranche also considers sensation a feeling (see De la Recherche de la Vérité, Bk. I, Ch. X, Sec. VI; Ch. XIII, Sec. I), as apparently does Berkeley (Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Pt. I, secs. 24ff.). Frankena's argument from usage must be considered, therefore, inconclusive.

5 These remarks are cited as found in Frankena. Whenever possible, I shall cite from Hutcheson's Inquiry as it is found in the readily available British Moralists, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, Vol. I (cited BM I). Otherwise, I shall refer to An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue; in Two Treatises. I. Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design. II. Concerning Moral Good and Evil (4th ed., corrected; London, 1738Google Scholar; republished, Westmead, Farnborough, Hants, England, 1969). I should add that Frankena explicitly limits his discussion to Hutcheson's two earlier works, the Inquiry (first published in 1725) and the Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections. With Illustrations on the Moral Sense, (first published in 1728). For this reason I too shall forego any reference to his Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (first published, in Latin, in 1742), and the System of Moral Philosophy (published posthumously in 1755).

6 Cited as found in Frankena. Hereafter I shall cite from An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections. With Illustrations on the Moral Sense (3rd ed., London, 1742Google Scholar; republished, Jamesville, Florida, 1969).

7 Another line of argument is used to show that Hutcheson is not a subjectivist. I do not find this argument fully convincing, but because nothing in this paper appears to depend on it, I shall not examine it here.

8 This is a restatement of the brief argument summarized above, and found in HMST, 371–72.

9 BM, I, 83; italics added. Frankena omits from his citation this portion of the passage. See HMST, 369.

10 BM, I, 75. Which is to say that, though there be limitations on what the cognitive external senses can excite us to, they do excite us. Hence a sense for Hutcheson can be both exciting and cognitive.

11 See Peach, Bernard, “The Correspondence between Francis Hutcheson and Gilbert Burnet: The Problem of the Date,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. VIII, No. 1 (Jan., 1970), 87–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar. “Objective” as used in the previous sentence is ambiguous. It might be intended to suggest that virtue and vice are qualities in (some kind of) objects, or, equally, to suggest that moral claims are not merely subjective, not merely private reactions or expressions of private interest. I suggest that Hutcheson intended to defend the objectivity of morals in both senses.

12 Beginning with the second edition the work was given the shorter title cited in note 5 above.

13 For an expanded discussion of Shaftesbury's opposition to the ethical scepticism of Hobbes and Locke, see my “Shaftesbury and Two Scepticisms,” Filosofia, Vol. XIX (Supplemento al fascicolo IV, Nov. 1968), 713–24.Google Scholar

14 de Mandeville, Bernard, The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. Kaye, F. B. (2 vols.; Oxford, 1957), I, 41, 51.Google Scholar

15 Hutcheson appears to be concerned with refuting three related claims: 1) that all human acts are motivated solely by self-interest or self-love; 2) that, although we use the terms “virtue” and “vice” and speak of moral “good” and “evil”, the fact is that such distinctions are essentially meaningless, either serving as tools whereby a few men may control the behaviour of others, or expressing the customary prejudices of a given culture or sub-culture; and hence, 3) that when we say that a particular act is morally good, or that a given person is virtuous, we are in fact expressing no more than a subjective judgment, and not describing any objective state of affairs.

16 Inquiry, ix-x; BM, I, 100. In the Essay Hutcheson complains that recent philosophers have so “treated our Desires or Affections” that they have made it seem as though “the most generous, kind and disinterested of them … proceed from Self-Love, by some subtle Trains of Reasoning, to which honest Hearts are often wholly Strangers.” (p. vi — misnumbered as p. vii).

17 See, for example, BM, I, 86, 89–90, 94, 127–34. A similar approach may be found in the three articles on laughter which appeared in the Dublin Journal for June 5, 12 & 19, 1725. The Essay Hutcheson considered to be essentially a continuation of the Inquiry, and thus little is said to reinforce the “facts” already pointed out in the earlier work. As he says, “In this Essay on the Passions, the Proofs and Illustrations of this Point, that we have a moral Sense, and a Sense of Honour, by which we discern an immediate Good in Virtue and Honour, not referred to any further Enjoyment, are not much insisted on since they are already laid down in the Inquiry into Moral Good and Evil, in the first and fifth Sections.” (p. ix)

18 BM, I, 97, 147. In addition Hutcheson says, “Honour then presupposes a Sense of something amiable besides Advantage, viz. a Sense of Excellence in a publick Spirit; and therefore the first Sense of moral Good must be antecedent to Honour, for Honour is founded upon it,” and that “We might have form'd the metaphysical Idea of publick Good, but we had never desir'd it, further than it tended to our own private Interest, without a Principle of Benevolence; nor admir'd and lov'd those who were studious of it, without a moral Sense.” (BM, I, 133–34)

19 Essay, 291–92. This remark illustrates a major source of Hutcheson's ambiguity on this matter. It can be read as implying that the senses (our first source of Ideas) are instincts, and instincts for Hutcheson are clearly motivating influences. Yet on other occasions he appears to suggest that the moral sense is supplemented by motivating instincts. If the moral sense is an instinct, then it is certainly a motivating influence; if it is not an instinct, however, it could still be motivating, but the issue is not so clear. At the present I would say that the moral sense is an “instinctive faculty” — because this preserves the ambiguity of the text.

20 BM, I, 110–15. This calculus was eliminated from the third and subsequent editions of the Inquiry.

21 A similar relationship of disposition and sense proper seems to be suggested by Hutcheson in his discussion of the sense of beauty.

22 Essay, 3–5, 286–87. See also Hutcheson's, Metaphysicae synopsis: ontologiam, et pneumatologiam, complectens, (Glasgow, 1742, revised edit., 1744), where he discusses in more detail his theory of perception.Google Scholar