Religion in Hutcheson's moral philosophy

Journal of the History of Philosophy

Volumn 46, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 205-222

  Harris, James A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949576984     PISSN: 00225053     EISSN: 15384586     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/hph.0.0017     Document Type: Article

References (40)

1. D. D. Raphael, The Moral Sense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), 1.
2. Soon after the publication of Raphael's book, William Frankena ("Hutcheson"s Moral Sense Theory," Journal of the History of Ideas 16 [1955]: 356-75, at 356) made a similar case for Hutcheson's importance: "in his earlier works at least, Hutcheson was propounding a certain kind of non-cognitivist theory of moral judgment, and . . . has, therefore, a more important historical position and a more considerable contemporary relevance than he has been accorded."
3. See David Fate Norton, David Hume: Common-Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician [David Hume] (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) ch. 2;
4. and "Hutcheson's Moral Realism," Journal of the History of Philosophy 23 (1985): 397-418.
5. See, e.g., Joel J. Kupperman, "Francis Hutcheson: Morality and Nature," History of Philosophy Quarterly 2 (1985): 195-202;
6. Kenneth Winkler, "Hutcheson's Alleged Realism," Journal of the History of Philosophy 23 (1985): 179-94;
7. Kenneth Winkler, "Hutcheson and Hume on the Color of Virtue," Hume Studies 22 (1996): 3-22;
8. and P. J. Kail, "Hutcheson's Moral Sense: Skepticism, Realism, and Secondary Qualities," History of Philosophy Quarterly 18 (2001): 57-77.
9. On this point, see Thomas Mautner, "Introduction" to Francis Hutcheson, On Human Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 6.
10. Mautner notes that Wolfgang Leidhold has also argued that the moral sense has been dwelled upon at the expense of other equally important aspects of his moral philosophy; see Wolfgang Leidhold, Ethik und Politik bei Francis Hutcheson (Munich: Aber 1985), 21.
11. Francis Hutcheson, "Reflections on Our Common Systems of Morality" ["Reflections"], in On Human Nature, ed. and trans. Thomas Mautner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 101-02.
12. Francis Hutcheson, "On the Natural Sociability of Mankind" ["Natural Sociability of Mankind"], in Logic, Metaphysics and the Natural Sociability of Mankind, ed. James Moore and Michael Silverthorne (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 189-216, at 204. The inaugural address was given in Latin, and published at Glasgow in 1730 under the title De naturali hominum socialitate.
13. The editions of Hutcheson's major works used in this paper are as follows: An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue [Inquiry], ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004);
14. A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy [Short Introduction], in Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendaria, with A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, ed. Luigi Turco (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007);
15. See especially James Moore, "The Two Systems of Francis Hutcheson: On the Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment" ["Two Systems"], in Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment [Studies], ed. M. A. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 37-59;
16. and "Hutcheson's Theodicy: The Argument and the Contexts of A System of Moral Philosophy" ["Hutcheson's Theodicy"], in The Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation, ed. Paul Wood (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2000).
17. For comment on Moore's "two systems" thesis, see Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment [Natural Law] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ch. 2.
18. See Norton, David Hume, 87-92.
19. Richard Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985), 176-78.
20. For a detailed assessment of Hutcheson's influence on the "moderate literati," see also Sher, "Professors of Virtue: The Social History of the Edinburgh Moral Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century," in Stewart, Studies, 87-126.
21. Haakonssen, Natural Law, 71. For further explanation, see 78: "Having gained the insight that the moral system of humanity is not simply the aggregate of men's individual moral endeavours but in itself a moral good, because it flows as a whole from God's moral motivation, we morally approve of, that is, feel an obligation to, the rules which our reason works out to be God's prescriptions for how to realize the system. In this way the moral sense is the basis for natural law . . ."
22. For exposition see my "Answering Bayle's Question: Religious Belief in the Moral Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment," in Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, vol. 1, ed. Daniel Garber and Steven Nadler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 229-53, at 232-34.
23. There is discussion of the religious dimension of Hutcheson's ethics also in Michael Gill, The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), ch. 14.
24. For an account of the ancient philosophy most influential in the early Scottish Enlightenment, see M. A. Stewart, "The Stoic Legacy in the early Scottish Enlightenment" ["Stoic Legacy"], in Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquility: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. 288-96.
25. This, I take it, is one reason why Haakonssen suggests that, despite its utilitarian features, Hutcheson's moral philosophy is best characterized as "beatific," "concerned with the creation of happiness as a consequence of the beatitude of its agent's soul" (Natural Law, 76-77).
26. For remarks upon Hutcheson's distinction between the benevolent, truly virtuous character, and the merely useful one, see also James Moore, "Utility and Humanity: The Quest for the Honestum in Cicero, Hutcheson, and Hume," Utilitas 14 (2002): 365-86.
27. Inquiry, 134. Jerome Schneewind ("Classical Republicanism and the History of Ethics," Utilitas 5 [1993]: 185-207, at 200) draws attention to the ways in which Hutcheson follows Shaftesbury in a move away from traditional "republican" understandings of virtue: "Hutcheson holds, more clearly and fully than Shaftesbury, that virtue is an inner condition which is independent of one's wealth, of the social structure of one's society, and of one's occupation."
28. In somewhat similar vein, Michael Brown (Francis Hutcheson in Dublin, 1719-30 [Dublin: Four Courts, 2002], 9) presents Hutcheson as an exponent of "a social rather than political idea of moral virtue."
29. Hume is criticizing Stoicism along such lines when in the first Enquiry he calls it "only a more refined system of selfishness" (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000], 34).
30. There is more on the same lines in Hume's essays, "The Epicurean," "The Platonist," and "Of Moral Prejudices." For Hume on Stoicism, see Stewart, "Stoic Legacy," 274-88.
31. Essay and Illustrations, 17.
32. For an account of Hutcheson's "public sense," and of the revisions he made to his theory of sympathy in response to the criticisms of John Clarke of Hull, see Luigi Turco, "Sympathy and Moral Sense: 1725-1740," British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7 (1999): 79-101.
33. See Moore, "Two Systems" and "Hutcheson's Theodicy."
34. Moore, "Hutcheson's Theodicy," 244.
35. Among those Leechman has in mind here is surely John Clarke of Hull; see especially The Foundation of Morality in Theory and Practice Considered (York, 1726), 104-12.
36. T. D. Campbell notes that "Hutcheson's most characteristic view is that the evils of the state of nature are indeed worse than those of at least some polities, so that it is rational for men to hope for some improvement in their lot, albeit a marginal one, by entering into civil society" ("Francis Hutcheson: 'Father' of the Scottish Enlightenment," in The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. T. D. Campbell and Andrew Skinner [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982], 175).
37. Francis Hutcheson and James Moore, The Meditations of Emperor Marcus Aurelius [Meditations] (Glasgow, 1742), 146; see also 282.
38. For an account of the controversy surrounding Hutcheson's election to the Glasgow moral philosophy chair, see William Robert Scott, Francis Hutcheson: His Life, Teaching, and Position in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900), 54-62.
39. The relation between Hutcheson and Hume has become a matter of some controversy in scholarship devoted to the early phase of the Scottish Enlightenment. James Moore ("Two systems," 25) has argued "that their moral philosophies were . . . very different in origin and inspiration, that in crucial respects their views on moral subjects were directly opposed." For a recent development of this reading of the intellectual origins of Hume's moral philosophy and its relation to Hutcheson, see John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680-1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ch. 6.
40. Moore replies to Norton in "The Eclectic Stoic, the Mitigated Sceptic," in New Essays on David Hume, ed. Emilio Mazza and Emanuele Ronchetti (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2007), 133-70.