Hutcheson Francis (1694–1746), Scottish philosopher who was the chief exponent of the early modern moral sense theory and of a similar theory postulating a sense of beauty. He was born in Drumalig, Ireland, and completed his theological training in 1717 at the University of Glasgow, where he later taught moral philosophy. He was a Presbyterian minister and founded an academy for Presbyterian youth in Dublin.
Sparked by Hobbes’s thesis, in Leviathan (1651), that human beings always act out of selfinterest, moral debate in the eighteenth century was preoccupied with the possibility of a genuine benevolence. Hutcheson characterized his first work, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), as a defense of the nonegoistic moral sense theory of his more immediate predecessor, Shaftesbury, against the egoism of Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733). His second work, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (1728), explores the psychology of human action, apparently influenced by Butler’s classification of the passions (in his Sermons, 1726). Hutcheson asserts the existence of several ‘internal’ senses – i.e., capacities for perceptual responses to concepts (such as one’s idea of Nero’s character), as opposed to perceptions of physical objects. Among these internal senses are those of honor, sympathy, morality, and beauty. Only the latter two, however, are discussed in detail by Hutcheson, who develops his account of each within the framework of Locke’s empiricist epistemology. For Hutcheson, the idea of beauty is produced in us when we experience pleasure upon thinking of certain natural objects or artifacts, just as our idea of moral goodness is occasioned by the approval we feel toward an agent when we think of her actions, even if they in no way benefit us. Beauty and goodness (and their opposites) are analogous to Lockean secondary qualities, such as colors, tastes, smells, and sounds, in that their existence depends somehow on the minds of perceivers. The quality the sense of beauty consistently finds pleasurable is a pattern of ‘uniformity amidst variety,’ while the quality the moral sense invariably approves is benevolence. A principal reason for thinking we possess a moral sense, according to Hutcheson, is that we approve of many actions unrelated or even contrary to our interests – a fact that suggests not all approval is reason-based. Further, he argues that attempts to explain our feelings of approval or disapproval without referring to a moral sense are futile: our reasons are ultimately grounded in the fact that we simply are constituted to care about others and take pleasure in benevolence (the quality of being concerned about others for their own sakes). For instance, we approve of temperance because overindulgence signifies selfishness, and selfishness is contrary to benevolence. Hutcheson also finds that the ends promoted by the benevolent person have a tendency to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Thus, since he regards being motivated by benevolence as what makes actions morally good, Hutcheson’s theory is a version of motive utilitarianism.
On Hutcheson’s moral psychology, we are motivated, ultimately, not by reason alone, but by desires that arise in us at the prospect of our own or others’ pleasure. Hutcheson formulates several quantitative maxims that purport to relate the strength of motivating desires to the degrees of good, or benefit, projected for different actions – an analysis that anticipates Bentham’s hedonic calculus. Hutcheson was also one of the first philosophers to recognize and make use of the distinction between exciting, or motivating, reasons and justifying reasons. Exciting reasons are affections, or desires, ascribed to an agent as motives that explain particular actions. Justifying reasons derive from the approval of the moral sense and serve to indicate why a certain action is morally good. The connection between these two kinds of reasons has been a source of considerable debate.
Contemporary critics included John Balguy (1686–1748), who charged that Hutcheson’s moral theory renders virtue arbitrary, since it depends on whatever human nature God happened to give us, which could just as well have been such as to make us delight in malice. Hutcheson discussed his views in correspondence with Hume, who later sent Hutcheson the unpublished manuscript of his own account of moral sentiment (Book III of A Treatise of Human Nature). As a teacher of Adam Smith, Hutcheson helped shape Smith’s widely influential economic and moral theories. Hutcheson’s major works also include A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (originally published in Latin in 1742) and A System of Moral Philosophy (1755).
See also BENTHAM , HUME, MORAL SENSE THEORY , SMIT. E.S.R.