Following the lead of their English predecessor Joseph Butler, eighteenthcentury Scottish philosophers Thomas Reid and Adam Smith identified key elements in the makeup of young children that support the idea that, while still children, they can acquire fundamental features of reasonableness. This book is a revisiting of their accounts, with particular attention given to how their views can support current efforts to promote the philosophical thinking of children.

In contrast to Reid and Smith, both of whom attended carefully to Butler's earlier writings on resentment and forgiveness, David Hume did not discuss these reflections. This is so despite his admiration of Butler's work and his familiarity with the writings of his two contemporaries. However, Glen Pettigrove, the current occupant of Glasgow University's Chair of Moral Philosophy (the position once held by Smith, and then by Reid, his immediate successor), offers an account of eighteenth-century Scotland's regard for meekness as a virtue that might shed some light on why Hume took a different path. Pettigrove's “Meekness and ‘Moral’ Anger” (Ethics, January 2012) discusses in detail how meekness was standardly regarded as a moral virtue in eighteenth-century Scotland. Among those Pettigrove credits with sharing this assessment of meekness was David Hume.

Today meekness is commonly regarded as a sign of weakness and moral submissiveness. However, Hume and his contemporaries understood it as exhibiting moral strength and anything but submissiveness. In his essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” Hume lists meekness, equity, justice, temperance, and charity as concepts that “must always be taken in a good sense.” In his Treatise, Hume says that meekness is a virtue whose “tendency to the good of society no one can doubt of.”

What was this earlier understanding of meekness? A particularly noteworthy mark of its strength was the disposition to resist becoming angry while at the same time maintaining firm commitment to moral principle, including support for rules of justice. Pettigrove points out that it was typically contrasted with anger, resentment, wrath, rage, revenge, cruelty, and a persecuting spirit. Credited with constraining anger and related emotions, the meek individual is “slow to anger and is not prone to resent others, to desire their suffering, or to take pleasure in their distress.” Pettigrove adds, even when angered, the meek do not sustain their anger long, and they choose enduring evil over trying to overcome evil with evil.