Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Chapter 1 Fellow-feeling and ethical theory: the British sentimentalists
- Chapter 2 Ethical sentimentalism revisited
- Chapter 3 Shaftesbury's ethical system
- Chapter 4 Hutcheson's moral sense
- Chapter 5 What do we perceive by moral sense?
- Chapter 6 C. D. Broad's defense of moral sense theories in ethics
- Chapter 7 What is innate in moral sense?
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 5 - What do we perceive by moral sense?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Chapter 1 Fellow-feeling and ethical theory: the British sentimentalists
- Chapter 2 Ethical sentimentalism revisited
- Chapter 3 Shaftesbury's ethical system
- Chapter 4 Hutcheson's moral sense
- Chapter 5 What do we perceive by moral sense?
- Chapter 6 C. D. Broad's defense of moral sense theories in ethics
- Chapter 7 What is innate in moral sense?
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
THREE RECEIVED VIEWS
What exactly do we perceive by moral sense? The question sounds simple, but is most likely the hardest to answer – and the most interesting – when it comes to interpreting Hutcheson's moral sense theory. In one place he calls moral sense “the perception of moral good and evil,” but what exactly does that mean? I have concluded – hesitantly – that scholars of Hutcheson have never successfully answered that question. The purpose of this chapter is to show how and why this is so, and then (and this is all I promise) to try to do better – by building on what is helpful in the literature while criticizing what seems to me unhelpful or mistaken.
To begin to see why this is such a difficult problem (saving for a moment the question of its importance), consider again the passage in which Hutcheson says that, “by a superior sense, which I call a moral one, we perceive pleasure in the contemplation of [certain] actions in others.” Or the other in which he states that, “we mean” by “this moral sense” “only a determination of our minds to receive amiable or disagreeable ideas of actions, when they occur to our observation.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Fellow-Feeling and the Moral Life , pp. 124 - 160Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008