HUTCHESON AND MORAL SENSE

Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith were the main Scottish participants in the British debate on the foundations of morals. Here their moral theories will be outlined as three rival systems, and then Thomas Reid's critical attitude towards their theories will be discussed.

Francis Hutcheson (1694 1746) was the first Scottish philosopher to approach the problem of the foundations of morals in an original way. His strategy was to construct a unitary doctrine drawing both on Lord Shaftesbury's teachings on the relation between natural affection and morality, and on Locke's new empirical epistemology. In response to Hobbes's theory that human nature is fundamentally selfish and anti-social, Shaftesbury had argued that God provided human nature with a number of generous forms of affection, from family affection to a love for mankind, that naturally predispose men to live together. Human beings are also provided with a natural capacity to feel attraction to these affections and a dislike for the contrary ones. In Shaftesbury's works it is not clear whether moral distinctions derive from reason or sentiment, an omission that Hutcheson was to remedy.

From Locke, Hutcheson took the doctrine that men lack innate ideas, and that they derive their complex ideas of things and actions from experience, compounding, enlarging and abstracting from simple original ideas.