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Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics
An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two Treatises
Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics
275 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1725
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About the author
Francis Hutcheson
135 books19 followersFrancis Hutcheson was an Irish philosopher born in Ulster to a family of Scottish Presbyterians who became known as one of the founding fathers of the Scottish Enlightenment. He is remembered for his book A System of Moral Philosophy.
Hutcheson took ideas from John Locke, and he was an important influence on the works of several significant Enlightenment thinkers, including David Hume and Adam Smith.
Hutcheson took ideas from John Locke, and he was an important influence on the works of several significant Enlightenment thinkers, including David Hume and Adam Smith.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 16, 2024
Hutcheson occupies an important but misunderstood place in the Scottish "moral sense" school. What everybody knows is that he defended the sentimentalist ideas of Shaftesbury against Mandeville and Hobbes and anticipated the works of Hume and Smith. In the process of doing so, he even accidentally half-invented utilitarianism - a century before Bentham! Beyond all that, however, his works are treasure troves of insights, thought experiments, tangents, and objections. Unfortunately, he is not frequently read today, although he should be. I believe that his works on ethics and aesthetics are among the greatest works in modern philosophy. Indeed, one is at a loss to find many contemporary authors who write (and think) with such grace and intuition.
Like Shaftesbury, Hutcheson believes that human beings have certain in-built capacities or faculties with which to sense a) aesthetic harmony and beauty in nature and art, and b) moral goodness and virtue in human characters and actions. I will focus on his moral philosophy, but the first half of the book deals with (and starts with) aesthetics, and this is no accident. The faculties of moral perception and aesthetic perception operate on similar logic. When human beings come into contact with the harmonious, the beautiful, the orderly, the beneficent, or the virtuous (or their opposites!), they are naturally wired to feel and judge them on an emotional, intuitive level. Like Shaftesbury, although to a less extent, Hutcheson also believes that there is an intrinsic theological connection between the realms of natural, aesthetic, and moral harmony or goodness. (This theological dimension, however, stays in the background.)
Curiously, although I find Shaftesbury almost unreadable (because he is so maudlin and conceptually wishy-washy), Hutcheson seems to import only the good bits of Shaftesbury. Indeed, Hutcheson refines the moral sense doctrine into an unassailable bastion of philosophical argumentation. No wonder that Hume and Smith were so inspired by him. After Hutcheson, it is almost impossible to believe that human beings do not have a powerful natural tendency to value perceived moral qualities in others and their actions. And although I believe that Shaftesbury misses some of the key insights of Mandeville and Hobbes, he forces them into a conceptual retreat from the over-strong position that all of human morality is founded on self-love. This challenge has been very healthy for the refinement of modern moral philosophy. Cynicism needs to be moderated by a good understanding of our evolved moral psychology. Although I am generally very sympathetic to the Mandevillean and Hobbesian position, I feel that Hutcheson's arguments are extremely well-rounded, nuanced, and perceptive. So, even though Hutcheson (in my opinion) fails to shoot down the central insight of the self-love school, i.e., that much of society (including its laws and moral norms), are constructed on self-interest (or have evolved to serve it), he utterly destroys the incautious argument that ALL of human society is founded on it. He thus encourages us to accept a more nuanced position: that human psychology is a complex mixture of simple self-interest (hedonism), extended self-interest (instrumental concern for others), and genuine concern for others (which stems from our benevolent instincts and moral judgments). This complex position, not coincidentally, is also the position of Hume and Smith. The latter two further extended our understanding of human moral psychology through their studies of sympathy, which yielded a better understanding of the dynamics of social interaction, moral imitation, cultural learning, and social evolution. But Hutcheson was required to make it all work.
Hutcheson's genius was manifold: He perfected the foundations of the moral sense school. He stripped Shaftesbury's doctrine down to his bare essentials, developed it further, and thus made Hume and Smith possible. He rejected both simple altruism and simple egoism and made both into constituent parts of a complex human motivational structure. He wrote about human conduct and motivation with incredible perceptiveness. He invented (as far as I know) the idea of the philosophical moral calculus based on formal expressions and mathematical formulae. He also invented the crystalline concept of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" - NOT as a normative principle to ground maximizing utilitarianism (although he sometimes comes close to being a forerunner of Benthamism!), but more as as a descriptive principle of how reason can (and does) serve our passions by subjecting moral dilemmas to a kind of rational "balancing" test. Finally, he expressed his groundbreaking substantive arguments in beautiful prose. His philosophical penmanship is elegant, witty, smooth, analytical, perceptive, and to-the-point. It is to our own detriment that his books are unappreciated and mostly unassigned to students. Perhaps this is almost unavoidable for someone who is seen as a precursor to Hume and Smith. But he was far from than a good conduit from traditional virtue ethics (exemplified by Shaftesbury) to modern moral philosophy (exemplified by Hume); he was one of the best thinkers of the era.
Like Shaftesbury, Hutcheson believes that human beings have certain in-built capacities or faculties with which to sense a) aesthetic harmony and beauty in nature and art, and b) moral goodness and virtue in human characters and actions. I will focus on his moral philosophy, but the first half of the book deals with (and starts with) aesthetics, and this is no accident. The faculties of moral perception and aesthetic perception operate on similar logic. When human beings come into contact with the harmonious, the beautiful, the orderly, the beneficent, or the virtuous (or their opposites!), they are naturally wired to feel and judge them on an emotional, intuitive level. Like Shaftesbury, although to a less extent, Hutcheson also believes that there is an intrinsic theological connection between the realms of natural, aesthetic, and moral harmony or goodness. (This theological dimension, however, stays in the background.)
Curiously, although I find Shaftesbury almost unreadable (because he is so maudlin and conceptually wishy-washy), Hutcheson seems to import only the good bits of Shaftesbury. Indeed, Hutcheson refines the moral sense doctrine into an unassailable bastion of philosophical argumentation. No wonder that Hume and Smith were so inspired by him. After Hutcheson, it is almost impossible to believe that human beings do not have a powerful natural tendency to value perceived moral qualities in others and their actions. And although I believe that Shaftesbury misses some of the key insights of Mandeville and Hobbes, he forces them into a conceptual retreat from the over-strong position that all of human morality is founded on self-love. This challenge has been very healthy for the refinement of modern moral philosophy. Cynicism needs to be moderated by a good understanding of our evolved moral psychology. Although I am generally very sympathetic to the Mandevillean and Hobbesian position, I feel that Hutcheson's arguments are extremely well-rounded, nuanced, and perceptive. So, even though Hutcheson (in my opinion) fails to shoot down the central insight of the self-love school, i.e., that much of society (including its laws and moral norms), are constructed on self-interest (or have evolved to serve it), he utterly destroys the incautious argument that ALL of human society is founded on it. He thus encourages us to accept a more nuanced position: that human psychology is a complex mixture of simple self-interest (hedonism), extended self-interest (instrumental concern for others), and genuine concern for others (which stems from our benevolent instincts and moral judgments). This complex position, not coincidentally, is also the position of Hume and Smith. The latter two further extended our understanding of human moral psychology through their studies of sympathy, which yielded a better understanding of the dynamics of social interaction, moral imitation, cultural learning, and social evolution. But Hutcheson was required to make it all work.
Hutcheson's genius was manifold: He perfected the foundations of the moral sense school. He stripped Shaftesbury's doctrine down to his bare essentials, developed it further, and thus made Hume and Smith possible. He rejected both simple altruism and simple egoism and made both into constituent parts of a complex human motivational structure. He wrote about human conduct and motivation with incredible perceptiveness. He invented (as far as I know) the idea of the philosophical moral calculus based on formal expressions and mathematical formulae. He also invented the crystalline concept of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" - NOT as a normative principle to ground maximizing utilitarianism (although he sometimes comes close to being a forerunner of Benthamism!), but more as as a descriptive principle of how reason can (and does) serve our passions by subjecting moral dilemmas to a kind of rational "balancing" test. Finally, he expressed his groundbreaking substantive arguments in beautiful prose. His philosophical penmanship is elegant, witty, smooth, analytical, perceptive, and to-the-point. It is to our own detriment that his books are unappreciated and mostly unassigned to students. Perhaps this is almost unavoidable for someone who is seen as a precursor to Hume and Smith. But he was far from than a good conduit from traditional virtue ethics (exemplified by Shaftesbury) to modern moral philosophy (exemplified by Hume); he was one of the best thinkers of the era.
January 18, 2022
Read for my university course. Fascinating tracts in dialogue with the works of Burke, Godwin, and other philosophical and political writers of this turbulent era.
Read
November 21, 2009None
read-partially
September 15, 2010Treatise I: An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews