Motivation and the Moral Sense in Francis Hutcheson (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 263 icaUy-bound Christian idiom of Malebranche's ethics, to provide the structure he develops with a content which we would today consider to be genuinely part of ethics. THOMASM. LENNON The University of Western Ontario Motivation and the Moral Sense in Francis Hutcheson. By Henning Jensen. International Archives of the History of Ideas, 46. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971. Pp. x-t-128. Gld. 29.25) Though not a philosopher of the first rank, Francis Hutcheson has an important place in the history of ideas, especially for his influence on Hume and Adam Smith. Hume's great contribution to philosophy began with the ethical theory of Hutcheson, which he developed and from which he derived his key ideas for epistemology. Adam Smith was Hutcheson's pupil at the University of Glasgow and might have been expected to keep closer than Hume to the views of Hutcheson. He did not in fact do so in ethics, though the essential approach, .made from the point of view of a spectator, is the same in all three writers. The influence of Hutcheson on Smith lay rather in their concept of the scope of moral philosophy and in their interests. Unlike Hume, neither of them was much moved by problems of epistemology or metaphysics. They studied and taught philosophy as the framework of ideas for the practical life of society. Ethics led on to jurisprudence and economics. The three most important books of Hutcheson are: (1) Inquiry into . . . Beauty and Virtue, 1725; (2) Essay on the Passions and Affections; with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, 1728; and (3) System of Moral Philosophy, published posthumously in 1755. The first two contain the distinctive ethical theory that Hutcheson developed as a young man. The Inquiry gives the initial statement of it, stressing the disinterested character of moral judgment and moral action alike, comparing the former with aesthetic judgment, and setting the whole doctrine in contrast to the egoistic theory of Mandeville. The second volume elaborates and refines the account, turning its critical guns against a different type of opponent, rationalist theory, but maintaining the essential character of the moral sense theory itself. The System of Moral Philosophy is a printed version of Hutcheson's lectures as delivered in the later years of his life. By this time he had become more eclectic, more conventional. In particular he had adopted certain points from Bishop Butler, notably the authority of conscience. The theory of the System has less originality and less bite. Professor Henning Jensen, in his interesting and well-argued book about Hutcheson, sensibly concentrates on the earlier theory. He has valuable things to say about the notion of moral sense itself and he then fastens upon a crucial weakness in Hutcheson's view, the inability of this moral sense to act as a motive for action. If I may put the point in my own way, the problem arises for Hutcheson (as for Hume) because he takes a spectator view of moral judgment. Hutcheson began by insisting on the disinterested character of ethics. This disinterestedness has two aspects. Moral action is motivated by disinterested benevolence, and moral judgment is a disinterested approval of benevolence. Shaftesbury had said that moral judgment is the result of reflection by the agent himself on his motives. Hutcheson, in order to bring out the disinterested character of moral judgment no less than of moral action, envisaged the moral sense (approval) as coming from spectators. It is easier to demonstrate that approval of others can be utterly disinterested than it is to make such a case for self-approval. But a result of this perspective is to neglect the special features of moral judgment concerning oneself. A moral judgment about one's own action, couched in the form of obligation, can provide a motive to action. How does Hutcheson's theory deal with that? The answer, in brief, 264 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY is that it doesn't. Hutcheson did not see the problem at first, because he was absorbed in the refutation of egoism. In the Illustrations he was more concerned to criticize the rationalists, and here he distinguished between "exciting reasons" and "justifying reasons"; the former, he argued...