Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (review)

At the heart of this book lies a fundamental question that became a sustaining preoccupation of the Enlightenment and which remains, albeit in modified form, a live issue in modern society. This is, as Daniel Carey puts it, the problem of human ‘diversity’; or, to express it slightly differently, whether the undeniable existence of a great variety of customs and values among people means that there is in fact no innate human knowledge or belief and, perhaps, no essential human nature.

It was Locke, inspiration later to both the Enlightenment and the American Revolution, who first gave form and structure to the debate, arguing provocatively but influentially in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) that humans did not and could not agree amongst themselves because, coming into the world famously with minds that were tabula rasa, their preferences and commitments were necessarily the product of lived experience rather than unchanging nature. The brilliant aristocratic theorist Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3^rd Earl of Shaftesbury, who had himself been Locke’s pupil, responded in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711) with a stout defence of the efficacy of human nature against the corrosive scepticism of his teacher. In fact, Shaftesbury was bold enough not only to insist that a consensus in questions on taste, morality and opinion was actually possible but also to go further and assert that there existed a natural disposition in mankind towards virtue and benevolence: in this view, such diversity as arose was to be understood merely as the result of the uneven impact of different contextual factors rather than as proof of the absence of universal human proclivities.

It was into precisely this debate that Frances Hutcheson, who knew neither man but who had been a close reader and admirer of both, decisively stepped, not only in his Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725) but also in his Glasgow moral philosophy classes between 1730 and his death in 1746. For Hutcheson’s aim was to resolve the specific philosophical problems created by his eminent predecessors, an enterprise which eventually led to his identification of the ‘moral sense’, a natural and universal human faculty that, being like the other senses, could be presented explicitly in the Inquiry, and thus in conformity with Lockeian principles, as non-innate. The unintended consequence of this preoccupation, however, was to make a technical controversy that had arisen in England at the beginning of the eighteenth century absolutely central to the development of intellectual and cultural life in Scotland over the next hundred years. Indeed, with Hutcheson’s status as a founding father of the Scottish Enlightenment now largely taken for granted by scholars, the implication of Carey’s interpretation is that in order to understand the arguments in which theorists such as David Hume, Lord Kames, James Beattie and even Dugald Stewart at the turn of the nineteenth century were involved, we need first to explore the diversity debate as Hutcheson had first carried it over from an English into a Scottish environment.

This account of a genuinely British process of intellectual cross-fertilization has many virtues, particularly in showing the fruitful relations that existed between Oxford, London, Dublin and Glasgow at this time. Indeed, one might even begin to wonder whether ‘Three Kingdoms’ interpretations, so beloved of those historians seeking to explain the distinctive patterns of seventeenth-century politics and religion, actually work even better when applied to the history of eighteenth-century moral philosophy: if we were also to include figures like Thomas Hobbes, Gershom Carmichael and Bernard Mandeville in this story (the first and third of whom have walk-on parts in this book) this would certainly seem a convincing approach to adopt.

Yet it should be said that Carey’s version of events is not without its own problems, especially in relation to Scotland. One important dimension clearly missing from this account is the impact...