Fellow-Feeling and the Moral Life (review)

This study takes as its point of departure a question posed by Francis Hutcheson in An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, an important text of the Scottish Enlightenment. Hutcheson asked: “Whence arises this Love of Esteem, or Benevolence, to good Men, or to Mankind in general, if not from some nice Views of Self-Interest?” (1). As will be well known to readers of this journal, Hutcheson in his answer pointed to the workings of a “moral sense,” arguing: “The Universality of this moral Sense, and that it is antecedent to Instruction, may appear from observing the Sentiments of Children, upon hearing the Storys with which they are commonly entertain’d as soon as they understand Language. They always passionately interest themselves on that side where Kindness and Humanity are found; and detest the Cruel, the Covetous, the Selfish, or the Treacherous. How strongly do we see their Passions of Joy, Sorrow, Love, and Indignation, mov’d by these moral Representations, even tho there has been no pains taken to give them Ideas of a Deity, of Laws, of a future State, or of the more intricate Tendency of the universal Good to that of each Individual!” (2).

The book under review here aims to defend Hutcheson’s way of seeing things, even if “many will dismiss [Hutcheson’s theory] as romantic fantasy, sentimentality” (2). Filonowicz explains that, “there is a moral sense” even though “contemporary philosophers . . . will have nothing to do with the idea of a moral sense, considering it to be a historical curio, a sort of philosophical white elephant” (2). Filonowicz will prove the existence of the moral sense, “not by condensing articles from scientific journals—which could never suffice in any case—but rather by examining history, in this case the history of ethical speculation in the era of the sentimental school in early modern Britsh moral philosophy” (2). He aims “to express (intuitively and in a timeless sort of way)” a “rough and ready sketch” of the “career” of sentimentalism. But this is also a book concerned with “what ethics, or moral theory, is supposed to be about” (10). For Filonowicz, “ethics has some obligation to try, at least, to be true to what people really are, true to what is in the open street” (11). True, that is, to the ethical lives of those such as the “Kulaki kids (Kids in the street)” captured in the photograph by Heffy Dantzic (c. 1956) that graces the volume’s jacket cover. “I find it sad to think that any reader should have to choose between loving eighteenth-century British ethics and being part of the analytic tradition, but if my principle is sound and the results are found good, this is a choice that no one really needs, in theory, to face” (43). The result is a refreshingly well-written and wide ranging volume with much to offer philosophers and others interested in the history of ethics.

Filonowicz’s investigation begins not with Hutcheson or his moral sense theory, but with Filonowicz’s own observations about people and their moral behavior. People act, for the most part, “from self-convenience” (to use Hobbes’ term), but they are also “motivated by concern, not for themselves, but for others” (16). Filonowicz defends this “ethical sentimentalism” with reference to Shaftesbury’s An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, Hutcheson’s Illustrations upon Moral Sense and An Inquiry Concerning the Original of our Ideas of Virtue and Moral Good, C. D. Broad’s “Some Reflections on Moral Sense Theories in Ethics,” and James Q. Wilson’s The Moral Sense. The volume ends with a short postscript, entitled “Hume, Smith and the end of the sentimental school.”

Filonowicz confesses he remains “haunted by Broad’s statement . . . that his primary interest in studying past moralists was to ‘find out what is true and what is false about ethics’ and that the arguments of his subjects are only really interesting in so far as...