Dark Humour and Moral Sense Theory: Or, How Swift Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Evil

This article examines points of agreement between Jonathan Swift’s satire, in such works as Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and A Modest Proposal (1729), and the moral sense philosophy of Francis Hutcheson, as represented in, for example, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725). I argue that Swift’s satirical representations of evil rely on a construct similar to what Hutcheson calls “disinterested malice,” a deliberate delight in cruelty for its own sake. Hutcheson suggests that disinterested malice is imaginable but not possible: although it is conceivable to choose malicious conduct purely for its own sake, in practice real individuals will always be subject to partial interests, biases, and prejudices. Swift’s satire functions by restoring this ethical potential lost in the actualization. It attacks the target by remaining faithful to it on its own terms, demonstrating that the impossible ideal that evil espouses is both more repellant and more ethical than the quotidian forms of selfishness or malice that proxy it.