Francis Hutcheson and Contemporary Ethical Theory (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 177 resolution, Mme Labrousse develops a picture of an intellectual personality who could plausibly have had both the doubts and the assurances Bayle professed to having and tries to show how these views could have developed out of Bayle's Calvinist background. The problem of reconciling Bayle's complete scepticism with his positive moral, political, and social views and his avowed fideistic Christianity points to a broader problem, that of characterizing the views of the modern sceptics from Montaigne to Hume. They usually all adhere to an epistemological and metaphysical scepticism, and all of them also profess strong religious or moral and political convictions that have not been undermined by their doubts. From Montaigne to Bayle, all the avowed sceptics proclaim (whether sincerely or not) that they accept the truths of religion on faith. The type of religious scepticism about the true value of the documents and claims of the Judeo-Christian tradition, starting from the work of Isaac La Peyr~re, Spinoza, and Richard Simon, that was to flourish in the eighteenth century, seems foreign to the seventeenth-century sceptics. The value scepticism of a Raskalnikov-that everything is lawful--does not seem to develop from the epistemological and metaphysical scepticism of the period. The scepticism about axiology that appears in Sextus Empiricus and the conventionalist social and political morality ~Ivocated by the ancient Pyrrhonism certainly seem different from the strong moral convictions of a Montaigne, a Bayle, and a Hume. In each case one has to figure out what relation these convictions have to the doubts about man's ability to attain true knowledge about reality, and what status these convictions may have. In the development of scepticism from the Renaissance to the present, it is interesting to follow the progression from epistemological, metaphysical, and theological scepticisms , to religious scepticism to axiological scepticism. A scepticism that had seemed so easy for the ancient Pyrrhonists, encompassing all these kinds of doubts, has taken a long time to develop in modern times. In this development, Bayle played an enormous role, carrying epistemological scepticism to its highest level, and setting the stage for the flowering of religious scepticism in the Enlightenment. But, as Mme Labrousse shows, for Bayle "le royaume des valeurs est in~branlablement ~tabli et autour de cet riot de certitude incontest~e, les temp ~tes du doute peuvent bien assailir en tornaAe les vaisseaux de ligne des divers dogmatismes mStaphysiques" (p. 71). Perhaps it was only after a thoroughgoing religious scepticism that an axiological scepticism could develop. Perhaps the moral commitments of the JudeoChristian tradition had taken such deep roots in the Western mind that only after the merit of that tradition had been thoroughly doubted, and a transvaluation of all values had been advocated , could this next stage of scepticism be proposed. RICHARD H. POPKIN University o/Calilornia, San Diego Francis Hutcheson and Contemporary Ethical Theory. By William T. Blackstone. (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press [University of Georgia Monographs No. 12], 1965. Pp. viii -t- 88. $2.75.) In view of the important role he seems to have played in the history of ethical theory, it appears that very little attention has been given to Francis Hutcheson. In addition, as Professor Blackstone puts it, the studies of Hutcheson which do exist "are largely biographical and historical in scope" (p. 8). Having taken notice of this situation, the author has presented us with some detailed analyses of Hutcheson's ethical theory as well as of its relation to the views of one of tIutcheson's contemporaries, Richard Price, and to the ethical theories of some of the more important of our contemporaries. After an introductory chapter, Blackstone sets out to clarify Hutcheson's moral sense theory . What Hutcheson means when he says that the moral sense is the foundation of morals is not always clear. Sometimes it appears that the moral sense is offered as a causal explanation of our moral approvals or disapprovals; at other times it appears rather to be offered as a justi]ying ground of these reactions: "Hutcheson, throughout his ethical treatises, seems to confuse a causal explanation for acting or approving with a justification (in the sense of 178 HISTORY...