Most twenty-first century ethicists conceive of character as a stable, enduring state that is internal to the agent who possesses it. This paper argues that writers in the 17th and 18th centuries did not share this conception: as they conceived it, character is fragile and has a social ontology. The paper goes on to show that Hume’s conception of character was more like his contemporaries than like ours. It concludes with a look at the significance of such a conception for (...) current debates about the place of character in ethics. (shrink)

Without questioning Hutcheson's general affinities with the Stoics, this article focuses on two important differences in moral psychology that show the limits of the appropriation of Stoicism in Hutcheson's ethics of benevolence. First, Hutcheson's distinction between calm affections and violent passions does not fully match with the Stoic distinction between constantiæ and perturbationes, since the emotion of sorrow remains in Hutcheson's table of the calm affections. As far as sorrow as a public affection is concerned, this first point is tied (...) to a second point, which Hutcheson highlights himself: His conception of virtue as benevolence and the general importance of the public affections seem to be in conflict with a Stoic conception of virtue as an internal good, since the happiness of others, which is the object of both Hutchesonian benevolence and the public sense, is external for the Stoics. (shrink)

Contrary to the view that Francis Hutcheson attempted to expound, defend, and further develop the philosophical system described in Shaftesbury's Characteristics, some contemporaries of Hutcheson considered Hutcheson's differences from Shaftesbury to be at least as profound as the similarities. The clearest descriptions of those differences can be found in William Leechman's preface to Hutcheson's 1755 System of Moral Philosophy, and more elaborately in a review of Hutcheson's System, probably by Hugh Blair, published in the 1755 Edinburgh Review. Examining Shaftesbury's and (...) Hutcheson's moral philosophies in light of these two descriptions reveals that Shaftesbury's defense of virtue as natural to human beings, while a plausible response to Locke, clearly did not escape Hutcheson's censure of Epicurean egoism. (shrink)

Francis Hutcheson es un reconocido proto-utilitarista. Sin embargo, Adam Smith, su discípulo más prominente y sucesor en la cátedra de Filosofía Moral de la Universidad de Glasgow, tomó otros aspectos de la ética sentimentalista de su maestro y fundó, sobre la base del mismo sentimentalismo, una teoría moral completamente distinta. En este trabajo exploraré qué rasgos de la ética de Smith -en particular, los de la simpatía y espectador imparcial- se encuentran ya en germen en la ética de Hutcheson y (...) cómo Smith desarrolló esas intuiciones para, introduciendo una instancia de racionalidad en los juicios morales y sin traicionar la tradición sentimentalista, incluir también en su teoría moral elementos propios de la razón práctica.Francis Hutcheson is known as a proto-utilitarian. Adam Smith, though, his most prominent student an successor on the Chair of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow, focuses on some different trends of his teacher's ethics and founds, based on the same sentimentalism, a completely different theory of morals. On this paper I explore what aspects of Hutcheson's ethics -particularly those of ‘sympathy' and the ‘impartial spectator'- where already present in his theory, and how Smith develops those intuitions in order to introduce a moment of rationality in moral judgments, whereby he is able to construct a theory that includes practical reasoning, without betraying the Scottish sentimentalist tradition. (shrink)

The moral sense is at the heart of Hutcheson's system. Its prominent role in this philosopher's morals and posterior commentary eclipses the rest of the senses, but there is at least one sense that deserves more attention in scholarship: the sense of honour. The reason the sense of honour, and its subordination to the moral sense, is attention-worthy is that it combats Mandeville's idea of honour as artifice. First, I flesh out the tension between pride and the moral sense and (...) a possible tension between the sense of honour and the moral sense. Next, I show how Hutcheson expanded and elaborated on the sense of honour, particularly in his later works ( System and Compendiaria). His strategy consisted in dissolving the tension between the sense of honour and the moral sense. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Kant’s psychology of moral motivation has less in common with Hutcheson’s view than interpreters have traditionally thought. I first offer an interpretation of the role that feeling, desire, and cognition play in Kant’s account of moral action. I then outline the essential features of Hutcheson’s understanding of desire before arguing that although Kant and Hutcheson share the trivial similarity that even moral action springs from a desire, Kant conceives of the desire at the root (...) of moral action as qualitatively different from all other desires in a number of important ways. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to discuss Kant’s engagement with what is arguably the core feature of Hutcheson’s moral sense theory, namely the idea that the moral sense is the foundation of moral judgement. In section one I give an account of Hutcheson’s conception of the moral sense. This sense is a perceptive faculty that explains our ability both to feel a particular kind of pleasure upon perceiving benevolence, and to appraise such benevolence as morally good on the basis (...) of this feeling. Section two summarizes Kant’s discussion of the moral sense during his pre-Critical period. Kant’s appraisal of the concept changes during this time and culminates in the 1769/70 rejection of the moral sense as the foundation of moral judgement. In section three I turn to the main reason why Kant rejects the moral sense as the foundation of moral judgement, namely because it is incapable of issuing sufficiently universal and necessary judgements of moral good and evil. I argue that underlying Kant’s rejection of the moral sense is the fact that he understands the faculty not as a “sense” proper, but as a “feeling” according to his technical understanding of these terms. In the fourth section I conclude by briefly evaluating what my analysis says about Kant’s engagement with Hutcheson. I suggest that while Kant never accepted the existence of a moral sense, Hutcheson’s position was a view with which Kant often contrasted his own, and as such it played an important role in the development and expression of Kant’s mature moral philosophy. (shrink)

Philosophy was at the core of the eighteenth century movement known as the Scottish Enlightenment. The movement included major figures, such as Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid and Adam Ferguson, and also many others who produced notable works, such as Gershom Carmichael, George Turnbull, George Campbell, James Beattie, Alexander Gerard, Henry Home (Lord Kames) and Dugald Stewart. I discuss some of the leading ideas of these thinkers, though paying less attention than I otherwise would to Hume, Smith (...) and Reid, who have separate Encyclopedia entries. Amongst the topics covered in this entry are aesthetics (particularly Hutcheson's), Moral philosophy (particularly Hutcheson's and Smith's), Turnbull's providential naturalism, Kames's doctrines on divine goodness and human freedom, Campbell's criticism of the Humean account of miracles, the philosophy of rhetoric, Ferguson's criticism of the idea of a state of nature, and finally the concept of conjectural history, a concept especially associated with Dugald Stewart. (shrink)