Bry Martin on Hutcheson
by Bry Martin, University of Notre Dame
Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) was, to Adam Smith, “the never to be forgotten Dr Hutcheson,” his boyhood instructor at the University of Glasgow and, along with his friend David Hume, the unrivalled master whose political and economic—but above all, moral—views would stimulate and challenge Smith throughout his life. At Glasgow, Smith consumed a steady diet of Hutcheson’s lectures: mornings on ethics, afternoons on politics and jurisprudence, and optional talks on the Roman Stoics twice a week. Hutcheson had already gained fame for two treatises, the 1726 An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue and the 1728 An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense. In these works Hutcheson lodged morality in a “moral sense” in human nature that detected and was pleased by that which furthered the greatest good, eliciting its approval. Though Smith knew Hutcheson’s treatises intimately and would both praise and criticize Hutcheson’s “moral sense” theory in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Hutcheson was much more than his famous idea for Smith. He was Hutcheson of the usually twice-a-day lectures, unusually in English, covering eloquently and without notes a sweep of subjects that today would include psychology, moral philosophy, economics, rhetoric, legal studies, political science and sociology. There is little doubt that human nature and the central place of affections through the “moral sense” made up a good part of those lectures, as these are the first subjects developed and the cornerstone of Hutcheson’s student primer, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (1742) and his posthumously published A System of Moral Philosophy (1755), the latter to which Smith subscribed. When Smith left Glasgow to attend Balliol College, Oxford in 1740, he was bitterly disappointed at what he saw as a step down in the curriculum, “our only business here being to go to prayers twice a day, and to lecture twice a week.” In 1752 Smith stepped into his late mentor’s Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow.
Hutcheson’s goal in moral philosophy was to show the error of those writers and philosophers who reduced moral goodness to a mask worn by human self-interest or the ticking gears-and-springs of reason. He made little attempt to hide that he was entering into a heated intellectual fray, signaled by the subtitle to his Inquiry, “In which the principles of the late Earl of Shaftesbury are Explain’d and Defended, against the Author of the Fable of the Bees: and the Ideas of Moral Good and Evil are establish’d, according to the Sentiments of the Antient Moralists.” Shaftesbury had argued that, just as people were drawn to physical beauty by the sense organs, they were drawn to “moral beauty” by a “moral sense” attuned to the greater good. Bernard Mandeville, in his Fable of the Bees, however, made the stunningly cynical counter to Shaftesbury that not only were people actually more often drawn to selfishness and vice, but that their viciousness was altogether a blessing, since it drove people to activity in the economy and government more than virtue ever would. Hutcheson’s moral philosophy was intended as a forceful restatement of Shaftesbury, but not a séance. Where Shaftesbury’s remarks on the “moral sense” had been suggestive, Hutcheson would be systematic; where Shaftesbury had spoken of the moral sense as another operation of the mind, Hutcheson would treat it as a distinct mental faculty, something like a moral “sixth sense”; and where Shaftesbury, though not equating the moral sense with self-interest, had emphasized that self-interest and the public good normally aligned, Hutcheson would do all he could to show that moral approval and disapproval were distinct from self-interest. To the critics who thought Hutcheson’s moral sense had put the cart before the horse—making affection do the moral work properly left to reason and truth, Hutcheson countered in his Essay that reason was a prodigious talent enabling people to discover means to ends, but only affections could excite the mind towards a moral end.
The first words of Smith’s first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, revealed his debt to Hutcheson. “How selfish soever man may be supposed,” Smith began, “there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.” Before the reader pauses to take a breath Smith has dispatched to the dustbin Hutcheson’s two old bugbears—that morality is really just dressed up self-interest, and that it is a matter of reason and logic, having little to do with feeling. Smith wastes no time sparring with either foe until the final section of the book, instead adopting as a starting premise the Hutchesonian position, that an enquiry about morality must run through the passions and affections, through what we would call moral psychology. When he does address those who argue that morality is based on reason in Book VII, Smith waves Hutcheson’s Inquiry at them as a dispositive rebuttal: “Dr. Hutcheson had the merit of being the first who distinguished with any precision in what respect all moral distinctions may be said to arise from reason, and in what respect they are founded upon immediate sense and feeling. In his illustrations upon the moral sense he has explained this so fully, and, in my opinion, so unanswerably, that, if any controversy is still kept up about this subject, I can impute it to nothing, but either to inattention to what the gentleman has written, or to a superstitious attachment to certain forms of expression…” The relationship between Hutcheson and Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments is that between the founder of a new branch of moral science and a disciple that would take that science down new paths, some inconsistent with Hutcheson’s beliefs.
For while Smith credited Hutcheson with identifying the source of morality in the passions and affections, Smith could not follow his old teacher’s belief in the “moral sense” or the benevolent virtue that supposedly sprang from it. David Hume, Smith’s intellectual hero turned close friend, had in his Treatise of Human Nature (1738-1740) already rejected the idea that an inborn faculty like the “moral sense” or a single moral trait like Hutcheson’s “benevolence”—a “Love of others, and a Study of their Happiness”—could describe why all actions merit approval and others condemnation. Smith, too, critiqued the “ingenious philosopher” Hutcheson’s “moral sense” on the problem of diversity, if in a slightly different vein than Hume. If there is only a single faculty of moral approval and disapproval, why, Smith asks, does our approval of a “tender, delicate, and humane sentiment” feel different from “one that appears great, daring, and magnanimous,” or our “horror for cruelty” different from our “contempt for mean-spiritedness”? If there is such a “moral sense” universal to humanity, why does no language have a word for it? Above all, Smith stresses that the moral sense, since it supposedly draws people toward the greatest good, cannot explain moral disagreement, our disgust and resentment when others genuinely and disinterestedly approve of what seems wicked or reprehensible to us. So, too, Smith could not accept the identification of virtue with benevolence, a view for which “the late Dr. Hutcheson was undoubtedly, beyond all comparison, the most acute, the most distinct, the most philosophical, and what is of the greatest consequence of all, the soberest and most judicious” advocate. Smith saw Hutcheson as too insistent on both selflessness and too imbued with an early utilitarianism Smith detected, quite properly given Hutcheson’s early coinage that “that Action is best, which procures the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers; and that, worst, which, in like manner, occasions Misery.” Hutcheson’s “amiable system” left out too much, particularly the virtues of self-control and improvement that gained approval though not obviously benefiting the greater good, “prudence, vigilance, circumspection, temperance, constancy, firmness.” Smith’s own theory of sympathy would better explain the diversity of virtue than Hutcheson’s “moral sense” and “benevolence” could.
The moral philosophy of Hutcheson’s and Smith’s day encompassed a broader subject matter than it does in our own. Hutcheson would have taught Smith political economy as well as moral psychology at Glasgow, and Hutcheson’s political and economic thought contained embryonic statements of ideas that Smith would pursue. Hutcheson had used something resembling Smith’s later idea of the division of labor as an important inducement for people to leave nature to enter into society. “‘tis well known that the produce of the labours of any given number, twenty, for instance, in providing the necessaries or conveniences of life,” Hutcheson wrote in his System, “shall be much greater by assigning to one, a certain sort of work of one kind, in which he will soon acquire skill and dexterity, and to another assigning work of a different kind, than if each one of the twenty were obliged to employ himself, by turns, in all the different sorts of labour requisite for his subsistence, without sufficient dexterity in any.” Hutcheson’s idea, the rather intuitive observation that one is better off in society twith butchers, bakers and candlestick makers than having to do it all oneself, is different than Smith’s pin factory in the opening pages of the Wealth of Nations, which showed how the economic production of a commodity can be exponentially increased by specialization. Both, however, gave economic specialization a central place in their works; Hutcheson as one of the virtues of society, and Smith as an engine of economic production. Smith also retained much of Hutcheson’s approach in his System towards the value of labor, barter and the rise of money, and the futility of debasing currency for an economic advantage.
Given his admiration for Hutcheson and his years occupying Hutcheson’s chair at Glasgow, it is natural that Smith’s writings would show a significant debt to him. Smith’s failed attempt to teach without notes, as Hutcheson had, is a mark of his reverence for his former teacher. Even criticism sometimes smacked of a tribute, as when Smith argued that Hutcheson’s identification of virtue with benevolence could not explain more private virtues like “temperance” and “firmness,” a charge that showed Smith’s concern to save the Stoic virtues that Hutcheson had lectured upon. But ultimately the men held different theories and aims. For all Hutcheson’s psychological emphasis on moral passions above naked reason, his philosophical endeavor was to construct a rational model of moral intentions directed towards a roughly utilitarian greatest good. Smith was a more trenchant observer of the human mind and the muddy moral sympathies, not always useful, benevolent, or even just, nor inherently vicious, that gave the world its moral order. The two came together, with Hume, in dethroning the reason of the philosopher and sage as the key representative of virtue and replacing them with the more widely shared affections. If the teacher would nevertheless let a philosophical virtue creep back in through a rigid insistence on selfless affections directed to the greatest good, his student would shut the door on it more firmly, a small rebellion nevertheless expressing an enduring fidelity.
Futher Reading
Gill, Michael B. The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Hutcheson, Francis. An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. Ed. Wolfgang Leidhold. Revised Ed. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2008.
--. An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense. Ed. Aaron Garrett. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2002.
--. Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria, with A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy. Ed. Luigi Turco. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2007.
--. A System of Moral Philosophy. London: A. Millar, 1755.
Ross, Ian Simpson. The Life of Adam Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Scott, William Robert. Francis Hutcheson: His Life, Teaching and Position in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900.
Smith, Adam. The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, 8 vols. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1981.