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Francis Hutcheson
Edited by Michael Walschots (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz)
About this topic
| Summary | Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) was born in Ireland but was educated and spent his career in Scotland at the University of Glasgow, where he was professor and chair of moral philosophy from 1729 until his death. Hutcheson is generally considered a key figure, and sometimes even the ‘father’, of the Scottish Enlightenment, especially considering his ideas had such an important impact on figures like Hume, Smith, and Reid. Hutcheson is best known for his theory of the moral sense and his sentimentalist moral theory more generally, wherein he provided an early formulation of the utilitarian principle of ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’, among other things. He also made a significant contribution to early aesthetic theory, and his works were not only translated and discussed in places like Germany, where he had an influence on Kant, but were also discussed in the American colonies both at colleges and by writers on slavery and colonial independence. |
| Key works | Hutcheson’s most read works are the Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725, modern edition 1971) and the Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations upon the Moral sense (1728, modern edition 2002). The Inquiry contains his theory of the moral sense and sense of beauty, as well as his arguments against the self-interested moral psychology of Hobbes and Mandeville and alternative theory of benevolence. The Essay is an even more extensive elucidation of his theory of motivation, and the Illustrations contains his famous distinction between exciting and justifying reasons. Hutcheson’s other writings include texts on logic and metaphysics (Hutcheson et al 2006), a Latin textbook introduction to moral philosophy (2007), his posthumously published magnum opus A System of Moral Philosophy (1755, modern edition 2015), as well as a translation of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Among his more famous shorter writings are his exchange with the rationalist Gilbert Burnet in the London Journal and his inaugural lecture on the Social Nature of Man (see Mautner 1993). Facsimiles of eighteenth-century editions of Hutcheson’s works have been reproduced by Georg Olms press (1745), but the new standard edition of Hutcheson’s works is that published by Liberty Fund, and which is available online (some volumes are still forthcoming). |
| Introductions | For an excellent introduction to Hutcheson’s meta- and normative ethics, see Dorsey 2021. On Hutcheson’s aesthetics see Grote 2017. For Hutcheson’s relation to the Scottish Enlightenment, see Carey 2015. For Hutcheson’s relation to utilitarianism see Hollander 2019. The standard biography of Hutcheson remains Scott 1900. |
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Related
Siblings
- Mary Astell (99)
- George Berkeley (2,792 | 123)
- Francis Bacon (894)
- Robert Boyle (350)
- Edmund Burke (193)
- Joseph Butler (200)
- Margaret Cavendish (101)
- Catharine Trotter Cockburn (51)
- Anne Conway (56)
- Thomas Hobbes (5,599 | 2,729)
- David Hume (16,729 | 53)
- John Locke (5,309 | 14)
- Bernard Mandeville (101)
- Damaris Masham (44)
- Isaac Newton (1,410)
- Thomas Reid (866)
- Earl of Shaftesbury (155)
- Adam Smith (1,028)
- Mary Wollstonecraft (107)
- Cambridge Platonism (718)
- 17th/18th Century British Philosophy, Misc (2,786)
See also
- Aesthetic Perception (289)
- Social and Political Philosophy (179,305)
- Ethics (49,203 | 47,218)
- Moral Emotivism and Sentimentalism (422)
- Moral Sensibility Theories (32)
Contents
277 found
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| 1 — 50 / 277 |
- Kant and Hutcheson on the Psychology of Moral Motivation.Michael Walschots - forthcoming - In Antonino Falduto (ed.), Problems of Reason: Kant in Context. De Gruyter.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 (...)
- Lore Knapp. Empirismus und Ästhetik: Zur deutschsprachigen Rezeption von Hume, Hutcheson, Home und Burke im 18. Jahrhundert. [REVIEW]Michael Walschots - forthcoming - Austrian History Yearbook.
- The Active Powers of the Human Mind.Ruth Boeker - 2023 - In Aaron Garrett & James A. Harris (eds.), Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Volume II: Method, Metaphysics, Mind, Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 255–292.This essay traces the development of the philosophical debates concerning active powers and human agency in eighteenth-century Scotland. I examine how and why Scottish philosophers such as Francis Hutcheson, George Turnbull, David Hume, and Henry Home, Lord Kames, depart from John Locke’s and other traditional conceptions of the will and how Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart reinstate Locke’s distinction between volition and desire. Moreover, I examine what role desires, passions, and motives play in the writings of these and other Scottish (...)
- Pufendorf and Hutcheson in the Alps : variations on natural law in Eighteenth-Century Italy.Serena Luzzi - 2023 - In Elisabetta Fiocchi Malaspina & Gabriella Silvestrini (eds.), Natural law and the law of nations in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Italy. Boston: Brill/Nijhoff.
- The Rationality of Love: Benevolence and Complacence in Kant and Hutcheson.Michael Walschots - 2023 - Ergo 10 (40):1133–1156.Kant claims that love ‘is a matter of feeling,’ which has led many of his interpreters to argue that he conceives of love as solely a matter of feeling, that is, as a purely pathological state. In this paper I challenge this reading by taking another one of Kant’s claims seriously, namely that all love is either benevolence or complacence and that both are rational. I place Kant’s distinction between benevolence and complacence next to the historical inspiration for it, namely (...)
- Hutcheson and his Critics and Opponents on the Moral Sense.Ruth Boeker - 2022 - Journal of Scottish Philosophy 20 (2):143-161.This paper takes a new look at Francis Hutcheson's moral sense theory and examines it in light of the views of his rationalist critics and opponents who claim that there has to be an antecedent moral standard prior to any sense or affections. I examine how Gilbert Burnet, Samuel Clarke, and Catharine Trotter Cockburn each argue for the priority of reason over a moral sense and how Hutcheson responds or could respond to their views. Furthermore, I consider the proposal that (...)
- Mencius and Hutcheson on Empathy-based Benevolence.Christina Chuang - 2022 - Philosophy East and West 72 (1):57-78.
- Hutcheson in the History of Rights.Stephen Darwall - 2022 - Journal of Scottish Philosophy 20 (2):85-101.Francis Hutcheson's An Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, published in 1725, arguably contains the first broadly utilitarian theory of rights ever formulated. In this essay, I argue that, despite its subtlety, there are crucial lacunae in Hutcheson's theory. One of the most important, which Mill seeks to repair, is that his theory of rights lacks a conceptually necessary companion, namely, a corollary account of obligation. Hutcheson has no theory of fully deontic obligations, much less (...)
- The Natural and the Publick Good: Two Puzzles in Hutcheson's Axiology.Dale Dorsey - 2022 - Journal of Scottish Philosophy 20 (2):163-182.Whatever the finer details, Francis Hutcheson is clearly some form of proto-, quasi-, pseudo-utilitarian. But for any utilitarian, the full picture of their moral theory will only emerge once we understand their theory of the good. What, according to said utilitarian, is the nature of happiness? How do we aggregate happiness across persons? In this paper, I discuss two important aspects of Hutcheson's utilitarian axiology each with their own puzzles of interpretation. The first involves Hutcheson's theory of happiness or the (...)
- Empirismus und Ästhetik: Zur deutschsprachigen Rezeption von Hume, Hutcheson, Home und Burke im 18. Jahrhundert.Lore Knapp - 2022 - Boston: De Gruyter.Empirismus und Ästhetik werden in den Schriften von Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Edmund Burke und Henry Home zu einer empiristischen Ästhetik verbunden. Sie argumentiert induktiv, psycho- oder physiologisch, evolutionär und demokratisch und lässt sich als frühe Form der empirischen Ästhetik verstehen. Ihr Transfer nach Deutschland in Rezensionen, Übersetzungen und Anschlussforschungen geht mit unwillkürlichen Anpassungen einher. Für die empiristische Ästhetik in der deutschsprachigen Aufklärung stehen nicht nur Namen wie Lichtenberg, Mendelssohn und Kant, Hamann, Herder und Merck, sondern auch die Übersetzer Dusch, (...)
- Hutcheson's Contributions to Action Theory.Elizabeth S. Radcliffe - 2022 - Journal of Scottish Philosophy 20 (2):103-120.Jonathan Dancy charges that Hutcheson's distinction between justifying reasons and motivating reasons is unimportant: it is simply between moral reasons and other good reasons. I argue that the distinction is between propositions with different presuppositions and different functions. One identifies qualities of objects that we desire; the other identifies qualities that we approve. I situate Hutcheson in the current debate about the nature of practical reasons. I argue that he avoids problems posed for factivists and for Humeans. On Hutcheson's view, (...)
- Hutcheson's Theory of Obligation.Michael Walschots - 2022 - Journal of Scottish Philosophy 20 (2):121-142.In this article I argue that Hutcheson has a theory of obligation that is different in important ways from the views of his predecessors and that his theory may not be as problematic as critics have claimed. In section (I) I sketch a brief picture of the rich conceptual landscape surrounding the concept of obligation in the Early Modern period. I focus on the five figures Hutcheson explicitly references: Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, their French translator and commentator Jean Barbeyrac, as (...)
- Editorial: New Perspectives on Hutcheson's Moral Philosophy.Michael Walschots - 2022 - Journal of Scottish Philosophy 20 (2).Guest Editor's Introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Scottish Philosophy exploring 'New Perspectives on Hutcheson's Moral Philosophy'. The purpose of the special issue is to explore aspects of Hutcheson’s moral philosophy that have not received a great deal of attention in the past and to thereby illustrate that his contributions to the history of ethics are far richer than the current secondary literature suggests.
- Francis Hutcheson.Dale Dorsey - 2021 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- Moralsinn und Gewissen: Shaftesbury, Hutcheson und Butler.Jens Kulenkampff - 2021 - In Christoph Halbig & Felix Timmermann (eds.), Handbuch Tugend Und Tugendethik. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. pp. 199-211.Aus der Beobachtung, dass es für jedes organisierte Wesen einen Bestzustand gibt, den zu erreichen bzw. zu erhalten sein oberstes Interesse ist, und aus der durchgängigen teleologischen Ordnung der Welt gewinnt Shaftesbury, der Vater der Moral-Sense-Schule der Ethik, sowohl den Unterschied von Nutzen und Schaden als auch den Begriff einer natürlichen Güte, die darin besteht, dass sich ein jedes Wesen, gemäß der Ordnung der Natur, für das Wohlergehen anderer Wesen als nützlich erweist. Der Begriff eigentlicher, allein dem Menschen eigener Tugend (...)
- Die Erweckung aus dem dogmatischen Schlummer der Ästhetik: Francis Hutcheson und Immanuel Kant.Helke Panknin-Schappert - 2021 - In Camilla Serck-Hanssen & Beatrix Himmelmann (eds.), The Court of Reason: Proceedings of the 13th International Kant Congress. De Gruyter. pp. 1085-1094.$232.00 new (collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct downloadExport citation
Bookmark - Francis Hutcheson on Liberty.Ruth Boeker - 2020 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 88:121-142.This paper aims to reconstruct Francis Hutcheson's thinking about liberty. Since he does not offer a detailed treatment of philosophical questions concerning liberty in his mature philosophical writings I turn to a textbook on metaphysics. We can assume that he prepared the textbook during the 1720s in Dublin. This textbook deserves more attention. First, it sheds light on Hutcheson's role as a teacher in Ireland and Scotland. Second, Hutcheson's contributions to metaphysical disputes are more original than sometimes assumed. To appreciate (...)
- Hume, Mandeville, Butler, and “that Vulgar Dispute”.Erin Frykholm - 2019 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 101 (2):280-309.The debate over whether human motivations are fundamentally selfinterested or benevolent consumed Shaftesbury, Mandeville, and Hutcheson, but Hume – though explicitly indebted to all three – almost entirely ignores this issue. I argue that his relative silence reveals an overlooked intellectual debt to Bishop Butler that informs two distinguishing features of Hume’s view: first, it allows him to appropriate compelling empirical observations that Mandeville makes about virtue and moral approval; second, it provides a way of articulating a fundamental criticism of (...)
- The Problem of Partiality in 18th century British Moral Philosophy.Getty L. Lustila - 2019 - Dissertation, Boston UniversityThe dissertation traces the development of what I call “the problem of partiality” through the work of certain key figures in the British Moralist tradition: John Locke, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, Anthony Ashley Cooper (the Third Earl of Shaftesbury), Francis Hutcheson, John Gay, David Hume, Joseph Butler, and Adam Smith. On the one hand, we are committed to impartiality as a constitutive norm of moral judgment and conduct. On the other hand, we are committed to the idea that it is permissible, (...)
- Francis Hutcheson and John Clarke on Desire and Self-Interest.John J. Tilley - 2019 - The European Legacy 24 (1): 1-24.Among the most animating debates in eighteenth-century British ethics was the debate over psychological egoism, the view that our most basic desires are self-interested. An important episode in that debate, less well known than it should be, was the exchange between Francis Hutcheson and John Clarke of Hull. In the early editions of his Inquiry into Virtue, Hutcheson argued ingeniously against psychological egoism; in his Foundation of Morality, Clarke argued ingeniously against Hutcheson’s arguments. Later, Hutcheson attempted new arguments against psychological (...)
- An Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue; In Two Treatises. I. Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design. II. Concerning Moral Good and Evil.Francis Hutcheson - 2018 - Gale Ecco, Print Editions.The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate (...)
- The passions and actions of laughter in Shaftesbury and Hutcheson.Laurent Jaffro - 2017 - In Alix Cohen & Robert Stern (eds.), Thinking about the Emotions : A Philosophical History. Oxford University Press.
- Inner Sense, Outer Sense, and Feeling: Hutcheson and Kant on Aesthetic Pleasure.Colin McQuillan - 2017 - In Elizabeth Robinson & Chris W. Surprenant (eds.), Kant and the Scottish Enlightenment. New York: Routledge.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Kant on Moral Satisfaction.Michael Walschots - 2017 - Kantian Review 22 (2):281-303.This paper gives an account of Kant’s concept of self-contentment (Selbstzufriedenheit), i.e. the satisfaction involved in the performance of moral action. This concept is vulnerable to an important objection: if moral action is satisfying, it might only ever be performed for the sake of this satisfaction. I explain Kant’s response to this objection and argue that it is superior to Francis Hutcheson’s response to a similar objection. I conclude by showing that two other notions of moral satisfaction in Kant’s moral (...)
- Hutcheson and Kant: Moral Sense and Moral Feeling.Michael Walschots - 2017 - In Elizabeth Robinson & Chris W. Surprenant (eds.), Kant and the Scottish Enlightenment. New York: Routledge. pp. 36-54.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 (...)
- Stoicism and the Scottish Enlightenment.Christian Maurer - 2016 - In John Sellars (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Stoic Tradition. Routledge. pp. 254-269.
- How to Be a Moral Taste Theorist.John McAteer - 2016 - Essays in Philosophy 17 (1):05-21.In this paper, I attempt to recover an 18th Century approach to moral theory that can be called Moral Taste Theory. Through an exploration of 18th Century sources I define the characteristics of moral taste theory and to distinguish it from its closest rival, moral sense theory. In general a moral taste theorist holds that moral judgments are analogous to aesthetic judgments while a moral sense theorist holds that moral judgments are analogous to physical sense perception. Francis Hutcheson was a (...)
- Francis Hutcheson and the Emerging Aesthetic Experience.Endre Szécsényi - 2016 - Journal of Scottish Thought 7:171-209.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Hutcheson's Theological Objection to Egoism.John J. Tilley - 2016 - Journal of Scottish Philosophy 14 (1):101-123.Francis Hutcheson's objections to psychological egoism usually appeal to experience or introspection. However, at least one of them is theological: It includes premises of a religious kind, such as that God rewards the virtuous. This objection invites interpretive and philosophical questions, some of which may seem to highlight errors or shortcomings on Hutcheson's part. Also, to answer the questions is to point out important features of Hutcheson's objection and its intellectual context. And nowhere in the scholarship on Hutcheson do we (...)
- Moral Sense Theory and the Development of Kant's Ethics.Michael Walschots - 2016 - Dissertation, University of Western OntarioThis dissertation investigates a number of ways in which an eighteenth century British philosophical movement known as “moral sense theory” influenced the development of German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) moral theory. I illustrate that Kant found both moral sense theory’s conception of moral judgement and its conception of moral motivation appealing during the earliest stage of his philosophical development, but eventually came to reject its conception of moral judgement, though even in his early writings Kant preserves certain features of its (...)
- Francis Hutcheson on Luxury and Intemperance: The Mandeville Threat.Lisa Broussois - 2015 - History of European Ideas 41 (8):1093-1106.This paper looks at two figures in the modern, European, eighteenth-century debate on luxury. It claims to better understand the differences between Francis Hutcheson and Bernard Mandeville by exploring how Hutcheson treated the topic of luxury as a distinction between two desires, thus differing from Mandeville's concept of luxury, and a concept of temperance based on moral sense. It explores why Hutcheson believed that luxury was a moral, social and political issue and particularly why he considered Mandeville the embodiment of (...)
- Francis Hutcheson’s Philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment: Reception, Reputation, and Legacy.Daniel Carey - 2015 - In Aaron Garrett & James Anthony Harris (eds.), Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Volume I: Morals, Politics, Art, Religion. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press. pp. 36-76.This chapter presents an account of the life and work of Francis Hutcheson. It charts his career from its beginnings in Dublin to the attempt to cement his place in British intellectual life that was his posthumously published A System of Moral Philosophy. Hutcheson’s ideas were not universally welcomed and acclaimed. Religious conservatives constantly challenged him even after he was elected to the Glasgow chair of moral philosophy. The chapter describes the rationalist critique of Hutcheson’s moral sense theory, the criticism (...)
- Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Volume I: Morals, Politics, Art, Religion.Aaron Garrett & James Anthony Harris (eds.) - 2015 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.This new history of Scottish philosophy will include two volumes that focus on the Scottish Enlightenment. In this volume a team of leading experts explore the ideas, intellectual context, and influence of Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Reid, and many other thinkers, frame old issues in fresh ways, and introduce new topics and questions into debates about the philosophy of this remarkable period. The contributors explore the distinctively Scottish context of this philosophical flourishing, and juxtapose the work of canonical philosophers with contemporaries (...)
- A System of Moral Philosophy: In Three Books.Francis Hutcheson - 2015 - Cambridge University Press.Often described as the father of the Scottish Enlightenment, Francis Hutcheson was born in the north of Ireland to an Ulster-Scottish Presbyterian family. Organised into three 'books' that were divided between two volumes, A System of Moral Philosophy was his most comprehensive work. It synthesised ideas that he had formulated as a minister and as the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. Published posthumously by his son in 1755, prefaced by an account of his life, it is (...)
- Making Sense of Moral Perception.Rafe McGregor - 2015 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (4):745-758.The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Francis Hutcheson’s moral sense theory offers a satisfactory account of moral perception. I introduce Hutcheson’s work in §1 and indicate why the existence of a sixth sense is not implausible. I provide a summary of Robert Cowan and Robert Audi’s respective theories of evaluative perception in §2, identifying three problematic objections: the Directness Objection to Cowan’s ethical perception and the aesthetic and perceptual model objections to Audi’s moral perception. §3 examines Hutcheson’s (...)
- John Clarke of Hull's Argument for Psychological Egoism.John J. Tilley - 2015 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (1):69-89.John Clarke of Hull, one of the eighteenth century's staunchest proponents of psychological egoism, defended that theory in his Foundation of Morality in Theory and Practice. He did so mainly by opposing the objections to egoism in the first two editions of Francis Hutcheson's Inquiry into Virtue. But Clarke also produced a challenging, direct argument for egoism which, regrettably, has received virtually no scholarly attention. In this paper I give it some of the attention it merits. In addition to reconstructing (...)
- Francis Hutcheson, da beleza à perspectiva do desígnio.Lisa Broussois - 2014 - Discurso 44:97-126.O que é “a outra perspectiva nas obras da natureza”, de que fala Hutcheson? De que forma a beleza provê acesso a ela? O presente artigo discute o lugar dessa “outra perspectiva” na teoria estética de Francis Hutcheson. Trata-se de compreender por que o desígnio (design) surge do belo através de uma reflexão sobre a beleza em sua Investigação sobre a origem de nossas ideias da beleza e da virtude, de 1725. Buscaremos determinar se essa teoria estética estaria subordinada aos (...)
- A System of Moral Philosophy 2 Volume Set: In Three Books.Francis Hutcheson - 2014 - Cambridge University Press.Often described as the father of the Scottish Enlightenment, Francis Hutcheson was born in the north of Ireland to an Ulster-Scottish Presbyterian family. Organised into three 'books' that were divided between two volumes, A System of Moral Philosophy was his most comprehensive work. It synthesised ideas that he had formulated as a minister and as the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. Published posthumously by his son in 1755, prefaced by an account of his life, it is (...)
- Hutcheson sobre a importância de ser desinteressado. Um encômio a Shaftesbury?Laurent Jaffro - 2014 - Discurso 44:79-99.Costuma-se dizer que a filososfia moral de Hutcheson seria tributária daquela de Shaftesbury, a ponto mesmo de ser um prolongamento do pensamento moral do filósofo inglês. O artigo busca mostrar que essa é uma visão simplista, examinando para tanto o conceito de desinteresse em Hutcheson.
- Passions, Perceptions, and Motives: Fault-Lines in Hutcheson's Account of Moral Sentiment.Glen Pettigrove - 2014 - In Heather Kerr, David Lemmings & Robert Phiddian (eds.), Passions, Sympathy and Print Culture: Public Opinion and Emotional Authenticity in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 203-222.In the 1720s Francis Hutcheson developed a systematic account of the origins of ethical judgments that would have a profound influence on later writers. Ethical judgments, he argues, arise from the perceptions of internal senses that are, themselves, rooted in ‘Passions and Affections’. This paper describes his account and draws attention to an important tension at its heart. When judging particular cases, Hutcheson praises kindly, generous, and merciful affections as exemplary. But when he proposes a mathematical formula for ‘computing the (...)
- Ethical Intuitionism and the Emotions: Toward an Empirically Adequate Moral Sense Theory.James Sias - 2014 - Journal of Value Inquiry 48 (3):533-549.IntroductionEthical intuitionists have never known quite what to make of the emotions. Generally speaking, these philosophers fall into two camps: rational intuitionists and moral sense theorists. And by my lights, neither camp has been able to tell a convincing story about the exact role and significance of emotion in moral judgment. Rational intuitionists are for the most part too dismissive of the emotions, either regarding emotions as little more than distractions to moral judgment,Samuel Clarke, for instance, after naming our “faculties (...)
- Hutcheson, Francis.Dale Dorsey - 2013 - In Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell.
- On Three Defenses of Sentimentalism.Noriaki Iwasa - 2013 - Prolegomena 12 (1):61-82.This essay shows that a moral sense or moral sentiments alone cannot identify appropriate morals. To this end, the essay analyzes three defenses of Francis Hutcheson's, David Hume's, and Adam Smith's moral sense theories against the relativism charge that a moral sense or moral sentiments vary across people, societies, cultures, or times. The first defense is the claim that there is a universal moral sense or universal moral sentiments. However, even if they exist, a moral sense or moral sentiments alone (...)
- La mesure du bien. Que calcule le calcul moral de Hutcheson?Laurent Jaffro - 2013 - Philosophiques 40 (1):197.
- The Bridge of Benevolence: Hutcheson and Mencius.Alejandra Mancilla - 2013 - Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 12 (1):57-72.The Scottish sentimentalist Francis Hutcheson and the Chinese Confucianist Mencius give benevolence (ren) a key place in their respective moral theories, as the first and foundational virtue. Leaving aside differences in style and method, my purpose in this essay is to underline this similarity by focusing on four common features: first, benevolence springs from compassion, an innate and universal feeling shared by all human beings; second, its objects are not only human beings but also animals; third, it is sensitive to (...)
- Self-interest and Sociability.Christian Maurer - 2013 - In James A. Harris (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford University Press. pp. 291-314.The chapter analyses the debates on the relation between self-interest and sociability in eighteenth-century British moral philosophy. It focuses on the selfish hypothesis, i.e. on the egoistic theory that we are only motivated by self-interest or self-love, and that our sociability is not based on disinterested affections, such as benevolence. The selfish hypothesis is much debated especially in the early eighteenth century (Mandeville, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Butler, Clarke, Campbell, Gay), and then rather tacitly accepted (Hartley, Tucker, Paley) or rejected (Hume, Smith, (...)
- The nature of virtue.Dario Perinetti - 2013 - In James A. Harris (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford University Press. pp. 333.This chapter examines the different answers that British moralists gave to the question ‘what does virtue consist in?’ Rather than as a royal road to present-day views in ethics, their answers are best understood when considered against the background of early modern natural law theories and their projected metaphysics of morals. The emerging ‘science of morality’ dealt with the metaphysical problem of determining what sort of thing virtue is. Considered from this vantage point, the British moralists struggled with the problem (...)
- Moral Sentimentalism and the Reasonableness of Being Good.Elizabeth S. Radcliffe - 2013 - Revue Internationale de Philosophie 2013 (no. 263):9-27.In this paper, I discuss the implications of Hutcheson’s and Hume’s sentimentalist theories for the question of whether and how we can offer reasons to be moral. Hutcheson and Hume agree that reason does not give us ultimate ends. Because of this, on Hutcheson’s line, the possession of affections and of a moral sense makes practical reasons possible. On Hume’s view, that reason does not give us ultimate ends means that reason does not motivate on its own, and this makes (...)
- Hutcheson, Francis.Phyllis Vandenberg & Abigail DeHart - 2013 - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.Francis Hutcheson (1694-1745) Francis Hutcheson was an eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher whose meticulous writings and activities influenced life in Scotland, Great Britain, Europe, and even the newly formed North American colonies. For historians and political scientists, the emphasis has been on his theories of liberalism and political rights; for philosophers and psychologists, Hutcheson’s importance comes from […].Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Anatomie du sens moral : Hume et Hutcheson.Lisa Broussois - 2012/2013 - Philonsorbonne 7:169.Le présent article a pour objectif de mettre en évidence un aspect de l’influence de Francis Hutcheson sur la troisième partie du Traité de la Nature Humaine de David Hume, consacrée à la morale : Hume écrit, en effet, que l’être humain est doté d’un sens moral. Cependant, la distinction qu’il opère entre la philosophie de l’anatomiste et celle du peintre, dans cette œuvre, montre qu’il se refuse à suivre totalement l’exemple de Hutcheson. Hume compte bien, au contraire, approfondir et (...)
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