Emotions & Morals, pt. 2: Francis Hutcheson -- British Sense Theorists

In the previous post that introduced this series on the British moral sense theorists, I noted that these eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers raise fascinating questions about the role of emotions, or passions, in moral judgments.  Some went so far as to posit a separate moral sense, a distinct faculty that engages those subjects, persons, actions, or thoughts that we judge to pertain to the moral sphere. One of those moral sense theorists is Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746).

Through his writings and lectures, Hutcheson builds an overall theory of emotions and psychology. He makes many distinctions, such as that between an "affection," which is a calm sensation of desire or aversion, and a "passion," which is, he writes,

a confused Sensation either of Pleasure or Pain, occasioned or attended by some violent bodily Motions, which keeps the Mind much employed upon the present Affair, to the exclusion of everything else, and prolongs or strengthens the Affection sometimes to such a degree, as to prevent all deliberate Reasoning about our Conduct. (Hutcheson, Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, p. 30)

Affections motivate actions in a way that simple sensations do not:  affections are oriented to some object.  For our purposes, we are interested most in the moral implications of his emotional psychological theory.  Hutcheson believes that humans have a natural inclination toward benevolence. We morally approve of actions that reflect or evoke reflective affections of benevolence.  Benevolence is the main thing esteemed.

Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746)

We justify or explain normative moral evaluations only in terms of human affections and senses.  Actions are compelled, or instigated, or generated by our affections or desires, not by reason.  Reason only grounds moral judgments in the sense of explaining actions as "rational" after the fact. Actions are not generated by reason, and actions either reflect or evoke (or both) the affection of benevolence in some fashion.

In moral evaluation, we must adopt the position of an independent or external spectator (something Adam Smith will pick up and develop).  This spectator can discern whether actions are other-oriented rather than selfish.  Virtuous actions may involve or benefit the self, but any pleasure is a result of, not the motivation for, benevolence to others.  Much less is it the justification for moral approbation (as in utilitarianism). We cannot will ourselves into believing something, even if we recognize overwhelming benefit to ourselves, and we do not act out of pure self-interest as Thomas Hobbes earlier may have suggested.  If, according to Hutcheson, the spectator judges that an action was in some preponderant way directed toward the good or happiness of another, then the spectator will reflectively judge the action as virtuous. The action is judged virtuous by a real or hypothetical spectator, and it is judged virtuous as a trait of character -- of specifically benevolent character -- in the acting subject, not in the action itself.

On this point, Prof. MacIntyre summarizes Hutcheson's view as follows and raises a critical question that exposes the weakness of Hutcheson's moral theory, namely, that it does not possess full explanatory power:

The moral sense is one which perceives those properties which arouse responses of moral feeling (there is also aesthetic sense, which stands to beauty as the moral sense does to virtue).  The properties which arouse a pleasurable and approving response are those of benevolence. What we approve are not actions in themselves but actions as manifestations of traits of character, and our approval seems to consist simply in the arousal of the required response.  But why do we approve of benevolence rather than of self-interest?  Hutcheson has no answer to this question.  He merely asserts that we do. (MacIntyre, Short History of Ethics, 162)

Hutcheson may not have a compelling answer to that question. To be fair, however, Hutcheson does write that "that Action is best, which procures the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers; and that, worst, which, in like manner, occasions Misery" (An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, p. 125 [2.3.7]).  This picks up a formula introduced by Gottfried Leibniz that was made famous after Hutcheson by Jeremy Bentham, but Hutcheson's maximization principle is not strictly utilitarian as Bentham and Mill would later put it to use.

For those two utilitarians, in different ways, maximization is the basis of the calculation that determines rationally what is moral.  Their basic thought is this: if an action maximizes happiness in a certain way then it is morally good; maximization constitutes moral goodness; an action is morally good to the degree that and because it maximizes.  For Hutcheson, it seems, benevolence, or love (in the Christian sense of an act of will) for other persons as such, is the basis of what is morally good; the moral sense in us is the source of our moral ideas, that is, of our approbation of benevolence and disapprobation of its opposite; and our reflective judgment about the moral quality of an act is aided by our recognition of its usefulness to other people and the common welfare.  In retrospect, we approve as morally good those actions that proceed from benevolence and promote benefit.

Hutcheson does imply that humans are naturally disposed to feel this way relative to benevolence, just as we are naturally disposed to act benevolently.  His view is anti-rational in the sense that affections and passions, not reason, generate or drive actions. Benevolence, on this view, seems to stem from our psychological impulses, and its justification, its approbation, as morally virtuous stems from the same.

Of particular interest to me in Hutcheson's theory is the fact that he builds a thoroughgoing moral psychology as an apparatus for explaining how we humans perceive and approve of virtue in actions. Hutcheson, in other words, takes seriously the nudges and pangs and gratification and other such emotional feelings that respond to actions that we perform, experience, or observe.  Morality is wrapped up with and inseparable from human emotions, and its justification may be entangled with human emotions as well.

Now, Hutcheson's theory may be on somewhat firmer footing when articulating observations of what we approve of as virtuous than when explaining precisely why we approve of benevolence rather than self-interest or utility.  But this is something that we will also find in the largely empirical moral theorizing of David Hume, to whom we turn in our next post in this series.