Francis Hutcheson

Dzieła

• 1725An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (Badanie pochodzenia naszych idei piękna i cnoty)

  Dwie rozprawy broniące Shaftesbury’ego przeciw Mandeville’owi: zmysł wewnętrzny postrzega piękno jako „jednolitość w różnorodności”, a zmysł moralny aprobuje życzliwość bez względu na nasz własny pożytek; najlepsze działanie przynosi „największe szczęście największej liczbie”.

• 1755A System of Moral Philosophy (System filozofii moralnej)

  Pośmiertnie wydane podsumowanie jego wykładów w Glasgow o zmyśle moralnym, prawach naturalnych, rodzinie i rządzie cywilnym; jego argumenty przeciw niewolnictwu naturalnemu, wojennemu i dziedzicznemu zostały później przedrukowane przez przeciwników niewolnictwa w Ameryce.

Stanowisko

Hutcheson is on the map as the systematic founder of moral sense theory and a teacher of the Scottish Enlightenment. Defending Shaftesbury against Mandeville, he argued in his “Inquiry” (1725) that we have, besides the external senses, inner senses: a sense of beauty, which perceives “uniformity amidst variety” in nature, art and mathematics, and a moral sense, which approves of benevolent motives immediately and disinterestedly, without regard to any advantage of our own. Virtue therefore cannot be reduced to self-love, as Hobbes and Mandeville claimed. In the same book he stated the principle that “that action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers”, later central to utilitarianism. His “Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions” (1728) analysed the passions and refined the theory. In his posthumous “System of Moral Philosophy” (1755) he set out natural rights, including a right of resistance and conditions under which colonies may become independent, and rejected the usual justifications of slavery – natural, war and hereditary slavery – with arguments that opponents of slavery later reprinted in America. Hume corresponded with him about the Treatise, Smith studied with him, and Kant in the 1760s saw his moral feeling as a promising starting point before developing his own ethics of reason.

Życie i kontekst

Francis Hutcheson was born on 8 August 1694 at Drumalig in County Down, Ulster, the son of a Presbyterian minister. As a Dissenter he studied not at Trinity College Dublin but at the University of Glasgow (1711–17). Back in Ireland he ran a Dissenting academy in Dublin, where he wrote his first books in the circle of Robert Molesworth, a friend of Shaftesbury. In 1729 he was elected professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, where he was among the first to lecture in English rather than Latin; Adam Smith was one of his students. His liberal theology led to a heresy charge before the Glasgow presbytery in 1737–38, which came to nothing. He died in Dublin on 8 August 1746, during a visit to Ireland.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (1728)
• Philosophiae moralis institutio compendiaria (1742)