Francis
Hutcheson
born Aug. 8, 1694, Drumalig, County Down,
Ire.
died 1746, Glasgow
Scots-Irish philosopher and major exponent of
the theory of the existence of a moral sense
through which man can achieve right action.
The son of a Presbyterian minister, Hutcheson
studied philosophy, classics, and theology at
the University of Glasgow (1710–16) and then
founded a private academy in Dublin in 1719. In
1729 he returned to Glasgow as professor of
moral philosophy, a position he held until his
death.
Hutcheson was licensed as a preacher in 1719
by Irish Presbyterians in Ulster, but in 1738
the Glasgow presbytery challenged his belief
that people can have a knowledge of good and
evil without, and prior to, a knowledge of God.
His standing as a popular preacher was
undiminished, however, and the celebrated
Scottish philosopher David Hume sought his
opinion of the rough draft of the section “Of
Human Morals” in Hume’s Treatise of Human
Nature.
Hutcheson’s ethical theory was propounded in
his Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of
Beauty and Virtue (1725), in An Essay on the
Nature and Conduct of the Passions and
Affections, with Illustrations upon the Moral
Sense (1728), and in the posthumous System of
Moral Philosophy, 2 vol. (1755). In his view,
besides his five external senses, man has a
variety of internal senses, including a sense of
beauty, of morality, of honour, and of the
ridiculous. Of these, Hutcheson considered the
moral sense to be the most important. He
believed that it is implanted in man and
pronounces instinctively and immediately on the
character of actions and affections, approving
those that are virtuous and disapproving those
that are vicious. Hutcheson’s moral criterion
was whether or not an act tends to promote the
general welfare of mankind. He thus anticipated
the Utilitarianism of the English thinker Jeremy
Bentham, even to his use of the phrase “the
greatest happiness for the greatest number.”
Hutcheson was also influential as a logician and
theorist of human knowledge.
