Hutcheson, Francis (1694–1746)

3. Practical ethics and influence

Although Hutcheson’s later works, his System and his Short Introduction, reveal his continuing commitment to the moral sense theory and all that presupposes, these works more noticeably reflect his need, after 1729, to offer lectures on a broad range of moral issues – issues of practice as well as principle – to largely adolescent audiences. Making extensive use of writers in the modern natural law tradition (Grotius, Pufendorf, and Richard Cumberland, for example), as well as of Cicero, Hutcheson in these works focuses principally on such practical issues as our duties to God, to humanity, and to ourselves; the law of nature and the rights of individuals; property and contracts; marriage and parenting; and civil government.

Hutcheson’s contemporaries and students remembered him as earnestly concerned with civil and religious liberty. He was, for example, an outspoken critic of the Aristotelian or classical theory of slavery, and also of the justification of slavery by conquest. Arguing that there are no natural slaves nor ought there to be slaves by conquest, Hutcheson insists that the ‘natural equality of men’ consists chiefly in the fact that ‘natural rights belong equally to all’, and that the laws of God and nature prohibit even the most powerful from depriving the least powerful of their rights, or from inflicting any harm on them. The least talented humans have the use of reason and thus have vastly greater capacity for happiness or misery than do animals. All humans ‘have strong desires of liberty and property, have notions of right, and strong natural impulses to marriage, families, and offspring, and earnest desires of their safety…. We must therefore conclude, that no endowments, natural or acquired, can give a perfect right to assume powers over others, without their consent’. This, he adds, ‘is intended against the doctrine of Aristotle, and some others of the ancients, “that some men are naturally slaves”’ (1755, I: 299–301). Equally abhorrent is the view that those taken prisoner in a just war may be justly enslaved as punishment or security against further offence. No ‘damage done or crime committed can change a rational creature into a piece of goods void of all right, and incapable of acquiring any [rights]’ (1755, II: 202–3). Those who claim that Africans were better off as slaves than they would have been if left in Africa have let custom and the prospect of profit stupefy their consciences until they have lost all sense of natural justice (1755, II: 84–5).

At the heart of Hutcheson’s political theory is his endorsement of the principle that the safety of the people is the supreme law. He insists that there are specifiable limits to the powers of the state, and that citizens retain the right to resist the excesses of any form of government and even the right to overthrow and replace a government. Consequently, any government that fails to function for the ‘safety and happiness of the whole body’ can be legitimately abolished (1742b: 303). Hutcheson explicitly applied these principles to colonies. Colonial subjects also have a right to legitimate – that is, beneficial – government. If they fail to receive such government, and are oppressed, they may justly overthrow their oppressor: ‘the people’s right of resistance is unquestionable’ (1742b: 292).

Hutcheson’s writings had a substantial influence in the eighteenth century. His claim that ill-governed colonies have the right to rebel was widely and effectively repeated in colonial north America, and may rightly be taken as having provided many patriots with a philosophical rationale for rebellion. His published views on natural equality and natural rights were reprinted in colonial Philadelphia, where they added philosophical weight to the anti-slavery movement. His moral sense ethics, although much criticized by rationalists, gained partial allegiance from David Hume. His best-known student, Adam Smith, learned from him both moral and economic theory, and credits Hutcheson as ‘being the first who distinguished with any degree of precision in what respect all moral distinctions … are founded upon immediate sense and feeling’ (Smith 1759: 321). Even Immanuel Kant, a moralist so apparently different, was initially attracted by, and always respectful of, Hutcheson’s contributions to moral theory. And if Jeremy Bentham thought the theory of the moral sense was simply totally unconvincing, he none the less adopted as fundamental to his utilitarian theory a principle that Hutcheson had enunciated, namely ‘that Action is best, which procures the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers’ (1725a: 181).