Hume Studies

Hume Studies Volume XXII, Number 1, April 1996, pp. 3-22 Hutcheson and Hume on the Color of Virtue KENNETH P. WINKLER "the colours or appearances of Good and Evil" —Francis Bacon Commentators have long debated whether Hutcheson's account of the moral sense, or Hume's account of moral judgment, can be classified as "subjectivist," "emotivist," "non-cognitivist," or "anti-realist." I myself have come to think that their accounts cannot usefully be described in these twentieth century terms, but I will not try to defend that suspicion here.11 will try instead to place their accounts of moral perception and moral judgment in an eighteenth century context, and to address a more narrow and, I think, better-defined question of interpretation, one raised not only by scholars of Hutcheson and Hume, but by contemporary philosophers seeking instruction or inspiration from their eighteenth century predecessors. Is there, according to Hutcheson and Hume, an illuminating comparison to be made between virtue (or its recognition) and the secondary qualities (or their recognition)? My aim in this paper is to show that there is. The first three sections of my paper deal with Hutcheson. The first is a very brief sketch of Hutcheson's account of the moral sense, designed to show that Hutcheson modeled his account of moral perception on the Lockean account of the perception of secondary qualities.2 In the second section I examine an interpretive proposal recently developed by David Fate Norton.3 According to Norton, Hutcheson treats virtue and vice as objective accompaniments, or "concomitants," of objective circumstances. And Hutcheson qualifies as a Kenneth P. Winker is at the Department of Philosophy, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts 02181 USA. email: kwinkler@wellesley.edu. 4 Kenneth P. Winkler moral cognitivist, Norton suggests, because he takes the ideas of virtue and vice, which are themselves concomitants of the ideas of the associated circumstances , to be representations of the objective concomitants. We have, on this interpretation, two sets of concomitants: objective concomitants (concomitants "in the object") and concomitant ideas (concomitants "in the mind"). Norton rests his case on five texts in which, he thinks, Hutcheson discusses, or appears to discuss, concomitant ideas of morality.4 After studying these texts in their original setting, I am unconvinced that Hutcheson believes in either concomitant moral ideas or concomitant moral qualities, and the second section of my paper is an attempt to defend this reaction. The third section is a discussion of Hutcheson's debt to Locke. A full discussion of their complicated philosophical relationship is beyond the scope of this paper, but I do want to call attention to a neglected work—Hutcheson's Latin logic handbook—in which the influence of Locke, on the topic of perception in particular, is striking. The handbook lends support to my reading of the texts in section two. In the fourth section of the paper I turn to Hume. Hume was the first to make an explicit comparison between moral qualities and secondary qualities, and he claimed (rightly, if what I say earlier in the paper is correct) to have found it in Hutcheson. Simon Blackburn has recently argued that Hume "did not rely upon the Comparison in his theory of ethics, [and] that he could not possibly have done so, for reasons lying deep within his philosophy."5 I want to create room for a different view, in which the comparison lends support to conclusions that seemed to Hume, at least at one time, to be momentous. 1. Hutcheson's Account of the Moral Sense According to the Lockean account of (for example) the perception of color (as presented, for example, in Book II, chapter viii of An Essay concerning Human Understanding), there are three kinds of ideas that might be described as ideas of color: sensations caused by colored objects; ideas of an object's power to cause such sensations; and ideas of whatever it is in objects in which that power is realized. We have, according to Locke, only very vague ideas of the third kind. Had we, for example, microscopical eyes, our ideas, like those of God or the angels, would be more revealing than they are now. The distinction among the...