Journal of the History of Ideas

Hutcheson was an able philosopher, but philosophical analysis was not his only purpose in writing about morals. ¹ Throughout his life his writings aimed at promoting virtue; his changing philosophical views often had to conform, if he could make them, to that rhetorical end. But a mind which understands philosophical argument cannot always control the conclusions at which it arrives. The result for Hutcheson was often tension in his thought—which in the end produced a farrago when he tried to create a system of moral philosophy.

Throughout his writing career, Hutcheson’s views on the problem of moral motivation were a combination of change and development against a background of certain constant views. A close examination of his views on moral motivation throws light on the development of his thought, including his growing Stoicism, and some of the changes he made to the moral sense theory.

The phrase “moral motivation” can refer to either of two issues. On the one hand there is the question of what motivates virtuous actions, and the usual answer for Hutcheson is benevolence. Because they are approved by the moral sense, actions motivated by benevolence are morally good or virtuous (terms which I will use interchangeably). Hutcheson in his late writings calls such actions “formally good” to distinguish them from actions which do in fact promote the greatest happiness, or the natural good, of others; these latter actions are “materially good.” ² On the other hand there is [End Page 277] the question of how our knowledge of the virtuousness of certain actions can motivate and how in particular such knowledge can motivate morally good actions. For Hutcheson we know which actions are morally good because we have a moral sense, but how this knowledge motivates morally good actions is a question Hutcheson made several attempts to answer. This second question, how the moral sense can motivate morally good actions, is the focus of this paper. The development of Hutcheson’s idea of benevolence will be commented on briefly, but first we need to look at some of the unchanging aspects of Hutcheson’s thought and purposes to provide background to the issue of motivation.

Virtuous actions are the result of virtuous character. Hutcheson maintained this from his earliest publications (Reflections, par. 5) to his posthumous System. ³ A virtuous character cannot be directly chosen, even if we wanted to, because we cannot choose to have benevolent desires: “[N]either benevolence nor any other affection or desire can be directly raised by volition” (Inquiry, IV, 139; revised from first edition).

But virtue can be cultivated:

... virtue, itself, or good dispositions of mind, are not directly taught, or produced by instruction; they must be originally planted in our nature by its great Author, and afterwards strengthened and confirmed by our own cultivation.

(Inquiry, IV, 271. Changed from I, 253, with reference to cultivation added; cf. also Introduction, 13, 25, 38, 39, 58–59, etc.)

We can cultivate virtue in ourselves; and through writing, teaching, conversation, and social interaction, we can cultivate it in others. ⁴ At the start of his career, when announcing in Reflections the purpose of his writing on [End Page 278] moral theory, Hutcheson regrets that the moral systems common in his day are not conducive to promoting virtue: they are written, he says, by moralists who are “sour and morose in their deportment;... easily put out of humour...; dejected with common calamities, and insolent upon any prosperous change in fortune” (Reflections, par. 4). He promises that his forthcoming Inquiry will not have this fault. In the preface to the Essay he complains about the writings of the ethical egoists because “many [people] have been discouraged from all attempts of cultivating kind generous affections in themselves, by a previous notion that there are no such affections in nature ...” (I, v; III, v). Throughout all the rest of his writings on morality Hutcheson advocates both the private and communal cultivation of virtue, and at the same time he contributes to that cultivation.

The other constant which dominates the moral motivation issue is Hutcheson’s rejection of egoism. Benevolence is a...