Journal of the History of Philosophy

Notes and Discussions Hutcheson's Moral Realism Some strange Love of Simplicityin the Structure of human Nature, or Attachment to some favourire Hypothesis, has engaged many Writersto pass over a great many simple Perceptions, which we have found in ourselves .... This Difficulty probably arises from our previous Notions of a small Number of Senses, so that we are unwilling to have recourse in our Theories to any more; and rather strain out some Explication of moral Ideas, with relation to some of the natural Powers of Perception universally acknowledged. --Francis Hutcheson Kenneth Winkler has challenged the appropriateness of calling Francis Hutcheson a moral realist, and in the process has raised a number of more specific issues? I appreciate the attention Winkler gives my work, and the opportunity it provides to clarify and expand my views, but his challenge fails for a number of reasons, not the least being his assumption that a reliable and useful reading of Hutcheson will follow from an effort to fit his account of the perception of virtue and vice into the "received [Lockean] account of the perception of secondary qualities" (W 18o). In addition, Winkler assumes that moral realism can take only one philosophically interesting form, and he underestimates the textual evidence for my suggestion that Hutcheson thought that there are concomitant ideas of morality. 1. There are significantly different ways of doing history of philosophy. I suggest that Winkler's approach to Hutcheson is a form of a priori construction , while my own approach to the same topic is more empirical and more ' I am especially indebted to David Raynor for comments on earlier versions of this paper. I wish also to thank Alasdair MacIntyre, James Moore, Michael Silverthorne, and M. A. Stewart for their counsel on matters related to it. In addition, Kenneth Winkler thoughtfully provided me with a draft of the paper to which I am responding, and which has since been published as "Hutcheson's Alleged Realism,~' Journal of the Historyof Philosophy, 23:2 (April 1985): 179-94. This paper hereafter cited as W. [397] 398 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 23:3 JULY ~985 contextual, and consequently is more informative and more accurate. This is nowhere more apparent than on the matter of Hutcheson's relation to Locke. On that topic Winkler follows out an only partially voiced assumption that Hutcheson is best understood as a Lockean, a point of view that I briefly but explicitly questioned in my book and in an earlier article that dealt entirely with Hutcheson's theory of perception, and which I wish to develop here? It is not my intention to claim that Locke had no significant influence on Hutcheson--no more than it was my intent to claim that Locke had no significant influence on Hump (DH v-vi). But surely, just as it is no longer acceptable to say as William Knight said, in a book on HumP, that in "explaining Locke, we virtually explain the doctrine of Hume, ''3 so is it no longer acceptable to suppose that in explaining Locke we virtually explain the doctrine of Hutcheson. If we are to come to grips with Hutcheson's position we must recognize that he is more than a Lockean cog in the development of Western philosophy. As a start we will need to look at Hutcheson in a wider eighteenth-century context, and to inspect the full range of his writings, including the early occasional pieces, the Synopsis metaphysicae and the other Latin works, and the System of Moral Philosophy. It is true, of course, that Locke had become a central figure in British thought before Hutcheson produced his philosophical writings, just as it is true that Hutcheson often uses the term idea, and that he sometimes speaks of pr/mary and secondary qualities. But to conclude that, by virtue of historical placement, Hutcheson must be a Lockean is simply fallacious, while Hutcheson 's use of idea, primary quality, secondary quality, or other terms and concepts is at best inconclusive evidence that he can be read as a Lockean, as is shown " DavidHume: Common-SenseMoralist,ScepticalMetaphysician(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 78n (hereafter cited as DH); "Hutcheson on Perception and...