Moral Sense

James Bonar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138870826
• eBook ISBN: 9781317852827
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

This is Volume III in a series of twelve in a collection on Ethics. Originally published in 1930. The rise, progress, and decline of a theory of moral philosophy which prevailed in this country for the greater part of the eighteenth century. Founded by Shaftesbury, and built up by Hutcheson, it derived our moral perceptions from a special Moral Sense, interpreted on the analogy of the Five Bodily Senses. The book attempts an account of those two leaders, and of their principal followers and critics. The followers include the doubtful supporter David Hume; the critics Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant.

MORAL SENSE

CHAPTER I

SHAFTESBURY

IN our own time “the moral sense” means the recognition of the ordinary principles of morality. We are told, for example, that Denmark’s abandonment of an army is “a powerful moral buckler against attack, and probably will be effective so long as there is a moral sense left in the world”.¹ We read that “A National Debt is against the enlightened moral sense”.² A book, mainly philological, bears the title The Idea of God and the Moral Sense in the Light of Language.³ Edward Caird writes:⁴ “The moral sense is jealous of the admission that good overreaches the antagonism between itself and evil.” So we read:⁵ “The moral sense of the better part of mankind has accepted certain conventions which are called International Law.” Even in theology doctrines are sometimes rejected because “contrary to our moral sense”. The phrase is now a popular generality. But in the early eighteenth century it denoted a special theory of the origin of Ethics—the theory that right decisions, if not indeed right principles, were due to a Moral Sense conceived as a special faculty. Such is a rough statement of the view associated with Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume, suggested by the first, developed by the second, explained away by the third.

Many questions arise on the bald description of the theory. Does it mean that moral judgments are made by this special faculty “pronouncing lastly on each deed”? Is the faculty possessed full grown by all human beings? Does it guide us to principles of action or straight to the action itself?

We cannot dismiss a theory that sprang from the patient thought of strong thinkers by comparing it with the opiate of Molière,⁶ which caused sleep by its soporific virtue. Yet it seems like that to most of us now. We seem to be told that men perceive moral distinctions because men have a power to perceive them, and posterity wonders how strong thinkers could adopt so weak a reasoning. We seem to be confronted with something like the “innate ideas” condemned in Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding. We hear that the supporters of the theory were followers of Locke, and we wonder how they thought to escape his criticisms. When we are told by Kantian critics that the theory of a Moral Sense was “the only way to save ‘the originality of our moral ideas’ in consistency with the philosophy of Locke”, we wonder if a special faculty would not be more odious to Locke than an innate idea, and more difficult to rescue from his arguments.

Locke writes:⁷ “There is nothing more commonly taken for granted than that there are certain principles, both speculative and practical (for they speak of both), universally agreed upon by all mankind, which therefore, they argue, must needs be constant impressions, which the souls of men receive in their first beings, and which they bring into the world with them as necessarily and really as they do any of their inherent faculties.” Man has tendencies and appetites; he has also a capacity for knowledge evident from the fact that he comes to knowledge in due time. But, if innate ideas mean only the capacity to have the ideas, then all and sundry ideas are innate. The capacity, indeed, is innate, but the knowledge itself is acquired by experience.⁸ Experience, however, shows that at first nothing more than the capacity is there. There are no innate principles in speculation. Even “whatever is, is”, does not command universal assent. There are no innate practical principles, in the sense of principles of the knowledge required for the conduct of life. “Moral rules need a proof; ergo, not innate.”⁹ Locke does not seem to have heard of the attempted evasion of his argument by means of a Moral Sense, but if it be regarded as an intuition he had judged it in advance:¹⁰ “If we will reflect on our own ways of thinking, we shall find that sometimes the mind perceives the agreement or disagreement of two ideas immediately by themselves without the intervention of any other, and this I think we may call intuitive knowledge. For in this the mind is at no pains in proving or examining, but perceives the truth, as the eye doth light, only by being directed towards it. Thus the mind perceives that white is not black, that a circle is not a triangle, that three are more than two, and equal to one and two. Such kind of truths the mind perceives at the first sight of the ideas together, by bare intuition, without the intervention of any other idea, and this kind of knowledge is the clearest and most certain that human frailty is capable of. Certainty depends so wholly on this intuition that in the next degree of knowledge, which I call demonstrative, this intuition is necessary in all the connections of the intermediate ideas, without which we cannot attain knowledge and certainty.” Yet he distinguishes “the knowledge we have by sensation, perceiving the existence of particular things” both from intuition and from reason.¹¹ He thinks that intuition has very narrow limits, which leave no room for moral intuitions. Thus the definitions and restrictions of Locke seem quite inconsistent with the admission of a Moral Sense.

His own theory of morals is sufficiently worked out to show that in his view reason created moral rules. Reason, however (to him), determines the will only through desire, and desire is for happiness “the utmost pleasure we are capable of”; good is pleasure, evil is pain.¹² “Moral good and evil is only the conformity or disagreement of our voluntary actions to some law whereby good or evil is drawn on us by the will and power of the lawmaker.”¹³ Moral rules therefore come, not from a voice within, but from a voice without. At every step we seem to go farther from the notion of a Moral Sense. Locke sums up his ethical position historically when he writes (“On the Keeping of Compacts”):¹⁴ “If a Christian, who has the view of happiness and misery in another life, be asked why a man must keep his word, he will give this as a reason: ‘Because God, who has the power of eternal life and death, requires it of us.’ But if a Hobbist be asked why, he will answer: ‘Because the public requires it, and the Leviathan will punish you if you do not.’ And if one of the old philosophers had been asked, he would have answered: ‘Because it was dishonest, below the dignity of a man, and opposite to virtue—the highest perfection of human nature—to do otherwise.’” Locke comes nearest to the first two, Shaftesbury to the last.¹⁵

Shaftesbury in early life was closely bound to Locke. He was at one time under Locke’s personal care, and they had been exiles in Holland together from 1686 to 1689. There was a mutual regard. But Shaftesbury had learned from other masters, including the “old philosophers”, and in opinions Locke and he drew apart very early. Born February 26, 1671, in the London home of his grandfather, the famous first Earl of Shaftesbury (Dryden’s Ahithophel), young Shaftesbury seems to have been that statesman’s special care. By the age of eleven he knew his Greek and Latin, taught to him by an Oxford lady, a schoolmaster’s daughter.¹⁶ After a short training at a private school he was sent by his father (the grandfather dying in 1683) to Winchester School for three years, and then to Italy, where he improved himself in the fine arts, then to Holland with Locke. On his return to England in 1689 he applied himself to study. He entered Parliament, as Member for Poole, in 1695. He distinguished himself there by a speech that at once failed and succeeded. When he stood up to speak on behalf of the Bill to allow counsel to men on their trial for treason, hitherto denied that general privilege of Englishmen, he forgot all he had meant to say, and found the value of “Locke’s caution to him, not to engage at first setting in an undertaking of difficulty, but to rise to it gradually”. Recovering himself, he said: “If I, sir, who rise only to speak my opinion on the Bill now depending, am so confounded that I am unable to express the least of what I proposed, what must the condition of that man be who is pleading for his life without any assistance, and under apprehensions of his being deprived of it?” The House was moved, and passed the Bill¹⁷—tradition transferred the incident to the better-known Halifax, but Halifax was no imperfect speaker in 1695. He was, besides, well known to Shaftesbury, to whose son he became godfather. The son relates the story circumstantially, of his father and not of his godfather.¹⁸

Shaftesbury had little relish for politics, even when his Whig principles were triumphing. He left the House in 1698 and went incognito as “a student in physic” to Holland, where he met Bayle and others.¹⁹ About that time he had finished An Inquiry concerning Virtue, presently printed without his consent by Toland, 1699.²⁰ In that year his father’s death made him third Earl of Shaftesbury (hitherto Lord Anthony Ashley), and he was again drawn into politics.²¹ But he “preferred tranquillity and a little study and a few friends to all other advantages of life and all the flatteries of ambition and fame”,²² and on Anne’s accession (1702) he retired into private life. He was not richly left, but “richly poor” with an encumbered estate; and the life abroad suited his circumstances as well as his inclinations. His marriage in 1709, after a wooing as little emotional as his father’s had been in 1669, gave him, not only the desired heir, but an affectionate and beloved consort who helped to prolong his days. He died at Naples, February 4, 1713 (O.S.).²³

He counted it all joy to have been under Locke, especially for those three years 1686–89; but he comes near to saying that the pupil was worthy of the master.²⁴

In a remarkable letter to Stanhope²⁵ he speaks of Locke as “my old tutor and governor whose name is established in the world, but with whom I ever concealed my differences as much as possible”. Though Locke, he says, did excellent service against the Schoolmen, he would have helped us more “if he had known but ever so little of antiquity”, especially its philosophy. Shaftesbury is conscious of being better equipped in this particular. Against the false Aristotle of the Schoolmen he would set the true Aristotle of the Ethics and Politics, to whom man is a social animal, born for society and bound to come of it.²⁶ He thinks thus to elude Locke’s refutation of innate ideas. The question, he says, is not whether the very philosophical propositions about right and wrong were innate, but whether the passion or affection towards society was such—that is to say, whether it was natural and came of itself, or was taught by art, and was the product of a lucky hit of some first man wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER I: SHAFTESBURY
• CHAPTER II: CRITICS OF SHAFTESBURY
• CHAPTER III: HUTCHESON: “INQUIRY”, 1725
• CHAPTER IV: HUTCHESON: “THE PASSIONS”, 1728
• CHAPTER V: HUTCHESON: “THE SYSTEM”, 1755
• CHAPTER VI: MINOR CRITICS OF THE THEORY
• CHAPTER VII: HUME: “HUMAN NATURE”
• CHAPTER VIII: HUME: “PRINCIPLES OF MORALS”
• CHAPTER IX: ADAM SMITH: HIS THEORY
• CHAPTER X: ADAM SMITH: HISTORIAN AND CRITIC
• CHAPTER XI: ADAM SMITH: UNDER CRITICISM WITH HUTCHESON
• CHAPTER XII: KANT ON THE MORAL SENSE
• APPENDIX: CONCERNING NATURAL GIFTS AND GRACES AND THE INTELLECTUAL VIRTUES. SHAFTESBURY ABIDES THE QUESTIONING OF A YOUNG MODERN ADMIRER
• INDEX