Common Sense and Common Language in Thomas Reid’s Ethical Theory

Abstract

Contemporary commentators on history of ethics have devoted little attention to ethical theory of Thomas Reid. The main reason for this neglect concerns perspective from which they are very likely to view his theory. Roughly, this perspective is as follows. Eighteenth century ethics tends to be viewed as consisting mainly in prolonged dispute concerning nature of moral faculty. In identifying Reid's part in this dispute it should be noted that his Essays on Active Powers of Human Mind, his major work on ethics, was published in 1788. It was therefore preceded by works of such early rational intuitionists as Cudworth, Clarke, Balguy, and Wollaston and by criticisms directed against them by such defenders of moral sense position as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume. Moreover, it was preceded by intuitionistic counterattack directed against latter by Richard Price, a near contemporary of Reid, who has often been described as greatest of intuitionists and whose prominence is such that his ethical theory has tended to eclipse that of Reid. The result is that there are in Reid a large number of pages devoted to restatements of an intuitionistic position which a contemporary reader has already encountered in earlier writers and which he is therefore likely to find rather boring. Even those who have main tained correctly that Reid is founder of Scottish school of common sense and that his ethical theory is to be seen in context of his defense of common sense have added little to this perspective, since, generally speaking, they have found no significant differences between his ethical theory as seen in this context and intuitionism. Viewed from this perspective, Reid's ethics might well be deserving of neglect and of comment made by Alasdair Maclntyre that the successors of Hume and Adam Smith in Scottish philosophy have little to say to us. Thomas Reid was a rationalist in spirit of Price.1