Hutcheson's Alleged Realism

Abstract

Hutcheson's Alleged Realism KENNETH P. WINKLER FRANCIS HUTCHESON is generally regarded as a straightforward example of a moral noncognitivist or subjectivist? But David Fate Norton, in David Hume: Common-Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician, contends that Hutcheson was a moral realist. '~ A main theme of Norton's book is that the influence of Hutcheson on Hume has been both exaggerated and misunderstood. The exaggeration comes, Norton thinks, when Hume is represented as extending Hutcheson's sentimentalism from morals to metaphysics. The misunderstanding comes when Hutcheson's sentimentalism is represented as noncognitivist or subjectivist, rather than as a view that emphasizes our apprehension -through sentiment rather than through reason---of an objective moral reality. Norton's response to the exaggeration is not to deny Hutcheson's influence, but to argue that it did not extend to Hume's metaphysics. And his response to the misunderstanding is not to deny that Hume was a Hutchesonian in morals, but to use his argument that Hutcheson was a realist as a small part of his argument that Hume was a realist too. Yet it seems to me that Norton has not established Hutcheson's moral realism. Norton fails to make certain distinctions which not only invalidate his argument when applied to Hutcheson, but very much weaken it when applied to Hume. Norton formulates the realism he attributes to Hutcheson in at least two different ways. He first says that "the question is, simply, whether.., the moral sense is a faculty capable of apprehending independently existing, intersubjective features (objectively real features) of the world around us, just as the other, ordinary senses.., do" (72). If we understand realism in ' See William Frankena, "Hutcheson's Moral Sense Theory,"JournaloftheHistoryofldeas 16 (t955); 356-75 and J. L. Mackie, Hume'sMoral Theory(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 198o), 3~-35. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. All page references in the body of the text are to this book. [179] 180 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY this way--as a view demanding only that our moral sense have what Norton elsewhere calls "objective correlates" (118), which can be understood as objective causes or occasions of our moral sentiments--then Hutcheson is certainly a realist, but not in any sense of "realism" that an emotivist or subjectivist would ever be concerned to deny. If one of the motives behind realism is to deny that morals is merely a matter of taste, as Norton himself indicates in at least two places (12 and 245 ), it is difficult to see how the realist impulse could ever find expression in a view that makes the moral sense "cognitive" in the same way taste is. It is, I suspect, the distance between this first formulation and the kind of realism robust enough to excite our interest that leads Norton to offer a second formulation. According to the second, our "ideas of virtue and vice.., are representative of an external or objective moral reality" (86, Norton's emphasis on "are" removed). On this view our moral sense does not merely register objectively real features, but represents objectively real moral features, where the word "represents" is taken to mean that the ideas the sense supplies are in some way images of the moral features to which they correspond (85). Norton's first formulation of realism permits a comparison between our perception of virtue and vice and our perception of secondary qualities, but the second formulation rules any such comparison out. According to the second formulation, our perception of virtue and vice can only be compared to the perception of primary qualities, a kind of perception which is not merely a response to an objective world, but "representative" or revelatory of the way things are. If Hutcheson were a realist according to the second formulation, then he would be a realist worth contending with. I will show, however, that Hutcheson is not a realist in this sense. Norton is under the opposite impression only because he fails to distinguish between his two formulations of realism. As a result he takes textual evidence that Hutcheson is a realist in the first, uninteresting sense, for evidence that he is a realist in the second, more exciting sense. Hutcheson...