Reid and Hume on the Possibility of Character

Abstract

The multiplicity of meanings attached to the word character in the eighteenth century in Britain, evident from its eight different definitions in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, makes it necessary to proceed carefully in an examination of approaches to character in the philosophy of the period.1 Thomas Reid was a philosopher who made a virtue of sensitivity to the ordinary meanings of words and who was prepared to criticize others, especially David Hume, for failing to give crucial terms stable and universal definitions, but even so, he himself worked with at least three different understandings of the nature of character. In some places in his writings, a person’s character is his or her reputation, the way he or she is known in the world. Thus, in his lectures on practical ethics, Reid included among the natural rights a “right to character,” which was to say, a right not to have one’s reputation falsely impugned;2 and in the Essays on the Active Powers of Man (EAP), as we see later, he recognized the value in the moral life of a “regard to character,” a concern for how one is seen by others. In other places, a character is simply a distinguishing characteristic, such as differentiates one individual, or kind, from another.3 Thus Reid says that one of the things that separates human beings from other animals is that they all have individual characters—good, bad, and indifferent—sufficient to distinguish them from each other.