Ashley, Mandeville and Hutcheson (Ethics 14)

Antony Ashley

Antony Ashley, the Earl of Shaftesbury and Locke’s pupil, argued that moral distinctions are made not by reason, but by a moral sense. A moral judgement is thus the expression of a response of feeling to some property of an action. The virtuous man is he who had harmonised his own inclinations and affections in a way that renders them also harmonious with the inclinations and affections of his fellow creatures.

Harmony is the great moral property. Between what will satisfy me and what will be for the good of others there is no conflict. Man’s natural bent is toward benevolence.

Bernard de Mandeville

Mandeville questions Shaftesbury two central propositions—that man’s natural bent is to act in an altruistic way, and that it is altruism and benevolence that procure social benefit. In fact, he argues that the spring of action is private and egotistical self-interest; and the public good of society is the outcome of the private individual’s disregard for any good but his own. It is a happy accident that the pursuit of enjoyment and luxury promotes economic enterprise. Were men in fact virtuous in the way that Shaftesbury supposes, social life would never advance at all.

Mandeville thus raises the second great issue for English moral philosophy in the eighteenth century. If moral judgements are expressions of feeling, how can they be more than expressions of self-interest? If moral action is grounded in feeling, what feelings provide the springs of benevolence?

From Mandeville onwards philosophers divide not only upon the issue of the moral sense versus reason, but also on the correct way to answer Mandeville. The greatest of these moral-sense theorists between Shaftesbury and Hume, Francis Hutcheson, simply evaded the issue.

Francis Hutcheson

For Hutcheson, the moral sense is one which perceives those properties which arouse responses of moral feeling; and the properties which arouse a pleasurable and approving response are those of benevolence. But why do we approve of benevolence rather than of self-interest? Hutcheson has no answer to this question. He merely asserts that we do.

The reason why we could not hope to find any adequate answer to Mandeville in either Shaftesbury or Hutcheson is fairly clear. Both of them assimilate ethics to aesthetics, and are not therefore preoccupied with clarifying the way in which moral judgements may provide is with reasons for acting in one way rather than another.

Neither is therefore under pressure to provide us either with an account of how reasoning can be practical or with an adequate theory of motives. Unfortunately, although these defects are in some ways supplied by the two greatest English eighteenth-century moralists, Butler and Hume, they, as it were, divided the problems between them and thus solved neither of them.

Butler attacks the problem of moral reasoning, but never asks how this kind of argument can weigh with human agents. Hume tries to supply an adequate account of motives, but leaves no proper place for moral reasoning.