Nicholas Phillipson
Page 7
Hutcheson’s critique of Pufendorf was sweeping and far-reaching and must have been exhilarating for his students. Was it enough to say that human beings behave sociably simply because they fear the sovereign or the deity? Surely true and lasting sociability must have deeper roots in the principles of human nature than the selfish, prudential and always opportunistic instincts about which Pufendorf had written. And was it really true, as Pufendorf claimed, that the authority of our parents or masters or sovereigns was based on a series of contracts? Did this not represent a perilously narrow and selective view of human nature and the civilizing process? And, worse still, was it not a view of human nature that had been distorted at every level by grim theological assumptions about the corruption of human nature? In a so-called ‘scientific’ age, wasn’t there a need, as one of Pufendorf’s sharpest editors, Jean Barbyrac, put it, for a new science of morality, which placed the study of human nature and the principles of sociability on empirical foundations? Was it not time for an account of the principles on which political society and government were based that would suit the needs of a civilization which had moved far beyond the insecurities of a Pufendorfian world and was in the process of being transformed by commerce?
Hutcheson’s distaste for Pufendorf’s grimly Augustinian view of human nature was profound.
We scarce ever hear any thing from [such moralists] of the bright Side of Humane Nature. They never talk of any kind Instincts; of natural Affections to associate; of natural Affections, of Compassion, of Love of Company, a Sense of Gratitude, a Determination to honour and love the Authors of any good Offices toward any Part of Mankind, as well as of those toward our selves; and of a natural Delight Men take in being esteem’d and honour’d by others for good Actions: which yet all may be observ’d to prevail exceedingly in humane Life.38
He wanted a moral theory which would take account of the fact that we have benevolent as well as selfish passions and affections, and one that would yield up a very different understanding of the functions and duties of government to Pufendorf’s. Here his starting point was the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury’s idiosyncratic and influential Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions and Times (1711) and his attempt to demonstrate that human beings were essentially ‘benevolent’ agents who were at their most contented, most virtuous and most sociable when they felt able to follow the dictates of their generous affections. He shared Shaftesbury’s view that the vicissitudes of modern life encouraged the young – ‘grown youth’ as he liked to call them – to ignore the ‘language of the heart’ and to indulge in selfish and cynical thinking about the world and their duties. He was interested in Shaftesbury’s ethics, which were designed to show how grown youth could discover their benevolent selves by cultivating a love of beauty, virtue, friendship and humanity, and learning to value them for their own sakes rather than for any vulgar material advantage they might bring, and he believed that these were lessons that could only be learned in the company of fellow-dilettanti. Above all, Hutcheson shared Shaftesbury’s belief that these exercises in self-improvement would foster a sense of sociability, public spirit and liberty. The trouble with these ethics for Hutcheson, however, was that they were deist and anti-Christian: Shaftesbury thought that organized religion fostered sectarianism and undermined man’s natural capacity for sociability. Moreover, as a philosopher he was well aware that Shaftesbury’s analysis of the relations between the selfish and benevolent passions was far from being conclusive. It was a weakness that had recently been demonstrated with devastating clarity by Bernard Mandeville, the author of The Fable of the Bees, first published in 1711 and reissued in 1723 in the highly publicized edition which Hutcheson must have read in Dublin, one of the most brilliant and witty philosophical satires of the Enlightenment. Mandeville was the philosophical irritant Hutcheson was able neither to ignore nor to accommodate, and one who would shadow Smith for the rest of his life.
The Fable of the Bees was a glorious satire on the follies of human nature that ridiculed Shaftesbury’s attempt to show that the sociable affections were founded on benevolence. Mandeville was a Grub Street journalist who was prepared to pit the down-to-earth language of the coffee-house and tavern against Shaftesbury’s high-falutin’ prose, and the apparently earthy cynicism of the ordinary citizen against the wishful thinking of the idealistic aristocratic virtuoso. ‘This Noble Writer (for it is the Lord Shaftesbury I mean in his Charcteristicks)’ had simply seen what he wanted to see in human nature and had naively assumed ‘that as Man is made for Society, so he ought to be born with a kind Affection to the whole, of which he is a part, and a Propensity to seek the Welfare of it’. Such sentiments, Mandeville commented dryly, ‘are a high Compliment to Human-kind, and capable by the help of a little Enthusiasm of Inspiring us with the most Noble Sentiments concerning the Dignity of our exalted Nature: What Pity it is that they are not true.’39 For Mandeville all our passions, benevolent and selfish alike, had a single purpose: to serve and gratify our pride and what he later called ‘self-liking’, and it was pride and its companion, shame, that explained the ultimate paradox of human nature – that man, the most selfish and wilful of animals, was also the most sociable and docile.40 How was this to be explained? For Mandeville it was a story about how human beings were ‘broke’ by their parents, nurses, teachers, friends and, above all, by ‘wary Politicians’ who used their arts to gull us into believing that curbing our passions was a better way of gratifying our pride and self-esteem than indulging them. It was a story about ‘the witchcraft of flattery’, about the never-ending comedy of lives devoted to exploiting others and discovering that we have been exploited in return, about the way in which we become caught in a web of culture and language that ensnares and socializes us all. It was dangerous as well as absurd for Shaftesbury to claim that young men could be socialized by indulging their so-called benevolent affections. It was also ethically contemptible, in that it provided ‘a vast Inlet to Hypocrisy, which being once made habitual, we must not only deceive others, but likewise become altogether unknown to our selves’.41 All the virtuously minded, good-natured person could do, Mandeville seemed to suggest (for this was not a subject he ever touched on directly), was to reflect on our endless capacity for hypocrisy and self-delusion with ironic detachment and to submit cheerfully to the beneficent if scarcely edifying constraints of culture and custom.
This was a formidably brilliant social analysis. Here was a highly developed account of the civilizing process which showed that at every point of their daily lives men and women (Mandeville was interested in the formation of the female as well as the male personality) were driven by what Mandeville described as ‘wants’ or ‘needs’. As he was well aware, his analysis could be used to show that all of the cultural institutions on which the survival of society depended, all systems of taste, morality and politics, all philosophy and art, all progress in the arts, sciences and commerce, all language even, were driven by need, by a hunger for social approval and by the ever-contemptible delusion that our self-regarding actions were virtuous and for the public good.
So Vice is beneficial found,
When it’s by Justice lopt and bound;
Nay, where the People would be great,
As necessary to the State,
As Hunger is to make ’em eat.
Bare Virtue can’t make Nations live
In Splendor; they, that would revive
A Golden Age, must be as free,
For Acorns, as for Honesty.42
Smith was to be acutely aware of the historicity of this approach to the study of human nature and of the evolutionary nature of human civilization which was built into it. But that is not what struck his teacher. For Hutcheson, as for so many of Mandeville’s contemporary critics, what was shocking was his cynicism. It was not simply that he had shown that all human behaviour was driven by pride – that, after all, was something orthodox Christians knew from St Augustine and his modern disciples. Nor was it even Mandeville’s
refusal to believe in the existence of that feeble spark of reason which would allow the chosen and dedicated few to learn how to control their appetites. What mattered was Mandeville’s demonstration that our belief in the existence of absolute standards of taste, virtue and, by extension, justice and liberty are simply delusions and the product of our endless capacity for self-deception and hypocrisy – delusions we generate to cover our natural depravity, and which make life both contemptible and tolerable. As Hutcheson saw very clearly, The Fable of the Bees posed a mortal threat to true moral philosophy by encouraging citizens to distrust their own and others’ motives, thus undermining those natural feelings of friendship and sociability on which trust, order and liberty depended.
This cynicism appalled Hutcheson and he returned to it continually in his writing and, it was said, in nearly every lecture; Mandeville, he said, was the most dangerous of those philosophers who would ‘rather twist Self-Love into a thousand Shapes, than allow any other Principle of Approbation than Interest’.43 Hutcheson was determined to find new ways of demonstrating the importance of the benevolent affections to human behaviour, intent to show that benevolently inclined societies were capable of a high degree of self-regulation and were therefore not in need of the attentions of absolute monarchs. It was a project that led him to think carefully about the relationship between the selfish and benevolent passions and about the civilizing process. It also, happily, provided him with an opportunity to rebut Shaftesbury’s notoriously deist natural theology. He had laid the foundations of this project in Dublin in the Enquiries which made his philosophical reputation and was to develop his theory’s ethical and political implications in Glasgow. Philosophically, Smith was to regard it as a problematical exercise on the part of his professor, but it was one which he would never forget.
Hutcheson wanted to use the resources of modern philosophy to rebuild the ethics of the ancients and to develop a theory of sociability and virtue that would dispose of the cynical errors of the moderns once and for all. What interested him were the circumstances in which we begin to reflect on our passions and interests and begin to acquire an understanding of those ideas of morality, justice and political allegiance on which our capacity for sociable behaviour ultimately depends. This meant thinking about the process of social interaction and about the way in which we perform as actors and spectators when we find ourselves engaged in moral encounters. Hutcheson saw human beings as naturally inquisitive agents. We seem to have a natural interest in other people’s motives and we find ourselves naturally approving of actions which seem to be virtuous and naturally disapproving of those which seem to be vicious. To be sure, our first impressions can be mistaken; another person’s motives may turn out to be more equivocal than we originally thought. But Hutcheson was struck by how quickly and almost instinctively we adjust our moral responses to new evidence, and how readily our feelings for the person concerned will adjust. He went to great trouble to show that we judge the moral behaviour of others by reckoning on the amount of benevolence that seems to motivate an action, and he was struck by the fact that our approval and affection for the person concerned seems to increase naturally in relation to the number of people we think will benefit from his actions. It also allowed him to show that we have a more complex attitude to ‘benevolent’ and ‘selfish’ behaviour than modern moralists had thought: we will naturally approve of and respect a dutiful husband who is prudent in dealing with his family’s financial affairs and we may even think him virtuous for doing so; in the same way we will surely think reckless generosity a vice, particularly if it threatens our family and friends. Such conclusions showed that ‘Self-love is really as necessary to the Good of the Whole, as Benevolence; as that Attraction which causes the Cohesion of the Parts, is as necessary to the regular State of the Whole as Gravitation. Without these additional Motives, Self-love would generally oppose the Motions of Benevolence and concur with Malice or influence us to the same Actions which Malice would.’44
The strength of Hutcheson’s analysis lay in its apparently conclusive demonstration that our moral behaviour, and the social education which shapes our moral personality, was determined by a process over which reason and calculations of interest exercised no control whatever.
The weakness of our Reason, and the avocations arising from the Infirmity and Necessitys of our Nature, are so great, that very few Men could ever have form’d those long Deductions of Reason, which shew some Actions to be in the whole advantageous to the Agent, and their Contrarys pernicious. The Author of Nature has much better furnish’d us for a virtuous Conduct, than our Moralists seem to imagine, by almost as quick and powerful Instructions, as we have for the preservation of our Bodys.45
He was able to observe that in the case of a fully developed moral agent ‘the natural feelings of the heart’ seemed to operate in such a regular and systematic way and seemed to have so little to do with custom and education, that it was possible to conclude they were controlled by an internal mechanism which was hard-wired into the constitution of human nature itself.46 This was what he famously and controversially called the moral sense, an apparent resource of human nature whose properties continue to be debated in our own day. It was a Newtonian principle which explained the principle of moral order in the universe in exactly the same way that the principle of gravity had explained the principles of order in nature. By means of it, he claimed, ‘all is capable of harmony’.47
These were conclusions which promised to breathe new philosophical life into old Stoic maxims. But they had thrown up problems that would have an important bearing on Hutcheson’s thinking about political life. He was fully aware of the subjectivity that was built into his thinking. How could we ever be sure that we had interpreted a person’s motives correctly? How could we be sure that our moral sense had been right in approving actions that only seemed to be virtuous? Did this not suggest that there were no absolute standards of virtue and vice, that sociability was, as Mandeville had suggested, simply a matter of convention? And wouldn’t it then be better to follow Mandeville in refraining from judging others and thinking of virtue as something that was too private to be left to moralists? For Hutcheson, however, that was to repress one of the most natural of all human instincts and the source of our understanding of the human personality. It was of the utmost importance that citizens felt free to indulge their moral curiosity and exercise their natural taste for judging the conduct of others. It would show them that while our moral tastes might differ, all citizens could agree that the best way of judging the moral behaviour of others was by the evidence their actions provided of an untarnished love of the public. In a state built on toleration and benevolence, the moral sense would reign. This was the vision which inspired Hutcheson to compose his hymn to human benevolence.
Let the Obstacles from Self-love be only remov’d, and Nature it self will incline us to Benevolence. Let the Misery of excessive Selfishness, and all its Passions, be but once explain’d, that so Self-love may cease to counteract our natural Propensity to Benevolence, and when this noble Disposition gets loose from these Bonds of Ignorance, and false Views of Interest, it shall be assisted even by Self-love, and grow strong enough to make a noble virtuous Character. Then he is to enquire, by Reflection upon human Affairs, what Course of Action does most effectually promote the universal Good, what universal Rules or Maxims are to be observ’d, and in what Circumstances the Reason of them alters, so as to admit Exceptions; that so our good Inclinations may be directed by Reason, and a just Knowledge of the Interests of Mankind.48
Hutcheson developed this highly distinctive view of political society in Glasgow in two texts on which he seems to have been working while Smith was taking his classes. The first was published in 1742 as A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy. The second was abandoned, and published posthumously by his son in 1755 as A System of Moral Philosophy; it was, the author thought, ‘a confused Book … a Farrago’.49 His view of political society was certainly distinct
ive and curious, an exercise in using the resources of modern philosophy to reactivate a somewhat old-fashioned form of radical Whig political thinking. He showed how citizens learned about their rights and political obligations from the moral sense, and rightly claimed that this had allowed him to develop a more naturalistic account of the principles on which political society rested than the notoriously contrived system of contracts about which Pufendorf had written. Nor was this simply a matter of reinvigorating old ideologies with a new theory. States which were saddled with authoritarian constitutions, riddled with fears of faction and plagued by cynical views of human nature would inevitably encourage citizens to take narrow, partial views of their rights and these would inevitably become the subject of controversy and faction. The free Hutchesonian polity, by contrast, would be committed to the development of a society of citizens whose behaviour was regulated by the moral sense and the love that these citizens felt towards the public and their Creator. It would be a limited monarchy which recognized that citizens had a right to resist unwelcome monarchs, that guaranteed religious toleration, and which protected small landowners and tenant farmers from acquisitive and over-mighty lords. It would be a society whose merchants traded for modest profits and were motivated by a desire to increase the industry and employment of the people at large. It would extend its citizens’ capacity for virtue by encouraging the diffusion of good manners and the performance of those charitable offices on which the perfection of society depended. In so doing, it would help to provide all men with those extensive views of creation on which an understanding and love of the Creator depended. For it was the virtuous, discriminating love of the deity, rather than the fearful Pufendorfian conscience, that was the ultimate source of authority on which virtue, and the performance of all the sociable virtues, depended.