>>>>The Enlightenment, a philosophical movement that has its roots in the second half of the
17th century, especially in the thought of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Isaac Newton
and that would stretch across the 18th century, a European wide phenomenon that would include
thinkers in Britain, France, Germany and beyond. The Age of Reason, the age when thinkers would
use their own minds to their fullest abilities, free of prejudice and superstition in the
pursuit of truth. The Age of Enlightenment also saw the revival of interest in the Stoics
and the Epicureans, and their rival accounts of what the meaning of happiness was. This
debate was stirred by the thought of Hobbes and Locke, and it was particularly provoked
by the work of Bernard Mandeville and his challenge to the idea of virtue. And it would
rage across the 18th century. In our study of law and justice, we can look at two of
the extreme poles of the Enlightenment: one deeply indebted to Stoicism, the other deeply
indebted to Epicureanism, that would draw from and in many ways transform these ancient
traditions of thought about the nature of human happiness, the purpose of life. And
in this lesson we turn to the Scottish Enlightenment, the Enlightenment as it unravels in Scotland.
Scotland was to be one of the primary centers one of the most extraordinary centers of the
Enlightenment, giving rise to figures like Adam Smith and David Hume, but the fountain
of the Scottish Enlightenment, the first great figure of the Scottish Enlightenment was in
fact, from Ireland. A man named Francis Hutcheson. Hutcheson's thought is crucial for the development
of 18th century thinking, especially about the nature of justice. Hutcheson's thinking
would have tremendous influence on the Scottish thinkers after him and indeed, would deeply
influence 18th-century America. Hutcheson is indebted to the Stoic tradition. He reads
the ancient Stoics, in fact, he was a translator of Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations", the extraordinary
diary kept by the Roman Empire Marcus Aurelius which is one of the great texts of Stoicism.
The epigraphs to Hutcheson's works like his fundamentally significant work of 1725, "An
Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue" carries an epigram that
is a quote from Cicero. And Hutcheson belongs to the tradition that says that happiness
is virtue. Hutcheson's philosophy is an effort to defend that view that happiness is somehow
fundamentally moral. That happiness is grounded in virtue, that happiness isn't simply pleasure.
Now the possibility that happiness was no more than physical pleasure is deeply indebted
to Thomas Hobbes and his view of humankind as a desirous creature that cannot be satiated.
It's deeply indebted to the scientific vision of Isaac Newton, classical mechanics, that
says that things in nature don't have a natural telos. So Hutcheson's effort to resurrect
the idea that happiness is virtue must do so in a world that is very different from
that of the ancient Stoics. It must do it in a world that has seen Hobbes and Locke
and Newton, and his 1725 inquiry is his most important attempt to do so. Hutcheson wants
to say that happiness is virtue and in doing so he offers an extraordinary vision of what
the human being is. Now Hutcheson builds on Locke, although the whole work is an effort
to respond to a problem that comes out of Locke's philosophy, it is nevertheless through
and through indebted to Locke's view of humanity. Especially in his "Essay Concerning Human
Understanding," his empirical account of human knowledge as the result of the sum of our
sensory perceptions. In the "Essay Concerning Human Understanding", Locke says that humans
have five senses. Hutcheson wants to argue that virtue is real and that virtue is natural
and so to do so, he creates in fact a sixth and a seventh sense, and that's one way to
think in shorthand about how Hutcheson would defend the idea that virtue is a genuine kind
of benevolence, not a kind of self-interest in disguise. And Hutcheson is writing explicitly
against Mandeville, because he realizes that those who would argue that virtue is nothing
but a form of self-interest in disguise that include Hobbes and Locke, and more cynically
Mandeville. Hutcheson realizes that this is a profound problem and he wants to find a
way of making virtue something more than just self-interest, and so to do so he invents
a sixth and a seventh sense. The sixth sense is a perception of beauty. He wants to say
that we have some kind of faculty within us that perceives beauty, that is somehow innately
part of our individual architecture as a human being, and that leads us to appreciate beauty
for its own sake. Even more important for a philosophy of justice is his seventh sense,
what he would famously call the moral sense. And the idea of a moral sense would be fundamental
to one strand of the Enlightenment that runs through the rest of the Scottish thinkers,
that is very important for thinkers like Thomas Jefferson, the idea of a moral sense. Hutcheson
thinks that human beings have a kind of natural morality, that it is in fact part of our makeup
to be moral. And it's different from Aristotle's idea that we are naturally moral. For Hutcheson,
it is a moral sense and one of the remarkable features of Hutcheson's 1725 inquiry is the
way that he thinks about stories, about the power of narrative for human beings and in
a few ways. He says first, think about the fact that human beings deeply care about stories.
So he says, imagine "The Iliad" imagine any story, imagine Superman. We care, we get engaged.
There's something natural, there's something innate about our ability to engage with stories.
Now why this works for Hutcheson why this is so powerful is because stories, fictional
ones especially don't have any impact on our material well-being. So when you go to a movie,
and you watch Superman, which this hadn't been invented in 18th-century Scotland but
Hutcheson would like the example. Everybody in the theater, who do they root for? They
root for Superman. You don't root for Lex Luthor unless you're a sociopath. You root
for the good guy. Why do you root for the good guy, Hutcheson asks. Is it because of
self-interest, is it some kind of disguised self-interest? Is it somehow really out of
your own self-love, are you somehow benefiting from rooting for the good guys? No, that is
your moral sense. He considers this a kind of true benevolence. It is a kind of love
for the well-being of others, and in this he's deeply embedded to Christian thought
as well. Jesus said, "Love your neighbor" and for Hutcheson that is a deep idea. Not
just an emotion that I feel, love that I feel, pleasure, but that I actually will for the
well-being of other human beings. That's what causes you to root for the good guy in a story,
your moral sense. And he says look at children, from the time they're tiny they love stories
and you can sit down with a two-year-old, a three-year-old, and they can begin to perceive
that there are good characters and eventually bad characters. And there's something natural,
simply native that makes them root for the good guys. That is the moral sense. And Hutcheson
argues that happiness isn't simply pleasure, that happiness isn't simply the sum of a kind
of positive physical sensation. Happiness also includes the senses that we get from
moral well-being, or reactions to beauty. And so Hutcheson begins to differentiate between
different kinds of good: a kind of utility, self-interest but also a kind of benevolence
that activates our moral sense, or a kind of beauty that activates our aesthetic sensibilities.
And for Hutcheson, happiness is virtue because happiness is a kind of deep, rich happiness
that calls upon our moral sensibilities. Again, turning to narratives he sees that happiness
is a kind of life that requires a kind of achievement, and so Hutcheson's philosophy
would defend the idea that there is a virtue, there is a morality in and of itself that
can be cultivated in human beings. And Hutcheson's political thought is equally built on Locke's
view of government. He believes that governments are created in a social contract to protect
individual rights like life, liberty, and property, and that the purpose of the state
is the protection of these and that it's a fundamentally moral kind of purpose. Hutcheson
in his inquiry offers a statement that would have a tremendous afterlife. He's the first
person to articulate a formula. He says: "That act is moral which promotes the greatest happiness
for the greatest number." And as we'll see in future lessons, that slogan would be the
core of a utilitarian outlook. But for Hutcheson at the beginnings of the Scottish Enlightenment,
his view of what happiness is isn't simply a kind of sum of pleasures. It is instead
deeply rooted to a view of humanity as a kind of naturally moral creature.