provided by Hutcheson’s moral calculus. This computation was first proposed in the Inquiry in order to ascertain the degree of benevolence or virtue implied in any action, moving from the idea that, ceteris paribus, there is a relation between the degree of benevolence and the amount of good produced. Since the aim of morally good affections is to maximize the common good, every action that contributes to this goal has a moral value and therefore has to be guaranteed by natural and civil laws.11 In this light, it makes sense that Hutcheson puts forward the discussion of the state of nature in the second book while Pufendorf treats it only in his book on government.
The natural condition of man is a state of innocence and sociability. Hutcheson does not use the traditional term “state of nature,” but prefers to call it a state of freedom, reacting, as Titius and Barbeyrac before him, to the pessimism of Hobbes and Pufendorf. He distinguishes between perfect rights that are necessary to the survival of society and that must be sanctioned by civil law, and imperfect rights that cannot be rendered a matter of compulsion in society without greater loss than benefit; he lists the rights of individuals, such as rights to life, reputation, and private judgment. The explanation of the origin of property and the method of acquiring and transferring it is followed by contracts, the conditions of their validity, and the obligations implied in speech and oaths. The concluding chapters of the second book explain that recourse to violence is licit when rights are violated. Hutcheson also enlarges on the rights of war and on the ways in which controversies must be decided in the state of natural liberty. In short, Book II touches upon all the subjects treated by Pufendorf in the first book of De officio, and when Hutcheson deviates from Pufendorf, it is in most cases under the influence of Gershom Carmichael’s annotations to Pufendorf’s work, as we will see.
The third book of Hutcheson deals with the subjects treated by Pufendorf in his second book. On the themes of marriage, parental power, and master-servant relationships, Hutcheson stresses the equal obligation of man and woman to fidelity in marriage and their equal partnership and authority in the education of children, and he challenges the principles on which natural jurists defend slavery. Every man is born free, and no just war can justify slavery for the population or conquest of its territory. Hutcheson also challenges the violent origin of the state and espouses Pufendorf’s doctrine that the state is founded on the consent of people expressed in three acts: (1) a contract of union among citizens, (2) a decree of the people concerning the form of government and the nomination of governors, and (3) a covenant between the governors and the people “binding the rulers to a faithful administration of their trust, and the people to obedience.”12 As a state is “a society of free men united under one government for their common interest,” Hutcheson defends the right of resistance,13 even in the state where the prince’s power has not been limited by the original contract. He denies the existence and legitimacy of monarchies founded on a pretended “divine right,” the patrimonial states, and is sarcastic about the subtleties of inheritance in hereditary monarchies.14 He follows Locke in the division of powers among the different organs of the state, Aristotle in his discussion of the forms of government, and Harrington in stressing the importance of the different forms of government and the necessity of some agrarian law to moderate the amount of lands owned by a single citizen. According to Hutcheson, the state has the duty, not only to provide for the safety and prosperity of the citizen, but also to provide for general religious instruction and to promote all the incentives to cultivating the four cardinal virtues. In the last chapters of the third book, on the laws of war, on treaties, and on ambassadors, Hutcheson follows not only Pufendorf, but also the Dutch natural jurist Cornelis van Bijnkershoek; this is a sign, perhaps, that Hutcheson thinks his compendium fit for a larger audience than the students of Glasgow or for Glaswegian students who have to complete their legal studies abroad.
Hutcheson and Carmichael
In his Preface Hutcheson declares that much of his compendium “is taken . . . from Pufendorf’s smaller work, de officio hominis et civis, which that worthy and ingenious man the late Professor Gershom Carmichael of Glasgow, by far the best commentator of that book, has so supplied and corrected that the notes are of much more value than the text.”15 In addition to minor points that Hutcheson receives from Carmichael, there are basic and deep agreements between the pupil and his former teacher. First of all they agree on the two precepts in which the law of nature is summarized,16 veneration of God and promotion of the common good, though Hutcheson does not want to start from the law of nature as a commandment of God, but rather wants to derive it from his teleological recognition of providence and the powers of human nature. Hutcheson follows Pufendorf and Carmichael’s theory of the original contract, concurs with Locke and Carmichael that even in a just war the conquerors have no right to enslave a nation, and concurs with Carmichael that most of the people in a conquered nation are innocent, that a slave is not property, and that children of slaves are born free. He shares Carmichael’s defense of the right of resistance and his strictures against the peculiar sanctity of the sovereign authority and against the legitimacy of patrimonial states. Hutcheson’s chapter on quasi-contracts17 is derived from Carmichael, and he clearly acknowledges the implications of this doctrine for his view of the duties of children to their parents, of orphans to their adoptive parents, and for his polemic against slavery; he uses it also to state that the original contract binds posterity without consent.18
Hutcheson and Hume
Hutcheson received a copy of the first and second books of David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature from Henry Home early in 1739, and, months later, Hume sent him the manuscript of the third book, Of Morals. Very likely he received a visit from David Hume in the winter of 1739–1740. Whereas Hutcheson’s reaction to the first two books was positive, differences appeared between the two men concerning morality.
We know of these differences through four extant letters from Hume to Hutcheson. Whereas Hume had to defend himself against the accusation of lacking “warmth in the Cause of Virtue,” he criticized Hutcheson for founding the notion of “natural” on final causes.19 Since they agreed that morality is founded on sentiment and not on reason, they must also agree that “it regards only human Nature and human life” and that nothing is known about the morality of superior Beings.20 They had a number of differences also concerning the notion of virtue. According to Hume and in contrast to Hutcheson, benevolence is not the sole or chief virtue, justice is an artificial virtue, natural abilities like the accomplishments of body and mind are virtues, and utility perceived through sympathy is the foundation of merit. Hume also declared that he took his “Catalogue of Virtue from Cicero’s Offices.”21
In 1742 Hutcheson presented Hume with a copy of his Institutio Compendiaria and received the fourth of Hume’s letters. While Hume reassured Hutcheson on the purity and elegance of his Latin, he added some critical reflections on particular points of Hutcheson’s book. He could not approve the distinction between calm affections and passions, Hutcheson’s adoption of Butler’s hegemonic moral sense, his explanation of the origin of property and justice, or his fear of deriving “any thing of Virtue from Artifice and human Conventions.” Moreover he repeated, as a common opinion, that Hutcheson “limited too much” his “ideas of Virtue.”
Did Hutcheson answer Hume’s criticisms? The first edition of the Institutio is already in many ways an answer to Hume. The first chapter of the first book presents a teleological approach to ethics that we cannot find in the earlier “four Treatises,” and the first chapter of the second book culminates in two general laws of nature, where the first states, “God is to be worshipped with all love and veneration.” In the second chapter on the summum bonum, Hutcheson presents a general catalogue of virtues in which the four cardinal virtues appear after the kind affections. Moreover, he begins to talk about “some natural sense, different from the moral one, but not unlike it, by which we relish and value some powers of the mind and the body,” that is, Hume’s “natural abilities.” In his System of Moral Philosophy, he will enlarge on this sense, calling it “a sense of decency or dignity” and stressing its independence
