Truth
Francis Hucheson and Moral Sense—Instinct, Freedom and Anxiety
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 22 June, 2011
Moral Sense
Francis Hutcheson introduced the notion of “moral sense” or “moral sentiment” (Hume), the feeling one has of approval or disapproval of a human act. The moral sense is not arrived at by reason as the rationalists would have, it is noted empirically, by observation and experiment. It is a feeling, a passion or an emotion, the feeling we have as part of our human nature that a deed is right or wrong. It implies that:
- Human beings can act out of reasons other than self interest, for the good of others. In particular, we can act out of benevolence—kindness, compassion, altruism, generosity, magnanimity—the lovingkindness of the Jews or the love of the Christians.
- Humans consequently can approve of deeds that they feel are right, they are kind, and disapprove of those that they feel are wrong, they are spiteful or simply thoughtless.
It is tempting to see malevolence as the opposite of benevolence, and sometimes it is, but Hutcheson did not think it was usually the case. Our instinct is to help bond with others for our mutual benefit by being kind to each other. The idea of an evolutionary bonding mechanism makes sense for social animals like humans. A disruptive mechanism makes no sense. Our inclination to be kind has been selected over hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer, because we stand better in the face of our rivals for food by working together. Any antisocial mechanism cannot benefit us. It tends to put us back in the state of individual, solitary hunter gatherers, with naught but antagonism between us, and no chance therefore of the co-operation that has allowed us to thrive. It follows that we disapprove of apparent acts of malice for this reason, but that any such acts are unlikely to be persistent now, having been selected out, one hopes, long ago.
Hutcheson concluded that the failing was not one of active malice but one of the absence of sufficient inclination to be kind, and the main reason for that was “self love” taking the place of love of others. Disapproval of selfishness and greed—acts based on putting regard for oneself before that of deserving others—was aroused in spectators because of their sympathy for the “victim”, the member of the group who was deprived through another member’s greed. Sympathy or compassion is at the core of our group bonding instinct, and its arousal when we see an unfortunate colleague stiffed.
Those of whom we approve we consider virtuous, while those with a reputation for unkindness we disapprove of as vicious. Virtue is the approval of others earned by having a reputation for generosity and kindness, and vice is disapproval of others earned by having a reputation for miserliness and unkindness, stemming from self love. Those who love themselves are attracted to vice because self indulgence is harmful to others in some respect, and all such acts are gathered under the label of vice. The humanity of such people is not fully developed in some way, either because they lack the moral instinct, or it is weak, or, perhaps more commonly, having had no cause to use it through being able to indulge themselves throughout their lives without disapproval, they have got used to neglecting it. They become mean by a form of auto conditioning. They reward themselves through self gratification and thereby weaken the instinct to do right. Such people, persistently failing to act morally in the formative stages of the group, would eventually have aroused intense hostility among group members, who would have taken stern measures, evicting the freeloader or even eliminating them all together.
Utilitarianism
Hutcheson’s theory of the moral sense as the social approval of kindness became an important pillar of Utilitarianism—mutual benevolence makes the members of the group feel secure and happy. Once everyone was happy, by definition they lived in a happy community. The Utilitarians therefore sought to do those acts which yielded the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people in society. The flaw in it is that it seems to be ready to condone unhappiness in a substantial portion of society as long as the majority is happy. That portion of society could be notionally up to a half and yet be a minority, even if hardly. Any such society could not be stable. The minority would have to be kept suppressed, and in fact any small minority could be habitually oppressed by a majority, yet that society would meet the Utilitarian criterion. So, on the face of it Utilitarianism can justify the oppression of minorities, and that cannot be right.
Moreover, it removes the motivation for being benevolent, the direct approval of one’s peers, in favor of assessing the consequences for the majority, something that might not be known until way down the line. It is the spontaneity of kindness and its social approval that makes it work so effectively. Spontaneity needs no thought. It is done instinctively, and is instinctively approved. One does not need a philosophy of happiness for this number or that, lovingkindness will lead to social happiness—spontaneously! The benefits of greater happiness and a stronger society are consequences of it all right, but indirectly. The whole point about love and kindness is that you do not have to think of the consequences, you just get them.
Empirical
Hutcheson was an empiricist, and a moral instinct is a phenomenon of the real world, which can be observed and tested. A sense is thought of as a physical means of being able to know what is happening outside our bodies, but senses tell us what is happening inside our bodies too. We feel a headache and a stomachache. We also “feel” emotions. We see a sharp slap in a drama and say, “Wow! I felt that”. When we have that sort of feeling, it is sympathy, and it can be much more subtle—the sadness of a mother who has found her child dead. If we are human we want to cry too. We have all experienced such emotions unless we are psychologically defective in some way.
Ultimately how do you judge what is moral? If morals are supernatural gifts from God, when we are faced with a novel dilemma, we have no way of judging what is the moral way to act. Either God has given us the gift of moral judgement, or He has not—we are good or we are wicked through the grace of God, and our choices depend on that. David Hume did not think the human moral sense was a mystery, because sympathy with the feelings of others explained it adequately. A spectator of a benevolent act sees happiness produced as a result of it, and by sympathy the spectator also feels pleasure, and that brings moral approval. The one who does the benevolent deed will feel the approval of their peers as honor or pride, while those who act selfishly will feel disapproval as shame and guilt. All presuming they are not psychologically defective or damaged.
The source of all this in the primitive human group is insecurity and scarcity of provisions. Security, caring and sharing are the motives for prehumans to band together. If morality is devised by humans living together to provide individual security, then the moral act is the one that causes least harm, or does more good, for other people. A terrorist throws a bomb into a restaurant. He is plainly immoral. He is harming innocent people for his own personal reasons. A waiter falls on to the bomb, smothering the blast with his own body. He dies but saves twenty others. He is a hero. It is an obvious and extreme case, but the morality of it is that, though the waiter lost his own life, he saved all those others. The most extreme such case is that of Christ, whom Christians say died to save the whole of humanity!
Food was not always abundant, and, when it was scarce, sharing it was a vital reason for sociality, and a necessary act of bonding. The band were foraging socially, that is to say, different groups of them would go foraging separately but when someone made a desirable discovery, they neither kept it for themselves, nor tried to get an advantage by selling it to someone in the group for the highest bid. Whatever they gleaned, they shared. It is natural for a normal human being to want to share. They knew they were expected to share it, as they expected anyone else who made such a find to share it with them. It was the done thing, because by so doing, they were held in esteem by the rest of the group, and could feel proud of the admiration. It is the origin of benevolence.
Had they tried to keep the find to themselves, or even tried to keep an unfair portion of it, they would not have been approved but would have been frowned upon and treated with disdain, inducing guilt and shame. A persistent offender would have been expelled from the group. Of course, there would be cases of dispute, and then the community, under the guidance of the leader, would have to decide the outcome. Whence the issue of fair shares led to the need for justice. So, morality is the welfare of other people in society. The base instinct is to preserve oneself. That is what a solitary animal would do. The social animal is moral because it tries to save others, tries to be a Christ!
A Criticism
Adam Smith, being more focused on the individual than the group, thought it impossible that everyone had the same sense of sympathy, and that was sufficient to discount any moral sense universal among human beings. In arguing his case, however, Smith begs the question by referring to the sense of propriety of a “normal” man, from which his ideas of virtue, merit and duty derive. If Smith allows that a “normal” man can have a “normal” sense of propriety, there is no reason why he should not allow him a “normal” sense of morality. Normal does not have to mean identical, any more than saying a normal US woman lives 86 years means they all live to the same age. Humans have an evolutionary experience stretching back 200,000 years, a period that covers the time when we lived in small hunter gatherer groups, and evolved our common moral instinct. We no more have the identical same moral instinct than we all live to the same age, or all have the same height, but qualitatively, it is the same in all of us, differing only in degree. Smith’s argument is therefore merely nit picking.
It is because human beings, all of us or at least the vast majority, have inherited the moral instinct with their genes, that something which is entirely a subjective personal experience can be treated as a universal human emotion, and therefore as something true for us all. God did not have to imbue us all with a moral sense because we developed it through our evolutionary experience, notably the experience of coming together to live in groups rather than remaining solitary and fending only for ourselves. Human morality was not handed down as a universal truth, it became universally true because it was necessary for us to evolve the way we did—communally.
As our sociality is essential to our being human, and our moral instinct keeps us social, to lose or ignore our moral instinct will destroy our communities and then our humanity will be destroyed too. That is the importance of morality and sociality. Why are we ignoring them?
Freedom and Social Order
For most of the dark ages, so called because of the absence of learning brought about by the victory of Christianity, people lived in misery largely because of their poverty, not because they had ideas beyond their station. Peasants knew their place in the social system, and even in the nineteenth century, the wife of the Bishop of Armagh was going to make sure the little scallywags at Sunday school knew it:
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.Mrs C F Alexander, All Things Bright and Beautiful
Most people were effectively slaves throughout the time of the feudal system. They had a notional freedom, but in practice were tied to their lord and master and the bit of his land he allotted to the peasant to pay him for his otherwise corvée service to the manor. As Mrs Alexander wrote, God had “ordered their estate”, and few villeins entertained any idea of getting on in the world.
Some however, did, and especially after the millennium year (1000 AD) when the parousia did not happen and Christ failed to appear as the bishops had been promising for centuries. Thereafter, some people objected to their propaganda (Catholic lies—the original meaning of the word), many of them in the south of France, in Languedoc. They were Cathars and Vaudois, and preached spontaneously against Catholicism as being a Satanic plot. The Church organized a crusade against them, massacring and scattering them, then set up the Inquisition to pursue the scattered remains throughout Europe, calling them witches, and projecting on to them the accusation of being Satanic that the witches had originally pinned on the Catholic clergy. As the Church won, it is witches who are now remembered as Satanic.
The Cathars and Waldenses were the first Protestants and the first capitalists, for many had to travel around earning what living they could as craftsmen and tinkers. Their preaching against Catholicism inspired people like Wycliffe and Tyndall, and the Lollards. They also motivated the peasantry to think strange thoughts, thoughts that God had not ordered everyone’s place, and that human beings need not be tied to the land. In England in 1381, the peasants revolted. A Lollard preacher, John Ball, taught quite a different message from that which the serfs held habitually and unquestioningly until then:
When Adam delved, and Eve span, who was then a gentleman? From the beginning all men were created equal by nature, and servitude had been introduced by the unjust and evil oppression of men, against the will of God, who, if it had pleased Him to create serfs, surely in the beginning of the world would have appointed who should be a serf and who a lord.John Ball, Leader, Peasants Revolt
These dissenting Christians were reading the bible for themselves, and Ball plainly meant that God had not made any such prescription in Genesis, so the presumed order of society had been arranged by the nobility and the clergy hand in hand for their own benefit, and contrary to God’s intention.
Primeval Human Groups
Adam and Eve in the bible had willingly chosen to disobey God, but the notion of God had sociologically come from the interpretation of their societies that early humans, just awakening into consciousness, found themselves living in. These small human groups were essentially classless. Leaders were treated with somewhat greater respect than ordinary members of the group, because they had to take decisions on the group’s behalf, but otherwise they barely differed from the others, living, sharing and caring equally with them.
A child was born into the group, and knew nothing else. When they were ill or hungry, it was the group that looked after them. The purpose of the leader was to keep them united when they were attacked by a predator or a rival group, so every member looked to others for defense and security too. And that was just how they saw it as they died. The group always provided for them and protected them from birth until death. It was, to them, as much part of Nature as the rising of the sun. It seemed eternal because it was in existence when they were born, it still was when they were dying, and so it had always been. The group was led by one member, the most competent of them to do it, and particularly good leaders were remembered, and became identified with the group first as a totem, then an ancestor or a father. In time the benefits of the tribe transferred to a mythical founding leader, who thereby became a god.
So the imagined benefits of the supernatural god or God were inherited from the benefits of the primitive tribe. God is a supernaturalized society, but the society he represents was the egalitarian society of early human beings, a society that made everyone feel secure and safe, and was ever present.
Freedom in Paradise
We can see now, that there was no way that this early simple society could have sustained a division into “haves” and “have nots”. Had it done so, the “have nots” would have upped and left—there could have been nothing in it for them, and the “haves” would have had to become “have nots” to survive. They would have had to do their own delving and spinning. This is the stage when the original hypothetical social contract that founded the original group could have been abandoned, had the social contract been violated.
Were the people in this early human group free? They were and they were not! They benefitted from the help offered by others in the group, and they in turn had to help the others. So they were not free to do as they liked. They had a social duty to perform in return for the social benefits they received. But all of them could rely on the others, for any rogue or antisocial member would have been disciplined by the rest, perhaps even being killed in extreme cases, as chimpanzees do, but also being driven out where they were likely to die unless a nearby group took them in. Members of the groups felt secure, and could participate in evicting a poor or old leader who was no longer effective, thereby participating in a rough and ready democracy—but they were obligated to the group by duty.
Here is the natural source of the ideas of positive and negative freedom. Negative freedom meant that none of the group members felt enslaved or confined. None could be made to do more than their fair share for the group, and could withdraw from the group if they felt some caucus in it was asking too much of them. But they were able to make their own contribution to the group, just the same as the others did, and also could help in replacing an ineffective leader. So, they had positive freedom. True freedom is the right balance of the two of them, and that is what the primitive human group had.
Angst—the Need for Positive Freedom
A free man is he that in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do is not hindered to do what he hath the will to do.Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 21:2
Not to be hindered from doing what you have the strength and wit to do is freedom, and it has been increasingly important to western civilizations in the last four centuries. Before then few men had much idea of what it was at all. Freedom was a word that meant nothing to them. They might have felt oppressed by their lord, but to leave their village seemed impossible for them. It meant no role in society, no income at all, no home, no family, and abandoning everbody they knew. They would have been horribly alone, pennyless, anxious and fearful.
Note that Hobbes speaks of being free to do what one has the “strength and wit” to do, but also the “will to do it”. The villein in bondage to his land and lord might have had the strength and wit to survive as a free man, but he would rarely find out because he would not have had the will to do it. Had the serf known that leaving his plot and his manor was what freedom was, despite the advantage the lord often will have taken of him, he would most likely have rejected it in favour of the security, companionship, and kindness that he could rely on among his fellow villagers.
Today, the situation is reversed. Ordinary people are feeling less and less secure in the situation which, they are assured by their bosses and rulers, is the best of all possible situations—freedom. Most people are getting increasingly anxious, even successful people. Middle and working class people are joined in their anxiety about the future—where will they get a job, or how will they keep their job, and how will their children get a job, how will they pay for their pension, how will they pay their sickness insurance, how will they pay their mortgage, and their kids university places. Being free is not looking that attractive, and part of the unpleasant feeling is that there is nowhere to turn—there are no friends to help, few friends to confide in, help and kindness is at a premium.
Overdoing negative freedom breaks down the cohesiveness of the group. People may be able to do a lot of things they could not do while they felt more obligated to the group, but they also feel that the help of others was waning, leading to their growing anxiety and insecurity.
For long periods in the dark and middle ages, though their lords could be oppressive, people could not imagine what freedom was. Equally, though poor, and liable to have hard times in bad seasons through cold, drought or flood, the normal working year was short, and people had a lot of free time waiting for crops to grow, and saints days for merriment. They also had the same strong feeling of community that the primitive group had. In short, the anxiety they felt was real, through poverty and providence, but was not generally social. Social anguish has grown steadily in the twentieth century along with the collapse of caring society into greed and exploitation.
People are feeling the absence of the kindness that close groups always had as a compensation for the random hardships of living—positive freedom. Instead they want more negative freedom—with its attendant failing cohesion of society.
Enough of Freedom—Negative Freedom!
A constitution allowing the greatest possible human freedom in accordance with laws by which the freedom of each is made to be consistent with that of all others… must be taken as fundamental.I Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
People have quite enough freedom—negative freedom, freedom from this and that restrictions—yet our present day lords and masters tell us we haven’t enough of it still. What we certainly do not have enough of is the security one has from having a loving and kind society to fall back upon when we feel tense, stressed and insecure. That is positive freedom, freedom to help others and ourselves, to rule ourselves by extending the hand of kindness to others.
More and more negative freedom seems to mean less and less instinctive kindness and care. Our society is no longer a caring society. Care now has to be paid for. It is hardly ever instinctive, these days. Commercialization, capitalism, is destroying society, and everyone is cheering it on. The Christian God is the God of love, they tell us, so what are they doing about the destruction of society by the siren call of the mirage of total freedom. They are often the cheerleaders!
