1. Shaftesbury. The actual term “moral sense” was
first used by Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of
Shaftesbury, in An Inquiry concerning Virtue (un-
authorized edition, London, 1699; corrected version
included in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times, London, 1711). In Shaftesbury the expression is
purely casual and has no more special significance than
the phrase of ordinary language, “sense of right and
wrong,” which Shaftesbury uses much more frequently.
It would be going too far to say of Shaftesbury, as one
can say of Samuel Clarke, that the use of the word
“sense” for moral discrimination is not to be taken
seriously at all. Clarke is a firm advocate of rationalist
ethics but is nevertheless able to write, like Shaftes-
bury, of the “sense men naturally have” of the differ-
ence between right and wrong. Shaftesbury's use of
the term means more than that—but not much more,
for Shaftesbury feels no difficulty in accepting also the
phraseology of the rationalists, when he speaks of
“knowledge” of right and wrong, of the use of “reason”
in moral judgment, and of “eternal” and “immutable”
virtue. Hutcheson took the expression “moral sense”
from Shaftesbury and used it as a definite name for
a definite theory, but the detail of that theory itself
owes little to Shaftesbury.
This is not to say that Hutcheson's ethical thought
owes little to Shaftesbury. The most important feature
of Shaftesbury's moral philosophy is the linking of
ethical and aesthetic judgment. That link remains an
important feature of the moral philosophy of both
Hutcheson and Hume, and in Hutcheson's first book
it is, as in Shaftesbury, the central feature. There is,
however, no intrinsic connection between a compari-
son of virtue with beauty and a theory of moral sense.
The former goes back to Plato and continues in many
philosophers, both rationalist and empiricist.
Shaftesbury influenced Hutcheson in one other re-
spect that is more relevant to the moral sense, namely
in the notion that reflection upon motives is a necessary
condition of moral approbation. Hutcheson makes
some use of this idea, but not a great deal. It was
emphasized more by Bishop Butler in his account of
conscience, which is emphatically not a theory of moral
sense.
Shaftesbury, then, contributed the name of “moral
sense” and the general background of an analogy be-
tween moral and aesthetic judgment, but little of the
actual content of the moral sense theory.
