Francis Hutcheson Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on Francis Hutcheson

Francis Hutcheson, leading figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, is too often considered a minor moral philosopher, of interest only for his influence on David Hume and Adam Smith. Yet, Hutcheson created the moral sense theory, and it was within that framework that Hume and Smith developed their own theories. He was a founder in a way that Hume and Smith were not. He was also one of the foremost moral philosophers of his day, and the influence of his moral thought ranged from Thomas Reid, who was first attracted to philosophy by reading Hutcheson, to the major political and theological thinkers in the American colonies. By the mid eighteenth century his works were taught at Harvard University, Yale University and the College of Pennsylvania. Hutcheson was an acute critic and original thinker, and within a sustained attack on the various forms of egoism and voluntarism prevalent among his predecessors and contemporaries he developed a form of moral naturalism rooted in the notion that human beings have irreducibly benevolent motives that are approved by a unique "moral sense."

Hutcheson was a third-generation Presbyterian minister, his grandfather having emigrated from Scotland to Ulster as part of the settlement in the late seventeenth century.

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