Comment percevoir l’intention morale ? Le sentiment chez Francis Hutcheson

The Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson is famous for introducing in his Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London, 1725) an internal sense called the moral sense. What interests us in this essay is the status he tries to give throughout his different works to this new kind of perception, moral perception, which is nowhere to be found in Locke’s writings. Although similar to external sensation, it cannot be reduced to it, as it is supposed to give us notions of good and evil and not only of corporeal objects. The problem can be therefore stated as the following: how can one perceive moral qualities, i.e. objects that are not sensible? Hutcheson refuses any intervention of reasoning in the constitution of moral perceptions. However, I argue here that the moral perceptions depend on a specific apprehension which relies on a kind of reflection, distinct from the way sensations are apprehended. Consequently, all the ambiguity of the term “sense” is exploited in such a theory: the perceptions of the moral sense, which Hutcheson tends to call “sentiments”, conflate immediacy and reflection, and private affects and understanding of the moral issues of a situation