Scottish Common Sense and Nineteenth-Century American Law: A Critical Appraisal

One overriding concern I have with Susanna Blumenthal\u27s insightful and stimulating article, The Mind of a Moral Agent: Scottish Common Sense and the Problem of Responsibility in Nineteenth-Century American Law, is whether there is anything sufficiently distinctive about Scottish Common Sense philosophy that justifies the role Blumenthal ascribes to it. One could probably replace Common Sense philosophy in Blumenthal\u27s formulation with something as diffuse as The Enlightenment, or even Western jurisprudence, without significantly altering its import, because the assumption that rational and moral faculties are innate and universal is common to most writers in these traditions. There are subtle differences among individual authors, of course, but most embrace the notion in one form or another, and their differences often trace to questions of nomenclature