sense with that of 'innate ideas,' and insists that "this moral sense has no relation to innate ideas."[1] We are not furnished at the outset of our moral career with a ready-made set of moral ideas; and without experience we should never have come by such ideas. All that nature provides is the capacity of moral perception; a moral sense, not moral ideas or perceptions. "The vast diversity of moral principles, in various nations and ages … is indeed a good argument against innate ideas, or principles, but will not evidence mankind to be void of a moral sense to perceive virtue or vice in actions, when they occur to their observation."[2]
We have already seen that the mark of virtue is, in Hutcheson's eyes, its disinterestedness or unselfishness. But he goes further, and insists that the essence of virtue is positive benevolence or love of others. "If we examine all the actions which are counted amiable anywhere, and enquire into the grounds upon which they are approved, we shall find, that in the opinion of the person who approves them, they always appear as benevolent, or flowing from love of others, and a study of their happiness."[3] "The universal foundation of our sense of moral good, or evil," is "benevolence toward others, on the one hand, and malice, or even indolence, and unconcernedness about the apparent publick evil, on the other."[4] It follows that "the most perfectly virtuous" actions are "such as appear to have the most universal unlimited tendency to the greatest and most extensive happiness of all the rational agents, to whom our influence can reach."[5] As "that action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers,"[6] so is that agent most virtuous the purity of whose intention to minister to the greatest general happiness is least corrupted by thoughts of self-seeking. Hutcheson has even constructed a "universal canon to compute the morality of any actions, with all their circumstances," a calculus of virtue and vice, with which I will not trouble you here, but the general outcome of which is that the amount of virtue is determined by the ratio of benevolence to selfishness in every case.
