Francis Hutcheson is known as a proto-utilitarian. Adam Smith, though, his most prominent student an successor on the Chair of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow, focuses on some different trends of his teacher's ethics and founds, based on the same sentimentalism, a completely different theory of morals. On this paper I explore what aspects of Hutcheson's ethics -particularly those of ‘sympathy' and the ‘impartial spectator'- where already present in his theory, and how Smith develops those intuitions in order to introduce a moment of rationality in moral judgments, whereby he is able to construct a theory that includes practical reasoning, without betraying the Scottish sentimentalist tradition.
Keywords:
Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, sentimentalism, ethics, practical reason, Scottish Enlightenment, sympathy, impartial spectator
Carrasco, M. A. (2009). De Hutcheson a Smith: Un Sentimentalismo ‘Sofisticado’. Revista De Filosofía, 65, Pág. 81–96. Retrieved from https://boletinfilologia.uchile.cl/index.php/RDF/article/view/1174
