ABSTRACT
The utilitarian reduction of moral philosophy which divided all motives into the self-regarding and the other-regarding was put forward and elaborated in the writings of Mandeville, Hume, and Adam Smith. Reservations, it is true, about these principles of action may be found even among the writers who first propounded them. Hume said that the two sorts of motive permeate each other, and Smith believed that an impartial umpire, ‘the man in the breast’, could persuade the selfish and unselfish parts to agree on a proper tradeoff. But Hazlitt saw all this line of rational speculation as a mistake; in his view of human action, he was closer to Joseph Butler than to any of the commercial and secular writers. It was Butler who had shown unforgettably, in his Preface to the Sermons and in the two sermons ‘Upon the Love of our Neighbour’, that the selfish instincts contradict each other quite as much as any of them contradicts the unselfish. And yet the idea of passionate sympathy was not native to Butler. It was to Hazlitt. The sense that our thoughts of the future are steeped in feelings about more than a single self, and that we act toward others free of a conscious division between self-regarding and other-regarding motives, seems the fairest detail to point to in bringing out the originality of Hazlitt's Essay on the Principles of Human Action.
