ABSTRACT
From his earliest work, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue published in 1725, to the posthumously published System of Moral Philosophy that appeared thirty years later, Francis Hutcheson argued for a unified account of morality. The unifying principle was the moral sense and what was to be unified was natural law and Virtue or moral goodness. Natural law, for Hutcheson, was a tradition initiated by Grotius. Mandeville had included a pointed polemic against Shaftesbury in the 1723 edition of The Fable of the Bees entitled "A Search into the Nature of Society" and Hutcheson's Inquiries attempted to counter Mandeville's criticisms. Hutcheson was suggesting that Pufendorf's account of obligation rested on something besides that the obligation was created by the superior. Hutcheson also thought there were methodological reasons for preferring his account of the justification of rights to the natural lawyers. In the Inquiry on Beauty, Hutcheson distinguished between good and bad demonstrations.
