## 1. The System of Necessity



Reid's moral philosophy, according to the gloss offered thus
far, is an agency-centered intuitionist position, which also blends
together both rationalist and sentimentalist influences. Given its
synthetic character, it is natural to ask how best to enter into
Reid's thought. A promising avenue is to note a pattern of
thought present in Reid's work. In his work in epistemology and
philosophy of mind, which is found primarily in *An Inquiry into
the Human Mind* (IHM) and *Essays on the Intellectual Powers of
Man* (EIP), Reid frames his project as a response to a general
position that he calls the Way of Ideas. This position, which Reid
says unites philosophers as diverse as Aristotle, Locke, Berkeley, and
Hume, holds that we are never acquainted with the external world but
only with "images" or sense data in the mind. What Reid
says positively about our perception of the external world is couched
as a response to this view. Although it is rarely noted, Reid's
work in ethics in *Essays on the Active Powers of Man* (EAP) is
also framed as a response to a general position, which he claims is
adopted by philosophers as diverse as Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hume. This
position Reid ordinarily calls the System of Necessity. Reid's
own positive views about the nature of agency and the moral domain are
best viewed as a response to the System of Necessity. Let us, then,
enter Reid's moral philosophy by having before us the rudiments
of the System of Necessity.



Suppose you have fallen asleep in your bed after a long day of work.
You briefly wake during the night, noting that someone has left a
kitchen light on. You do not want, however, to get out of bed at this
hour. Still, after pondering the issue for a moment, you know that you
should do so. So, you drag yourself out of bed and turn the light off.
How should we describe your behavior?



According to advocates of the System of Necessity, there is a sense in
which the performance of this action is up to you. No one forced you
to get up out of bed. There is also a sense in which you did it
because you believed you should. It is this belief, coupled with a
desire--perhaps to do what is right--that moved you to get
out of bed. Finally, there is a sense in which there is an explanation
of your action that is perfectly law-like. Because your desire (let us
suppose) to do what is right was stronger than your desire to stay in
bed, it won out. Under the supposition that stronger motivations win,
we have a perfectly general, law-like explanation of why you acted as
you did.



In Reid's view, then, proponents of the System of Necessity
affirm these three claims:


1. Every human action has a sufficient cause.
2. Provided normal background conditions obtain, the sufficient cause
of a human action is its motive, which is a mental state of an
agent.
3. Every human action is subsumable under a law, which specifies that
for any agent *S*, set of motives *M*, and action
*A* at *t*, necessarily, if *S* performs
*A*, then there is some member of *M* that is
*S*'s strongest motive, which causes *S* to
perform *A* at *t*.



Viewed from on angle, these claims appear not to fit tightly together.
One could accept any one and reject the others. Viewed from another
angle, however, they express a unified picture of human action, one
according to which human action is a natural phenomenon that is
subsumable under laws in much the same way that other ordinary natural
events are. If one is attracted to this broadly naturalistic position,
as Reid claims that figures such as Spinoza, Hume, Priestley, and
Kames were, then these claims form a natural package (see Cuneo
2011a).



Reid, however, believed that this package of claims provides a deeply
distorted picture of human action. Why did he believe this? In large
part because he could not see how it could account for genuinely
autonomous human agency in at least two senses of this multivalent
term. In the first place, autonomous actions are ones that can be
properly ascribed to an agent. But if the System of Necessity were
true, Reid claimed, there is no proper sense in which actions that
appear to be performed by an agent could justly be attributed to that
agent--the human agent being simply a theater in which various
drives and impulses vie for dominance. One could, if the System of
Necessity were right, attribute actions to mental states such as
desires. And this might be adequate to describe the behavior of
animals and addicts. But, Reid claims, it is not adequate to describe
purposeful human action. For human action, in Reid's view, must
be attributable to the person as a whole, not some force working in or
on her (see Korsgaard 2009, xii).



Secondly, autonomous agency is such that an agent can exercise a
certain type of control over the various impulses that present
themselves when deliberating. Suppose, to return to our earlier case,
that you briefly wake during the night, noting that someone has left a
kitchen light on. You want not to get out of bed at this hour. Must
you capitulate to your strongest desire? Not if you are autonomous.
For genuinely autonomous agents, according to Reid, are reflective.
Any desire is such that an autonomous agent can direct his attention
not only to its object, but also to the desire itself, asking: Should
I act on it? That is, any such agent can ask these two questions:
First, would acting on this desire contribute to my genuine
well-being? And, second, is there a sufficient moral reason or
obligation for acting on or ignoring it? These two questions advert to
what Reid calls the *rational principles of action* (see EAP,
III.iii.i). The first principle Reid calls the principle with
"regard to our good on the whole," the second the
"principle of duty." The fact that you needn't
capitulate to your desire to stay in bed but can step back and
critically assess it with reference to these two rational principles
of action, in Reid's estimation, is what separates normal,
mature human beings from the rest of the natural order.



This point was important enough to Reid that he highlights it in the
Introduction to *Essays on the Active Powers* and
elsewhere:



> 
> 
> The brutes are stimulated to various actions by their instincts, by
> their appetites, by their passions: but they seem to be necessarily
> determined by the strongest impulse, without any capacity of
> self-government.... They may be trained up by discipline, but
> cannot be governed by law. There is no evidence that they have the
> conception of a law, or of its obligation.
> 
> 
> 
> Man is capable of acting from motives of a higher nature. He perceives
> a dignity and worth in one course of conduct, a demerit and turpitude
> in another, which brutes have not the capacity to discern....
> 
> 
> 
> [Men] judge what ends are most worthy to be pursued, how far every
> appetite and passion may be indulged, and when it ought to be
> resisted.... In them [the brutes] we may observe one passion
> combating another, and the strongest prevailing; but we perceive no
> calm principle in their constitution that is superior to every
> passion, and able to give law to it. (EAP, 5 and II.ii: 57)
> 
> 
> 



When Reid talks about our capacity to be governed by law he has in
mind our capacity to regulate our behavior by assessing it in terms of
the two rational principles of action. Reid, then, champions what we
might call a *regulation account of autonomy*. We are
autonomous, rational agents, in Reid's estimation, in virtue of
the fact that we can regulate or govern our behavior by stepping back
from our various impulses, desires, instincts, and assess prospective
actions in light of the two rational principles of action. It is this
dimension of human action, according to Reid, that is missing
altogether from the description of agency offered by advocates of the
System of Necessity.


### 1.1 Reid's alternative



In Reid's view, then, the System of Necessity fails to offer an
accurate account of human agency. What alternative account of agency
did Reid propose? One that accepts the following three claims:



> 
> 
> (1') Every human action has a cause, which in the case of free
> human action is not itself a motive, but the agent himself.
> 
> 
> 
> (2') Motives are not mental states but the ends for which an
> agent acts.
> 
> 
> 
> (3') Human action is nomic only to this extent: If an agent
> fails to exercise autonomy when deliberating (and he is not in a state
> of indifference), then his strongest desire to act in a certain way
> will prevail. If he exercises autonomy when deliberating, however,
> then he will act on the motive that seems to him most rationally
> appropriate.
> 
> 
> 



Let us consider these three claims in turn.



The first statement, (1'), expresses Reid's commitment to
an agent causal account of human free action. Reid presents various
arguments for this view in *Essays on the Active Powers of
Man*, but it is worth emphasizing that a central consideration
that Reid furnishes in its favor appeals not to common sense but to
what science appears to tell us. Reid, like most of his
contemporaries, was a Newtonian. In Reid's judgment, however,
Newtonian science is committed to the claim "that matter is a
substance altogether inert, and merely passive; that gravitation, and
the other attractive or repulsive powers ... are not inherent in
its nature, but impressed upon it by some external cause" (EAP
I.vi: 34). Matter, according to this view, does not cause anything. On
the assumptions that there is genuine causality in the world and that
agents are causes, it follows that agents, who are not material
things, in Reid's view, are the only causes. Reid takes
Newtonian science to imply a mitigated version of occasionalism
according to which the only genuine causation in the world is agent
causation.



The second statement above, (2'), expresses Reid's
commitment to a broadly teleological account of human agency,
according to which autonomous human action is explained not by the
impulses that present themselves to an agent when deliberating but by
the ends for which she acts. In his defense of this view, Reid argues
that, contrary to the adherents of the System of Necessity, motives
are not mental states that cause us to act, for motives are not the
right sort of thing to be causes: They are not agents. In some places,
in fact, Reid says that motives (as he thinks of them) have no
"real existence," by which he seems to mean (at least)
that they are not part of the spatio-temporal manifold but are
abstracta (see EAP IV.iv: 214).



These claims might take us aback: Motives are not causes and have no
real existence? How could that be? When evaluating these claims, two
things should be noted. First, Reid is working with a rather narrow
understanding of what it is for something to be a cause (and to
exist)--an understanding, we've seen, he thinks fits best
with a Newtonian understanding of the world. Second, Reid's
considered view about the role of motives is actually more complicated
than (2') would have us believe. (2') expresses the view
that Reid defends in Essay IV of *Essays on the Active Powers*,
"Of the Liberty of Moral Agents." But anyone who has read
Essay III, "Of the Principles of Action," knows that Reid
claims that motives or "principles of action" divide into
three kinds: mechanical, animal, and rational. Mechanical principles
of action are what we would call instincts, such as the unreflective
impulse to protect oneself from perceived harm. Animal principles of
action are a more varied lot. Under this category, Reid places the
so-called benevolent affections, such as the affection felt between
kin, gratitude to benefactors, pity and compassion, friendship, public
spirit, and the like (see EAP III.iii.iv). He also includes the
so-called malevolent affections, such as resentment and the desire to
dominate others. (In section III, we will see a reason to believe that
some animal principles, by Reid's own lights, are not ones that
could be had by the animals.)



All this complicates Reid's picture. Reid seems to want to allow
that motives come in two varieties. On the one hand, Reid says that
rational motives function as "advice" or
"exhortation" which do not push but pull us to action. On
the other, he describes the mechanical and animal motives as
"impulses," which do not pull but push us to action (EAP
II.ii and IV.iv). How best to understand what Reid is saying? Perhaps
the best conclusion to draw is that Reid does not have a unified
account of motives. Some of the rational motives are best described as
being either those ends for which we act or principles by which we
evaluate those ends for which we act. Other motives--the
mechanical and a range of the animal ones--are not; they are what
push or impel us to action (see Cuneo and Harp 2016).



Are these latter motives best described as having a causal influence
on behavior? Perhaps they are, according to a more relaxed
understanding of causality than that with which Reid officially works.
For suppose we agree that there are processes that are instigated by
the exercise of active power, such as the process that is instigated
by an agent's willing to raise her arm. In Reid's view,
this process includes the exercise of active power, which is the
agent's willing to raise her arm, the activity of nerves and
muscles and, finally, the raising of her arm. If we allow ourselves to
talk of elements of this process as causes in a "lax and popular
sense," then perhaps some motives, in Reid's view, could
be called causes. Of course Reid would have to say that in some cases
the motives that "cause" us to act are not part of a
causal process that we ourselves instigate. Not every desire or mental
state we have is the causal consequence of the exercise of our active
power in a given way. (That I desire to eat an ice cream cone, for
example, appears to be a causal consequence not of the exercise of my
active power but of your handing me an ice cream cone.) Reid would
have to say, then, that those mental states and events that are not
simply the causal consequence of the exercise of active power are
parts of processes instigated by some other agent cause, such as God.
This may seem odd. But it seems to be the broader picture within which
Reid operated. All causal processes in nature (which are not due to
us) are instigated by the exercise of God's active power. A
typical case of human action involves the coincidence of the exercise
of our active power with God's (see EAP I.vi and Cuneo
2011a).



Let us now turn to the third statement above, namely, (3'). This
claim expresses Reid's two-fold conviction that free human
action is (i) not in any interesting sense nomic, and (ii) that we can
assess our motives along two dimensions. We can assess them, first,
according to their psychological strength and, second, according to
their rational authority.



That free human action is not nomic is simply an implication of
Reid's conviction that we are endowed with libertarian free
will, the exercise of which does not fall under any natural law in the
sense described by Newtonian science. That our motives can be assessed
along two dimensions, by contrast, is an implication of Reid's
regulation account of autonomy.



To see how Reid is thinking about the strength of motives, consider a
case in which you are moved to action by some animal principle of
action. Imagine, for example, you are incited to reprimand someone in
your family because you believe that he or she has acted irresponsibly
by leaving a kitchen light on during the night. One way to assess this
action would be to ask whether it conforms to the rational principles
of action. Let us suppose that, in the case we are considering, by
reprimanding you risk alienating yourself from those with whom you
live; the circumstances you're in call for a calm and measured
response. While there may be good reasons to alienate yourself from
others, expressing your anger in these circumstances is not one of
them. This motive in these circumstances, then, has no rational
authority.



Now consider the same motive not with respect to its rational
authority but with regard to its psychological strength. Is this
motive the strongest of your motives? Reid maintains that this is a
difficult question to answer. One of the complaints Reid raises about
the System of Necessity is that it sheds no light on the matter.
Although advocates of the System of Necessity claim that human actions
can be subsumed under natural laws, the laws to which they appeal in
order to assess the strength of motives are either false or trivial.
For recall that, according to the System of Necessity:



> 
> (3) Every human action is subsumable under a law, which specifies that
> for any agent *S*, set of motives *M*, and action
> *A* at *t*, necessarily, if *S* performs
> *A*, then there is some member of *M* that is
> *S*'s strongest motive, which causes *S* to
> perform *A* at *t*.
> 



Reid finds this claim totally unpersuasive. It is worth quoting at
length what he has to say about it:



> 
> It is a question of fact, whether the influence of motives be fixed by
> laws of nature, so that they shall always have the same effect in the
> same circumstance. Upon this, indeed, the question about liberty and
> necessity hangs. But I have never seen any proof that there are such
> laws of nature, far less any proof that the strongest motive always
> prevails. However much our late fatalists have boasted of this
> principle as of a law of nature, without telling us what they mean by
> the strongest motive, I am persuaded that, whenever they shall be
> pleased to give us any measure of the strength of motives distinct
> from their prevalence, it will appear, from experience, that the
> strongest motive does not always prevail. If no other test or measure
> of the strength of motives can be found but their prevailing, then
> this boasted principle will be only an identical proposition, and
> signify only that the strongest motive is the strongest motive
> ... which proves nothing. (C, 176-77)
> 



According to Reid, (3), then, is either false or trivial (for
discussion, see Yaffe 2004, Ch. 6).



We should now have a better picture of Reid's favored account of
human agency. It is one according to which agents are causes, at least
some motives are not causes but ends, and autonomous action is
non-nomic. Earlier I said that this picture of agency grounds his
non-naturalist account of the ethical domain. Let me now explain
how.


### 1.2 Reid's moral non-naturalism



Like most of his contemporaries, Reid's worldview was Newtonian.
While he was convinced that the natural sciences should conform to
Newtonian methods, Reid held that these methods have their
limitations. In a passage from an unpublished review composed toward
the end of his life, Reid writes:



> 
> There are many important branches of human knowledge, to which Sir
> Isaac Newton's rules of Philosophizing have no relation, and to
> which they can with no propriety be applied. Such are Morals,
> Jurisprudence, Natural Theology, and the abstract Sciences of
> Mathematicks and Metaphysicks; because in none of those Sciences do we
> investigate the physical laws of Nature. There is therefore no reason
> to regret that these branches of knowledge have been pursued without
> regard to them. (AC, 186)
> 



In this passage, Reid tells us that Newton's rules pertain only
to the physical laws of nature and what is subsumable under them. But
the rational principles of action, we have seen, are not themselves
the physical laws of nature. They do not concern how the universe in
fact operates. Rather, they concern how rational agents ought to
conduct their behavior. Nor are these principles subsumable under
Newton's laws (EAP IV.ix: 251). They are, in Reid's view,
not part of the space/time manifold. It follows that Newton's
methods should not guide our theorizing about the rational principles
of action. Since moral principles are among the rational principles of
action, it follows that they are not identical with or subsumable
under Newton's laws. Given the additional assumption that
natural science must conform to Newton's rules, Reid concludes
that morality is not the subject matter of natural science. That this
is so, Reid continues, is "no reason to regret." It is a
matter of simply acknowledging the implications of Newton's
system--implications, Reid maintains, that philosophers such as
Hume and Priestley, who also took themselves to be followers of
Newton, had failed to appreciate.



In sum: Suppose we understand moral naturalism to be the view that
moral facts are natural. And suppose we say, in a rough and ready way,
that a fact is natural just in case it pulls its explanatory weight in
the natural sciences (see Wiggins 1993). Reid maintains that Newtonian
methods exhaust the limits of natural science. Newtonian science,
however, does not investigate the ends or rational principles for
which we act. The ends for which we act neither fall under Newtonian
laws nor are identical with them. But moral facts, Reid says, are
among the ends or rational principles for which we act. It follows
that, in Reid's view, moral facts are not the proper object of
scientific inquiry. The moral domain is autonomous.


## 2. The Rational Principles of Action



Philosophers such as Hume and Priestly were eager to apply
Newton's methods to the moral domain. Reid, however, viewed
attempts to use Newtonian methods to understand the moral domain as
mistaken--not, once again, because he viewed Newtonian science as
suspect, but because he held that Newton's methods themselves
require this. That said, we have seen that there is a sense in which
Reid believes that human action is law-governed. We can regulate our
behavior by reference to the rational principles of action. Earlier we
saw that these principles are of two kinds: They concern our good on
the whole and duty. Reid holds that these principles stand in a
certain kind of relation to one another. We can better identify this
relation by having the notion of *motivational primacy* before
us.



Suppose we say that a state of affairs *P* has motivational
primacy for an (ordinary adult) agent *S* just in case three
conditions are met. First, in a wide range of ordinary cases,
*P* is a type of consideration in light of which *S*
would act. Accordingly, were *S* to deliberate about what to
do, *P* is a type of state of affairs that *S* would, in
a wide range of cases, not only use to "frame" his
practical deliberations, but also endeavor to bring about. *That my
loved ones flourish* is such a state of affairs for many of
us.



Second, *P* is a sufficient reason for *S* to act.
Roughly put, *P* is a sufficient reason for *S* to act
just in case were *S* to deliberate about what to do, then (in
a wide range of ordinary cases) *S* would take *P* to be
a reason to act and would endeavor to bring about *P* even if
he believed (or presupposed) that his doing so would not bring about
(or increase the likelihood of his bringing about) any further state
of affairs that he values. Imagine, for example, *S* is like
many of us inasmuch as he takes himself to have a reason to bring
about the flourishing of his loved ones. This is a sufficient reason
for *S* to act since he would endeavor to bring about the
flourishing of his loved ones even if he believed that his doing so
would not bring about any further state of affairs that he values,
such as his *gaining increased notoriety among his peers*.



Third, *P* has deliberative weight for *S*. For our
purposes, we can think of this as the claim that *P* is a
reason of such a type that, in a wide range of circumstances, were S
to deliberate about what to do, then *S* would take *P*
to trump other types of reasons, even other sufficient reasons. Many
of us, for example, hold *that there is a beautiful sunset on the
horizon* is a sufficient reason to stop whatever we are doing and
enjoy it. Still, for most of us, that an act would bring about or
preserve the flourishing of our loved ones has greater deliberative
weight than this. If a person had to choose between enjoying a
beautiful sunset, on the one hand, or protecting her child from
danger, on the other, then the latter reason trumps.


### 2.1 Reid's defense of The Hierarchy Thesis



Having introduced the notion of motivational primacy, we can now
identify a claim that is arguably the centerpiece of Reid's
discussion of rational motivation, namely:



> 
> **The Hierarchy Thesis:** In any case in which an agent
> must decide what to do, considerations of what is morally required
> should have motivational primacy. Specifically, what is morally
> required of an agent should have motivational primacy over what he
> takes to be his good on the whole.
> 



Eudaimonist positions, such as those defended in the broadly
Aristotelian tradition, reject The Hierarchy Thesis. They maintain
that when an agent deliberates about what to do he assumes, or ought
to assume, that considerations concerning his own well-being or
eudaimonia have motivational primacy in a very robust sense. Every act
that an agent performs, say eudaimonists, either is or should be taken
for the sake of his own happiness. Accordingly, if eudaimonism is
true, an agent operates, or ought to operate, with the following
principle of action selection: Perform only those actions that, to the
best of one's knowledge, positively contribute to one's
own well-being or eudaimonia. Moreover, in so doing, an agent treats,
or ought to treat, considerations concerning his own well-being as
being both a sufficient reason to act and having deliberative weight.
When asked: "Why did you do that?" an agent's
ultimate justification will, or ought to, appeal to the way in which
acting in that fashion contributes to her own well-being.



Reid rejects eudaimonism thus understood. It is safe to assume that
Reid took Butler's attack on what we might call *descriptive
eudaimonism* to be decisive: There is no plausibility to the idea
that agents necessarily will their own happiness, as they understand
it, for they can knowingly act in self-destructive ways (cf. EAP
III.ii.i: 95). But Reid realized that Butler's attack left
*prescriptive eudaimonism*, or the view that the
*practically rational* agent takes her own well-being to have
motivational primacy, relatively untouched. According to this view,
whatever may be the case about how agents actually act, they ought to
view their own well-being as having motivational primacy.



Like Butler, Reid did not wish to recommend a picture of agency
according to which agents should disregard or ignore their own
well-being. "To serve God and be useful to mankind, without any
concern about one's own good and happiness," Reid writes,
is "beyond the pitch of human nature" (EAP III.iii.iv:
166). Indeed, Reid holds that, when properly understood, a concern for
one's good on the whole naturally leads to the acquisition of
the moral virtues, such as justice and benevolence (EAP III.iii.iii:
163; see also EAP V.i). Still, Reid insists that our good on the whole
ought not to be the "only regulating principle of human
conduct" (EAP III.iii.iv: 164). Why?



For four main reasons. First, Reid claims that "the greater part
of mankind can never attain such extensive views of human life, and so
correct a judgment of good and ill, as the right application of this
principle requires" (EAP III.iii.iv: 164). Reid's point
here is that a principle of action should be action-guiding. It should
be the sort of thing that, in a wide range of cases, an agent could
consult when determining what to do and thereby come to understand
what she morally ought to do. The principles of morality are
action-guiding. "Every man of common understanding," says
Reid, is such that he is capable of knowing his duty (EAP V.i: 277).
But gaining a conception of one's good on the whole, let alone
an accurate one, and an understanding of what genuinely contributes to
it, is something that is very difficult to do. It requires that one
"observe the connections of things, and the consequences of our
actions," thereby "taking an extended view of our
existence, past, present, and future" (EAP III.iii.i: 153). Many
ordinary persons will have neither the time nor the ability to do
this, let alone actually gain an accurate notion of that in which
their good on the whole consists. If this is right, however, then
one's good on the whole is not sufficiently action-guiding to be
the most general and fundamental principle of action, as eudaimonists
claim.



Second, since one's good on the whole is concerned not only with
present satisfaction, but also with the enjoyment of future goods, it
proves not to be as motivationally charged as one might hope. We would
like to have a clearer and more efficacious guide to conduct. Reid
puts the point thus:



> 
> Men stand in need of a sharper monitor to their duty than a dubious
> view of distant good. There is reason to believe, that a present sense
> of duty has, in many cases a stronger influence than the apprehension
> of distant good would have of itself. And it cannot be doubted, that a
> sense of guilt and demerit is a more pungent reprover than the bare
> apprehension of having mistaken our true interest. (EAP III.iii.iv:
> 165)
> 



Duty is, then, according to Reid, in many cases, a better guide to
action than interest. Moreover, it is often motivationally more
powerful than an appeal to interest, as it connects more intimately
with powerful motivating considerations such as one's own
guilt.



The third point that Reid makes is that "a steady pursuit of our
own good may, in an enlightened mind, produce a kind of virtue which
is entitled to some degree of approbation, yet it can never produce
the noblest kind of virtue, which claims our highest love and
esteem" (EAP III.iii.iv: 165). So, Reid's view is not that
a concern for one's own well-being is crass egoism or
self-centeredness. To the contrary, there is something admirable about
it; to pursue one's own well-being properly requires virtue. For
example, if concern for one's self is such that it helps one to
discount temptations to a life of ease, leisure, or frivolity, then it
is much to be admired (cf. EAP III.iii.iv: 165; but also cf. EAP V.vi:
272). That said, to be genuinely dedicated to the moral life, one
cannot grant motivational primacy to one's good on the whole.
For our esteem, Reid writes, "is due only to the man whose soul
is not contracted within itself, but embraces a more extensive object:
who loves virtue, not for her dowry only, but for her own sake: whose
benevolence is not selfish, but generous and disinterested" (EAP
III.iii.iv: 166). For Reid, then, virtue requires caring not only
about particular persons (they are, according to Reid, the objects of
benevolence), but also about virtue itself. Being virtuous requires
being committed to the idea that the moral life is, in and for itself,
worth living. It is not to be made subordinate to considerations about
one's well-being.



Reid's fourth point echoes one of Butler's most famous
observations regarding the pursuit of happiness: If one primarily aims
to secure one's own happiness, one often increases the risk of
not obtaining it. This is not only because directly aiming for
one's own happiness can "fill the mind with fear, and
care, and anxiety" (EAP III.iii.iv: 167). It is also because a
"concern for our own good is not a principle that, of itself,
gives any enjoyment" (EAP III.iii.iv: 166). What does give
enjoyment, however, are those particular activities and objects to
which our affections are directed, such as friendship and the common
good. To achieve one's good on the whole, then, one must, at
least part of the time, be focused on and motivated by considerations
that are not identical with it.



Earlier we said that a consideration has motivational primacy for an
agent just in case the following three conditions are met: First, it
is a type of consideration in light of which an ordinary adult agent
would act in a wide array of cases; second, it is a sufficient reason
for that agent; and, third it has deliberative weight for him.
Eudaimonists believe that one's good on the whole has
motivational primacy. Indeed, they believe that one's good on
the whole has motivational primacy in a very robust sense.
Eudaimonists hold that *every* act that an agent performs is,
or should be, taken for the sake of his own happiness and that there
is, or should be, no deeper practical justification for so acting.
Reid maintains that eudaimonism thus understood is false. In many
cases, agents do not act for the sake of their good on the whole. Nor,
in many cases, should they do so. For one thing, appealing to
one's good on the whole is insufficiently action-guiding, since
many agents simply do not have an adequate understanding of that in
which it consists. For another, to make happiness the final court of
appeal when deliberating is to undermine the rightful primacy of
virtue.



There is a substantial challenge facing views such as Reid's.
Consider a case in which considerations of well-being conflict with
duty, such as when moral duty requires that one stand up for the
innocent at the cost of one's life and those of one's
family. Reid is committed to the claim that, in a case such as this,
one is required to surrender one's life. Could that be right?
Reid insists that it is. For any such conflict, Reid says, is
"imaginary" (EAP III.iii.viii: 194). So long as "the
world is under a wise and benevolent administration, it is impossible,
that any man should ... be a loser by doing his duty."
Reid's theism, in short, grounds his allegiance to The Hierarchy
Thesis. God guarantees that the two principles of action never come
into genuine conflict since performing one's duty will not
detract from one's good on the whole in the long run (see Cuneo
2010).


## 3. Moral Principles



According to the picture sketched thus far, Reid's account of
autonomous action is as follows: We human beings can act from a great
variety of principles, including the so-called mechanical and animal
principles. What renders us rational agents distinct from the rest of
the animals is our ability to gain critical distance from these
incentives and regulate our conduct by appeal to the two rational
principles of action, asking whether a given course of action truly
contributes to our good on the whole and is consonant with moral duty.
Finally, the principle of duty enjoys motivational primacy. Although I
have not yet emphasized the point, the similarities between
Reid's and Kant's thought in these respects are
unmistakable. (We have, however, no evidence that Reid was aware of
Kant's work.) According to both Reid and Kant, we are rational
beings not primarily because we can engage in means-end practical
reasoning. Rather, we are practically rational agents primarily
because we can assess the various impulses to act by appeal to a
"certain general principle" or law - this law
consisting, in Reid's view, in the rational principles of
action. Indeed, if J. B. Schneewind is correct, Reid and Kant were
unique among the moderns inasmuch as that they conceived of morality
primarily in terms of rational self-governance (see Schneewind
1998).



Still, we saw earlier that there is an important difference between
Reid and Kant. Kant is an ethical monist, holding that there is one
master principle of morality--the categorical
imperative--which is fundamental and from which all our
particular duties can be derived. Reid, by contrast, rejects ethical
monism, maintaining that there is no such master principle, but only a
variety of moral principles that are self-evident and irreducible to
one another. The locution "the principle of duty," in
Reid's mouth, is probably best understood to be a shorthand way
of referring to one or another of these principles which can govern
practical deliberation.



In his chapter "Of the first principles of morals," Reid
presents the first principles of morality "without pretending to
a complete enumeration" (EAP V.i: 270). The constellation of
principles that Reid presents is a hodgepodge. Some are metaethical
principles that specify certain properties of moral principles, such
as that they apply only to free actions, while others are normative
principles that one might consult when deliberating. Among the
normative principles that Reid presents are these:



> 
> 
> We ought to prefer a greater good, though more distant, to a less; and
> a less evil to the greater.
> 
> 
> 
> Every man ought to consider himself as member of the common society of
> mankind, and of the subordinate societies to which he belongs, such as
> family, friends, neighborhood, and country, and do as much good as he
> can, and as little hurt to the societies of which he is a part.
> 
> 
> 
> In every case, we ought to act that part toward another, which we
> would judge to be right in him to act toward us, if we were in his
> circumstance and he in ours. (EAP V.i)
> 
> 
> 



Principles such as these, Reid says, form a system of morality, but
only in a weak sense. They form a system only in the sense that we can
organize them in such a way that facilitates "apprehension and
memory." In this respect, a system of morals, according to Reid,
is not like a system of geometry "where the subsequent parts
derive their evidence from the preceding" but "resembles
more a system of botany ... where the subsequent parts depend not
for their evidence upon the preceding" (EAP V.ii: 281). So,
while Reid admits that the last principle stated above is the
"most comprehensive," he does not claim that it is
fundamental in the sense that it grounds the other moral principles.
Rather, he holds that each of the principles of morality is
self-evident, at least to those who have a sound understanding, a
satisfactory moral education, and are not in the grip of self-interest
or passion. These principles are self-evident, in part, because they
are not amenable to direct argument or proof, for any such argument
"will either take for granted the thing to be proved" or
be "something not more evident" (EAP V.i: 361; for more
discussion, see Cuneo 2004, 259 and Davis 2006, Ch. 6).



Those familiar with the history of ethical intuitionism know that its
critics have found the view unsatisfactory because the intuitionists
had almost nothing informative to say about why, in a given situation,
a particular moral principle takes precedence, and how we could know
that it did (see McNaughton 1996). In hindsight, it is remarkable that
Reid shows little interest in this problem, stating that it is usually
clear to a candid mind which moral principles take precedence and what
one should do (see EAP V.i; although see Roeser 2010a, 15-16).
Instead, Reid is more concerned to argue that there must be
first-principles of morality. In his argument for this claim, Reid
appeals to a traditional regress-style argument according to which
there must be some fundamental moral principles which both ground and
justify our moral deliberation on pain of our being unable to engage
in such deliberation, which we clearly can (see EAP V.i).



At first glance, this can give the impression that moral judgments
must, in Reid's view, derive their warrant from moral first
principles, presumably by being inferred from them. Although Reid
might encourage this impression in places, in other places he clearly
indicates that this is not how he views things. In his account of
particular moral judgments, for example, Reid insists that we
ordinarily form them immediately or non-inferentially. A moderately
virtuous agent "will rarely be at a loss to distinguish good
from ill in his own conduct, without the labour of reasoning"
(EAP V.ii: 280). If the first principles of morality were
warrant-conferring axioms, however, this presumably would not be the
case (see Cuneo 2014).



Suppose, then, that in Reid's view appeal to moral first
principles rarely plays a role in the formation of particular moral
judgments. It is natural to wonder about the role Reid envisions moral
first principles to play in ordinary moral thought. On this matter,
Reid says less than one might like. A promising strategy of
interpretation, however, is to draw a parallel between the first
principles of morality, on the one hand, and what Reid says about the
first principles of common sense in the *Inquiry* and
*Essays* *on the Intellectual Powers*, on the other.



In his discussion of the principles of common sense, Reid presents
various first principles, including the claims that memory is reliable
and that those things exist that we distinctly perceive. Although
sometimes he seems to claim that our particular perceptual judgments
are derived from them, a closer look at what Reid says makes it clear
that this is not his considered view. For, in Reid's view,
ordinary perceptual judgments are formed non-inferentially and are not
self-evident. What role, then, do these principles of common sense
play? Nicholas Wolterstorff (2001, Ch. IX and 2004) argues that Reid
thinks of such principles as being similar to what Wittgenstein, in
*On Certainty*, called "framework propositions."
They are propositions that ordinary people do not typically explicitly
believe but rather take for granted in their everyday comings and
goings. Similarly, one might hold that, properly understood,
Reid's view is that the moral first-principles are not
propositions that ordinary agents who have received a decent moral
education ordinarily consciously believe at some time or other.
Rather, they are what these agents take for granted in their moral
deliberations; they form the horizon or background against which they
deliberate--although these agents would, presumably, assent to
them if they were explicitly presented (for an alternative but, in
principle, complimentary account, see Davis 2006, Ch. 6).



Be that as it may, Reid's deep impulse for affirming the
existence of these principles is not so much to reply to traditional
worries about stopping a regress of reasons as to make an anti-Humean
point. (Hume, after all, also accepts the regress argument; see EAP
V.vii.) According to Reid's construal of it, the aim of Humean
practical reason is not to determine the ends that we should have, but
merely to ascertain how most effectively to satisfy our passions (EAP
III.iii.i: 153; cf. also EAP II.ii: 54). Reid, by contrast, takes it
to be evident that we can form a conception of our good on the whole
and regulate our actions in accordance with it. But if we can do this,
Reid contends, then Hume's account of practical reason cannot be
correct. We can reason not just about means but also ends. Moreover,
if Reid is correct and it is the province of reason to form a
conception of one's good on the whole, then Hume's more
extravagant claims about reason also cannot be correct. For, if Reid
is right, not only is it reason's province to form a notion of
one's good upon the whole, it is also its role to guide action
in such a way that it is conducive to one's own good. It cannot
be true, then, that it is not contrary to reason for an agent to
prefer his lesser good to his greater, as Hume claimed.


### 3.1 Reid's defense of the objectivity of moral first principles



So far, then, we have a sense of what, according to Reid, the first
principles of morality are and the roles that Reid wished them to
play. What should be added is that Reid thinks them to be objective in
a fairly strong sense. Or to put things somewhat more guardedly, if we
interpret Reid's claims that motives do not exist to mean only
that they do not exist in space/time, then Reid thinks they are
objective in a fairly robust sense (for different interpretations, see
David 1985, Nichols 2002, Yaffe 2004, and Van Cleve 2015, ch. 10).



In the first place, Reid believes that the fundamental moral
principles cannot be the product of convention. His argument in this
case is directed against Hume. In Reid's view, Hume defends a
conventionalist account of justice, which rides on a quasi-genetic
account of the emergence of the norms of justice. According to
Hume's story, we begin with a notion of our good on the whole.
Out of a concern to secure our good on the whole, we create the rules
of justice by convention. In response, Reid notes that to have the
concept of one's good on the whole, one must also have the
concepts of 'being a favor' and 'being an
injury.' These concepts, however, are "early in the mind
of man as any rational notion whatever" (EAP V.v: 309). Reid
contends that Hume would seem also to be committed to as much. Hume,
after all, believes gratitude and resentment to be
"natural" sentiments that are concerned with favors and
injuries. Call those concepts that cluster around the notion of
justice, such as 'being wronged,' 'being what is
deserved,' and 'being that to which one is
entitled,' our *concepts of primary justice*. Reid argues
that Hume's quasi-genetic story faces a problem, for a person
cannot have the concepts 'being a favor' and 'being
an injury' without first having the concepts of primary
justice.



Consider favors. Favors, says Reid, are naturally connected with the
benevolent affection of gratitude; they are what merit this response.
But to express gratitude toward someone who has performed a favor is
to believe or presuppose that that agent has benefited you by going
beyond what is owed. Or consider being injured (as opposed to simply
being harmed). Being injured, says Reid, is naturally connected with
the malevolent affection of resentment. To express resentment toward
an agent who has injured you is, however, to believe or presuppose
that he has wronged you, given you less than you deserve. If this is
right, we do not derive the primary concepts of justice from an
interest to secure our good on the whole. To the contrary, the reverse
is true; we can arrive at a notion of our own good on the whole only
if we possess the concepts of primary justice. But if so, we cannot
hold that we somehow constructed our notions and the rules of justice
from a concern to secure our good on the whole. Our notion of our good
on the whole presupposes them (see Cuneo 2015 and Powell and Yaffe
2015).



In fact, Reid believes that reflection on our concepts of primary
justice reveals more than this. It also reveals that these concepts
are irreducible to other normative concepts and fundamental to moral
thinking. Reid's way of making this point is to note that Hume
attempts to ground the rules of justice not just in our notion of our
good on the whole, but also in considerations of utility. Reid holds
that this is a mistake. To "have the conception of
justice," it is necessary that "one perceive its
obligation distinct from its utility" (EAP V.v: 306).
Considerations of utility, Reid holds, are the wrong sort of reasons
to ground accountability relations, which are among the objects of our
concepts of primary justice. In his book, *The Second-Person
Standpoint*, Stephen Darwall puts the point like this: To see that
something is required of another is to take up the
"second-person standpoint" with regard to him. To occupy
this standpoint is to have the authority to hold that person
accountable for not doing what is required of him. Failure to perform
an act that increases utility, however, is not the right sort of thing
for which to hold someone accountable (see Darwall 2006, especially
the discussion of Reid in Ch. 8; see also Wolterstorff 2010).



In addition to rejecting moral constructivist accounts of justice,
Reid rejects what we today would call response-dependent accounts of
moral facts. Roughly put, response-dependent views, which Reid
attributes to sentimentalists such as Hutcheson and Hume, maintain
that moral reality is determined by the sorts of affective reactions
we have to the world. It is because certain actions and events elicit
certain types of affective states in us that they have properties such
as *being wrong* or *being obligatory*. Drawing upon
what rationalists such as Balguy and Price had argued, Reid asks us to
consider fundamental moral principles, such as the claim that, in
ordinary conditions, an agent ought to honor his promise. Claims such
as this, Reid says, are necessarily true. But if the
response-dependent view were correct, it is difficult to see how that
could be so. After all, we can imagine being constituted in such a way
that we failed to disapprove of those who do not honor their promises.
If the response-dependent view were true, then in those counterfactual
circumstances honoring one's promises would not be obligatory;
failing to honor them, accordingly, would not be wrong. But that is
false, for basic moral principles do not exhibit this sort of
contingency. Even in those counterfactual conditions it would be wrong
not to honor one's word. If so, sentimentalists views, Reid
concludes, are false (see EIP VI.vi: 494-95).


## 4. The Moral Sense



We noted earlier that contemporary philosophers tend to think of
modern philosophers as being either rationalists or sentimentalists
about morality. We also noted that Reid does not fit comfortably in
either category, as his views tend to blend together both rationalist
and sentimentalist commitments. This becomes especially evident in
Reid's discussion of the moral sense. (See Davis 2006 for a
discussion of how Reid's account of the moral sense is
influenced by the legal practices of his day.)



It was Francis Hutcheson who first developed the claim that we are
endowed with a moral sense. While Hutcheson's position has been
variously interpreted, his considered position appears to run as
follows. Rationalists tell us that our moral judgments are the output
of reason. But many of our ordinary, nonmoral judgments are not the
output of reason. Our perceptual judgments concerning the external
world, our judgments about our own pain and pleasure, and our
aesthetic judgments, for example, are not the products of reason.
Rather, they are the products of various "senses" or
"determinations of our minds to receive Ideas independently of
our Will" (ONC, 17). Moral judgments, Hutcheson claims, are no
different in this respect. They are also the product not of reason but
of a sense, in this case, the *moral* sense. Although Hutcheson
himself describes this sense in different ways, it is probably best to
think of it as a faculty that has two basic functions.



In the first place, it is that faculty by which we form moral ideas or
concepts and in such a way that does not involve any sort of reasoning
or calculation. Rather, the "author of Nature" has
designed us in such a way that, in a certain range of circumstances,
when an agent is aware of the behavior of himself or others, this
awareness evokes in him states of approbation. These states of
approbation, in turn, elicit states of love and esteem for the person
whose behavior of which he's aware. States of approbation,
Hutcheson indicates, thus function as *signs* of an
agent's benevolence, indicating its presence. Love and esteem,
by contrast, do not indicate benevolence but are rather appropriate
affective responses to it. Second, these affective states move us to
benevolent action. The moral sense at once puts us in contact with
moral reality and motivates us to act (see Cuneo 2013; Kail 2007).


### 4.1 Reid's view compared with Hutcheson's



Those familiar with Reid's writing on perception will
immediately notice rather striking similarities between
Hutcheson's account of the moral sense and Reid's account
of external sense. To see this, consider a case of ordinary tactile
perception, such as when one perceives that the table before one is
hard by touching it. In cases such as these, how do we perceive the
table's hardness? According to Reid, in such cases, it is
pressure sensations--which, Reid stresses, largely go unnoticed
and unnamed--that immediately produce in us a "conception
and belief" of the table that it is hard. As such, Reid says,
the best explanation of how we perceive things such as a table's
hardness is that the "Author of our Nature" has designed
us in such a way that, when all goes well, feelings of a certain range
function as signs or indicators of it. (God, Reid emphasizes, could
have easily fashioned us in such a way that the perceptual process
worked differently. For all we reasonably believe, God could have
constructed us in such a way that signs of an entirely different sort,
such as noises or smells of a certain range, indicate a table's
hardness.) Reid stresses that, according to this account of
perception, pressure sensations are not ideas in the sense that Locke
or Hume thought of them. For pressure sensations do not function as
intermediaries of which we are aware that imagistically represent the
table's hardness and from which we infer its existence.



In order to explain judgments of these sorts, then, both Hutcheson and
Reid appeal not to reason but to an indigenous sense with which we
come hardwired. Both thinkers maintain that (in the ordinary case)
inference plays no role in the production of such
judgments--feelings being such as to immediately evoke them.
Both, moreover, offer thoroughly teleological accounts of perception,
which appeal to the plan of the "Author of our nature."
And, finally, both champion semiotic accounts of perceptual judgment
formation. According to the relevant design plans, sensations or
feelings of various kinds play the role of being signs for or
indicators of qualities of things in the world.



At various points, Reid himself highlights the similarities between
the two senses (see EAP III.iii.vi: 179-80 and PE, 144). Having
noted these similarities, however, Reid goes on to claim that there is
also an important disanalogy between the judgments produced by
external sense, on the one hand, and the moral sense, on the other: In
the former case, when all goes well, feelings elicit judgments about
the external world. In the latter case, the order of explanation is
reversed: "In the approbation of a good action ... there is
feeling indeed, but there is also esteem of the agent; and both the
feeling and the esteem depend upon the judgment we form of his
conduct," not vice-versa (EAP V.vii: 349; for discussion, see
Broadie 1998 and Cuneo 2006). By stressing that states of approbation
are not mere feelings but include full-blooded moral judgments, Reid
takes himself to have corrected a deficiency in Hutcheson's
view. For while Hutcheson nowhere denies that the outputs of the moral
sense include the acceptance of moral propositions neither does he
affirm this. Rather, what Hutcheson tells us is that states of
approbation are feelings of pleasure and that they yield
"love" for the benevolent. But Hutcheson, Reid points out,
says next to nothing about this latter state, never specifying whether
it includes moral propositional content. By explicitly specifying that
the outputs of the moral sense have moral propositional
content--indeed, a wide range of such contents--Reid takes
himself to have identified more accurately the character of its
outputs.



Let us pull these strands of argument together. Both Hutcheson and
Reid, we've seen, maintain that we come equipped with a moral
sense that bears certain resemblances to external sense. The Reidian
moral sense differs in two important respects, however, from the
Hutchesonian one. First, the outputs of the Reidian moral sense
include not only moral conceptions, but also full-blooded moral
beliefs with moral propositional content. (Reid, incidentally,
understood Hume to deny that moral judgments have moral propositional
content; for his attack on this view, see EAP V.vii and Cuneo 2004).
These moral beliefs themselves concern not only general moral truths,
such as the moral first principles, but also particular ones, such as
that this particular person's behavior merits approbation.



Second, we have seen that Reid reverses the order of explanation
between sentiment and moral judgment. In the paradigmatic case, moral
judgments elicit moral sentiments, not vice-versa. Although Reid
reverses Hutcheson's order of explanation claim, he still thinks
of a range of particular moral judgments as being cases of moral
perception. His basic approach is to claim that, in moral perception,
it is not sentiments that function as signs of moral properties.
Rather, it is the behavior and countenance of agents that play this
role. Roughly, the guiding idea is that moral properties of a certain
range attach to the mental states of agents such as their beliefs,
desires, and intentions. For example, the property *being kind*
can attach to an agent's intention to perform a certain act.
These mental states and their properties manifest themselves in the
behavior and countenance of agents. Ordinary mature agents are so
constituted that, when all goes well, upon becoming aware of the
behavior and countenance of these agents, this awareness
non-inferentially evokes in us the conception and belief of those
agents that they have properties such as *being kind*,
*deceitful*, *faithful*, and so forth. In this regard,
moral perception exhibits the same fundamental structure as our
perception of what Reid calls visible figure, such as an
object's length and height (see Cuneo 2003, 2006, Kroeker 2010,
Copenhaver 2014). In both cases, features of our environment function
as signs for a given quality, these signs being such as to
non-inferentially produce conception and belief. Here is how Reid
himself puts the point:



> 
> 
> Intelligence, design, and skill, are not objects of the external
> senses, nor can we be conscious of them in any person but
> ourselves....
> 
> 
> 
> A man's wisdom is known to us only by the signs of it in his
> conduct; his eloquence by the signs of it in his speech. In the same
> manner we judge of his virtue, of his fortitude, and of all his
> talents and qualities of mind.
> 
> 
> 
> Yet it is to be observed, that we judge of men's talents with as
> little doubt or hesitation as we judge of the immediate objects of
> sense.
> 
> 
> 
> ... We perceive one man to be open, another cunning; one to be
> ignorant, another very knowing; one to be slow of understanding,
> another quick. Every man forms such judgments of those he converses
> with; and the common affairs of life depend upon such judgments. We
> can as little avoid them as we can avoid seeing what is before our
> eyes.
> 
> 
> 
> From this it appears, that it is no less part of the human
> constitution, to judge of men's characters, and of their
> intellectual powers, from the signs of them in their actions and
> discourse, than to judge of corporeal objects by our senses. (EIP
> VI.vi: 503-4)
> 
> 
> 



It is Reid's view, then, that we can apprehend both the external
world and moral reality. He also holds that the beliefs formed on the
basis of these apprehensions are generally in good epistemic order.
So, in the case of our perception of external objects, Reid rejects
skepticism. Admittedly, Reid says, we may lack a complete explanation
of how we become aware of external reality. But this, says Reid, is no
reason to doubt that we can in fact apprehend it.



In fact, Reid claims, there are powerful reasons to reject skepticism
about external sense. For consider our indigenous or
"original" epistemic faculties such as memory,
introspection, reasoning, and perception. The outputs of these
faculties include judgments of various sorts--judgments about
what happened, what one is feeling, what to conclude given one's
evidence, and so forth. The practices of forming these judgments are
socially well-established over time. Indeed, they are so deeply
entrenched that engaging in them is, for all practical purposes,
inescapable; we cannot avoid forming memory judgments, introspective
judgments, perceptual judgments, and so forth. Moreover, we have
sophisticated methods of evaluating judgments made in these domains,
including ways of checking their reliability and the appeal to experts
of various sorts. Finally, many of the judgments made in these domains
are not subject to systemic disagreement among competent participants.
By and large, our judgments about the external world, for example,
converge.



Should we trust the deliverance of indigenous faculties of this sort?
In one of his better known dialectal maneuvers, Reid claims that we
should. For, Reid says, our situation is this. If we didn't
trust any of our indigenous faculties, we would face wholesale
skepticism. Our most basic processes of reasoning would be rationally
undercut, for we could not trust their deliverances. If we trust only
some but not all of our original faculties, then Reid claims we are
being arbitrarily partial. Given that these faculties exhibit similar
features, what reason could we have--at least at the outset of
theorizing--for trusting one but not the other? In a well-known
passage, Reid puts the point like this:



> 
> Reason, says the sceptic, is the only judge of truth, and you ought to
> throw off every opinion and every belief that is not grounded on
> reason. Why, Sir, should I believe the faculty of reason more than
> that of perception; they came both out of the same shop, and were made
> by the same artist; and if he puts one piece of false ware into my
> hands, what should hinder him from putting another? (IHM VI.xx: 169)
> 



Reid continues in this vein, noting that trusting our indigenous
faculties does not imply that we must suppose that they operate
flawlessly:



> 
> There is no more reason to account our senses fallacious, than our
> reason, our memory, or any other faculty of judging which nature hath
> given us. They are all limited and imperfect.... We are liable to
> error and wrong judgment in the use of them all; but as little in the
> informations of sense as in the deductions of reasoning. (EIP II.xxii:
> 251-52; for discussion, see Greco 2002 and 2004)
> 


### 4.2 Reid's defense of the reliability of the moral sense



In *Essays on the Active Powers*, Reid extends this line of
argument to the moral sense. The fact that we have no well-worked out
theory of how we form moral judgments does not itself rationally
undercut the epistemic status of these judgments (see EAP V.ii:
282-83). More importantly, the moral sense, Reid argues, is also
indigenous. All normal human beings raised in a normal environment
have it. Moreover, its outputs include judgments of various
sorts--judgments about what is wrong, right, approbation-worthy,
and so forth. The practice of forming moral judgments is, furthermore,
socially well-established over time. In fact, it is so deeply
entrenched that it is, for all practical purposes, inescapable; try as
we might, we cannot avoid forming moral judgments. We also have
sophisticated methods of evaluating moral judgments, such as appeals
to what we today would call reflective equilibrium (see EAP
III.iii.vi). Finally, many moral judgments--in particular, those
that concern the first principles--are not subject to systemic
disagreement among competent participants. By and large, in
Reid's view, our judgments about these principles converge (see
EAP III.iii.vi; for discussion, see Cuneo 2011b, 2011c and Levy 1999.
Davis 2006 and 2010 explore Reid's treatment of moral
disagreement).



Given all this, Reid contends that we should reject moral skepticism.
At the outset of inquiry, the deliverances of the moral faculty, like
the deliverances of our other indigenous cognitive faculties, deserve
an innocent until proven guilty status. Unlike Ross after him, Reid
seems to think that our beliefs about not only moral first principles
but also particular cases can count as instances of knowledge.



To this point, we have seen important respects in which Reid's
account of the moral sense both articulates with and deviates from
Hutcheson's. On the one hand, Reid is, like Hutcheson, concerned
to distance his view from the rationalists, who come very close to
characterizing moral knowledge as a species of ordinary theoretical
knowledge such as that achieved in mathematics. On the other, Reid
also wants to correct certain deficiencies in the sentimentalist
program, such as the tendency to drive a sharp wedge between reason
and "sense" and to think of the deliverances of the moral
sense as mere feelings. This allows Reid to defend the claim that the
moral sense is reliable in a perfectly straightforward sense.



Still, while Reid wishes to emphasize that the moral sense issues in
bona fide moral judgments, he also emphasizes that it issues in more
than mere moral judgments. Reid writes: "Our moral judgments are
not, like those we form in speculative matters, dry and unaffecting,
but from their nature, are necessarily accompanied with affections and
feelings ..." (EAP III.iii.vii: 180). Reid calls the
complex state that combines moral judgment, affection, and feeling
"moral approbation."



Moral approbation, then, comprises three elements: moral judgment,
affection, and feeling. Reid is clear that the moral judgments in
question are not general ones that concern the first principles of
morals, but particular judgments that concern whether someone has
behaved well or badly or exemplifies a virtue or vice. The affections
that accompany them are, in turn, dispositions "to do good or
hurt to others," which have a *de re* structure since
they have "persons, and not things" [i.e., propositions]
as their immediate object (EAP III.iii.iv: 107). Finally, Reid accepts
a minimalist account of the feelings that comprise moral approbation.
Feelings such as pleasure and pain, in Reid's view, have no
intentional object; they are not about anything. Rather, they are, as
it were, adverbial modifiers of mental states and events: one esteems
another pleasurably or disapproves of another painfully. By
distinguishing approbation from feeling, Reid clearly rejects the
position according to which (what we today would call) desires are to
be identified with feelings of one or another sort.



It is not difficult to discern the theoretical work that this account
of moral approbation is supposed to do for Reid. Under a natural
reading, in both the *Treatise* and the second
*Enquiry*, Hume charged rational intuitionists with having no
account of why moral judgments, which are the output of reason, should
have such an intimate connection with motivation. Reid's answer
to this challenge is to "go nativist": We are so
constituted that when we judge that, say, an action is unjust, we are
moved to action. That the moral sense should yield both judgments and
motivational states is built into its functional profile or design
plan. By emphasizing that this is how things go in the moral realm,
Reid takes himself to employ a strategy he has used elsewhere in his
elaboration of our perception of the external world.



Recall in this regard Reid's account of tactile perception. In
the case of tactile perception, Reid says that given certain
experiential inputs, such as the pressure sensations evoked upon
touching a table, we form judgments about the hardness of the table.
The pressure sensations function as signs of the table's
hardness, which immediately evoke the judgment in question. According
to this account, there are no mental images or "ideas"
from which we infer the hardness of the table. Likewise, in the moral
case, we are presented with various kinds of experiential inputs such
as the behavior and countenance of agents. These experiential inputs
function as signs, immediately evoking in us moral judgments of
various sorts. When all goes well, these judgments, in turn, yield
affection and feelings of various sorts. Once again, there are no
ideas from which we infer moral judgments and the process of judgment
formation is itself noninferential. By emphasizing the similarities
between these two cases, we have seen that Reid takes himself to
defend an account of moral perception. It is an account, in
Reid's view, which blends together the most promising features
of both the rationalist and sentimentalist traditions (see Cuneo
2007a, forthcoming b). For it implies both that moral judgments
express genuine moral propositional content and that these judgments
bear an intimate connection with moral motivation.


## 5. Conclusion



Reid's view is a version of agency-centered ethical
intuitionism. The view is agency-centered because Reid develops his
account of moral motives in light of his broadly agent causal account
of agency and regulation account of autonomy, according to which our
rational nature consists in our ability to regulate our conduct by
appeal to the rational principles of action. This account of moral
motives, we have seen, borrows a great deal from the rationalists. The
moral first principles, says Reid, are self-evident necessary truths
which are knowable to a person with a sound understanding, a decent
moral education, and not in the grip of distorting influences. Reid,
however, was no ideologue, and freely borrowed from sentimentalists
such as Hutcheson. In particular, he borrows from the sentimentalists
the conceptuality of the moral sense, which figures so importantly in
his work. The idea that the moral sense is at once an
information-processing system whose deliverances are affective states
that move us to action, we've seen, resembles closely what
figures such as Hutcheson claim. Finally, we have also seen that, at
various points, Reid's thought coincides with Kant's. This
is especially evident when one considers Reid's regulation
account of autonomy and his defense of what Darwall calls the
second-person standpoint.



Rather few contemporary philosophers could accept all of Reid's
central claims--agent causation, teleological accounts of action,
and occasionalism not being the dominant views of our day. Still, for
those who resonate with a broadly realist version of ethical
non-naturalism with emphases similar to Kant's, Reid's
view is intriguing. Its resources remain to be mined.