“The subject of these Essays is man,” Kames declared (p. 229), which subject involved a vindication of those principles that were at once the laws of our own nature and the laws of a universal system to which human nature belonged. To this end, the Essays is an attack on skepticism in both morality and epistemology. Part I concerns the principles and foundations of morality and justice, while Part II centers on questions of metaphysics and epistemology. No narrow specialist, Kames critically engaged theological rationalists, Lockean epistemology, Humean skepticism, and moral-sense theory and drew upon fields as diverse as medicine, theology, philosophy, aesthetics, and epistemology. In so doing, he addressed a number of interrelated themes, including moral sense, justice, selfhood and identity, the veracity of the senses, and the existence of the Deity. The result is to answer skepticism with a deistic defense of commonsense notions of morality and epistemology.
Morality and Justice
By far the lengthiest essay concerns “The Principles and Foundations of Morality” that are rooted in our very nature. In seeking to “restore morality to its original simplicity and authority” (p. 24), Kames criticizes both sides of the selfish versus social debate. Against the “selfish system”—the egoistic moral psychology associated with Hobbes and Mandeville—Kames supports Shaftesbury’s and Hutcheson’s argument that man is in herently social with a natural inclination toward benevolence. But while accepting a natural, perceptual moral faculty, he believed that something more than an instinctive orientation toward the good was required to make morality law-like. Using Butler’s notion that reflective conscience adjudicates between self-interest and benevolence, Kames argues that Hutcheson leaves too much to benevolence without adequate foundation for the duties necessary to justice. As Adam Smith put it, citing Kames as “an author of very great and original genius,” the Essays insist on “that remarkable distinction between justice and all other social virtues.”11
As a central concept in natural law, justice figures prominently in the Essays. Justice is “that moral virtue which guards the persons, the property, and the reputation of individuals, and gives authority to promises and covenants” (p. 46). Not only is justice a primary virtue, the sense of justice(and of injustice) is one of the strongest inclinations in human nature. For Kames, one of the most troubling aspects of Humean skepticism is its denial of justice as a natural principle. In the Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume had undermined a basic premise of natural law by arguing that justice is an artificial, not a natural, virtue.12 Hume did not mean that justice is unnatural or incompatible with human nature but rather that the sense of justice is not instinctive; justice arises from conventions that are themselves the products of complex social and historical relations. To Kames, this made justice too historically contingent to serve as an objective and authoritative arbiter of human conduct. Kames insisted that Hume’s conventionalist account of the origins of justice had got it backward: it is not society which gives rise to justice, but justice which gives rise to society. In the important Scottish divide between historicist and objectivist ideas of justice, this was forceful advocacy for the latter.
Liberty and Necessity
In December 1778, Kames wrote to his printer William Smellie to press for a new edition of the Essays:
I am informed from several hands that no subject at present employs more the thoughts and pens of the learned than that of Liberty and Necessity, which Dr. Priestley has revived and makes a great flourish about. Is not this then the proper time for the Essays on Morality and Natural Religion, in which Liberty and Necessity is handled with great precision? You have been calling for it for two years past; and I intimated to you some time ago that I was ready, having laboured upon it all the last vacation. If you delay this opportunity, you may happen not to find another so proper.13
As Kames knew very well, not all contemporaries agreed that he had handled liberty and necessity “with great precision.” With the first edition of Essays, he entered the eighteenth-century version of a debate going back to the ancient Stoics: if the universe is governed by necessary laws, to what extent are human actions free? And Kames’s treatment of liberty and necessity was as singular in Scottish moral theory as that of justice and morality was main stream. His attempt to reconcile moral agency with universal laws was so controversial that he narrowly escaped heresy charges before the Scottish presbytery; he “was scarcely warm in his judge’s seat when he became subject to attacks from the zealots in the Church of Scotland.”14
The essay on liberty and necessity views man as a necessary agent. Kames was committed to the doctrine that every part of the universe(both physical and moral) must be governed by the Deity in accordance with causal laws that are “fixed and immutable” (p. 120), but admitted that this involved “a labyrinth of doubts and difficulties” (p. 99). In the material world there is no contingency, all is governed by an omniscient and omnipotent Deity. In the human world, however, this lack of contingency “does not appear so clearly,” for “man is the actor here” and man is “endued with will, and he acts from choice” (p. 100). But if every action is directed by immutable laws and final causes, how can man act out of choice? In seeking to resolve the dilemma between determinism and free will, Kames hit upon a radical solution: the Deity had implanted a “deceitful feeling of liberty.”
However, if the feeling of liberty was delusive, how could a person be held accountable for actions that were not in fact free? Kames distinguished between the philosophical truth of final causes and the everyday truth (ultimately based on deception) that there is a distinction between “things necessary and things contingent.” He offered this analogy:“ the precise time and manner of each man’s death” is “determined by a train of preceding causes” but we do not act upon this principle; rather we behave as though the time of death were contingent, subject to actions such as “caution against accidents, due use of exercise, medicine, &c.”15 Likewise, though our actions are ultimately governed by final causes, we do and must behave as though they were subject to choice and contingency.
For many contemporaries it was a dangerous line of argument. Not surprisingly, some Scottish clergy reacted vehemently against depicting the Deity as a deceiver and claiming that denial of free will conformed to orthodox Calvinist predestinarianism. Kames’s unorthodox views inspired the opprobrium of George Anderson, an evangelical minister of the Church of Scotland who launched a campaign, not only against Kames but also against Hume. Writing to his friend Allan Ramsay in 1752, Hume informed him that “Anderson, the godly, spiteful, pious, splenetic, charitable, unrelenting, meek, persecuting, Christian, inhuman, peace-making, furious Anderson, is at present very hot in pursuit of Lord Kames.”16 In An Estimate of the Profit and Loss of Religion, Personally and publicly stated: Illustrated with reference to Essays on Morality and Natural Religion (1753), Anderson urged the Church of Scotland to excommunicate public teachers of atheism and infidelity, such as Kames and Hume. Another minister, John Bonar, entered the fray with a pamphlet addressed to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, in which he accused Kames of arguing that “since man is thus necessarily determined in all his actions, and can have nothing more than a deceitful feeling of liberty, [there] can be no sin or moral evil in the world.”17
Kames responded with a pamphlet (possibly coauthored by the moderate minister Hugh Blair) which he appended to the second and third editions of Essays. He managed to emerge relatively unscathed, the Moderate wing of the Church of Scotland voting against excommunication. Still, in the 1758 edition, Kames felt compelled to tone down his statements concerning the deceptive feeling of liberty. In the final edition of 1779, he removed the language of deceit altogether, though without abandoning the argument concerning necessary agency.
Since one of the issues at the heart of the controversy was that of moral agency, it should be noted that Kames also revised another essay that took up this theme.