Common Sense Nation. Robert Curry

mind is like a sheet of blank paper. Experience writes on that blank sheet by means of sensations of pain and pleasure.

      It is important for us to understand that Locke was not himself a skeptic; he believed that there are things that people know and he believed that there really is right and wrong. However, David Hume and others showed that Locke’s account of the mind left the door wide open for skeptical challenges. So Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid set out to provide what was missing.

      Francis Hutcheson set himself the task of finding a philosophical foundation for moral judgments. In doing so, he put Scottish Enlightenment philosophy in motion, and at the same time, put moral philosophy at the center of Scottish thought. He argued for the existence of the moral sense, relying on the analogy of our external senses, just as Jefferson, himself relying on Hutcheson, did in the earlier quote:

      “Man was destined for society . . . He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong merely relative to this. This sense is as much a part of his nature as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality.”

      Hutcheson believed that Locke’s account, based as it was only on pleasure and pain, left convention as the only possible foundation of morality.