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This Liberty Fund publication of Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria is a parallel edition of the English and Latin versions of a book designed by Hutcheson for use in the classroom. General Editor Knud Haakonssen remarks that “Hutcheson’s Institutio was written as a textbook for university students and it therefore covers a curriculum which has an institutional background in his own university, Glasgow. This was a curriculum crucially influenced by Hutcheson’s predecessor Gershom Carmichael, and at its center was modern natural jurisprudence as systematized by Grotius, Pufendorf, and others. . . . The Institutio is the first major [published] attempt by Hutcheson to deal with natural law on his own terms. . . . It therefore encapsulates the axis of natural law and Scottish Enlightenment ideas, which so many other thinkers, including Adam Smith, worked with in their different ways. It is of great significance that this work issued from the class in which Smith sat as a student.”
Editor Luigi Turco comments that “the aim of the text was twofold: on one hand, to put forward an optimistic view of God, human nature, and the harmony of the universe; on the other hand, to provide students with the knowledge of natural and civil law required by the university curriculum. Hutcheson starts from Pufendorf’s De officio hominis et civis (itself an abridgment of his De jure naturae et gentium)—the text that was most widely read within Protestant universities—but modifies its moral foundations.”

"Of the Law of Nature.

I. That we may shew how all the several parts of life may be brought into a conformity to nature, and the better discern the several Rights and Duties of Mankind, we shall premise the more general Doctrine in Morals, explaining some pretty complex notions {and terms constantly occurring}; and this is “the subject of this and the two following chapters.”
In the preceeding book we shewed, how from the very structure of our nature we derived our first notions of right and wrong{, virtuous and vitious, in our affections and actions}: and that it was then right and just that any Person should act, possess, or demand from others{, in a certain manner}, “when his doing so tended either directly to the common interest of all, or to the interest of {some part or} some individual, without occasioning any detriment to others.” And hence we say in such cases that a man has a right thus to act, possess or demand: and whoever would obstruct or hinder him thus to act or possess, or would not comply with such demand, is said to do an injury or wrong."

Francis Hutcheson

Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) was an Irish philosopher, a crucial link between the continental European natural law tradition and the emerging Scottish Enlightenment.

Hence, he is a pivotal figure in the Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics series. A contemporary of Lord Kames and George Turnbull, an acquaintance of David Hume, and the teacher of Adam Smith, Hutcheson was arguably the leading figure in making Scotland distinctive within the general European Enlightenment.