Adam Ferguson on Love, Self-Interest, and Pleasure

The tension between higher aspirations and self-interested pursuits—and indeed the role the moral sentiments (like love) play in resolving this tension—is a common theme in Ferguson’s Essay and much of the British moral sentimentalist tradition (e.g., Adam Smith and David Hume).

Here, we might read Ferguson against a nearby contemporary, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), who infamously argued that there was no difference between higher and lower pleasures. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) sums up Jeremy Bentham’s infamous position by the oft-remembered quip that, for Bentham, Push-pin (an old English children’s game) is as good as poetry.

Ferguson seems to fall squarely in-line with Mill insofar as he claims that love “carries the attention of the mind beyond itself,” which leads to a kind of pleasure qualitatively higher than pleasures derived from self-interest.