This chapter argues that, contrary to a very widely held view, Reid’s express disagreement with Hume on the matter of morality cannot satisfactorily be pressed into the “realism versus sentimentalism” dichotomy. Hume is certainly a sentimentalist, but there is good reason to interpret Reid’s use of the analogy between moral sense and sense perception in a way that does not imply the existence of “real” moral properties. Reid makes judgment central to the analogy, and this gives the exercise of an intellectual “power” primacy over passive sensual experience. The analogy thus allows him to apply the concepts “true” and “false” to moral judgments, without any quasi-realist appeal to moral facts.
