 This, therefore, is an exegetical puzzle.  However, progress may be made by reconsidering Hutcheson’s passage from the Essay. He writes that objects, etc.,“obtain the Name of Good” given their capacity to cause pleasurable sensations. Notice the word “obtain”. We might read Hutcheson as saying not that the property of goodness is the tendency to cause feelings of approbation or feelings of pleasure, but rather the property of goodness is one to which we have access given our feelings of pleasure, just in the sense that beauty is a property to which we have access given our feelings of pleasure in contemplation of the beautiful object. Our feelings of pleasure, in this way, serve to fix the reference of the term “goodness”, but do not constitute the referent of that term. In other words, moral goodness just is the property of XYZ, but we “apprehend” that property given our affective responses and the operation of the moral sense. For Hutcheson, the pleasure generated by the moral sense operates in an analogous way that the description of an object operates in a causal theory of reference. “The author of The Shining” fixes the reference of “Stephen King”, but the property of being Stephen King is not the property of being the author of The Shining. Similarly, that which has a tendency to cause approbation fixes the reference of moral goodness, but being the property of moral goodness is not the same as being the disposition to cause approbation. For Hutcheson, the property is independent.