 The pursuit of happiness was also an issue for British philosophers such as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, although it sometimes paled next to their interests in moral evaluation. Shaftesbury argued vehemently that “virtue and interest coincide,” because he maintained that happiness depends on a preponderance of pleasant affects, and the emotions carrying moral worth are themselves pleasant. To this end, he introduced a notion of the “economy” of the passions (Inquiry 198). Yet he had to argue the point, since he did not understand virtue primarily in terms of individual flourishing, but within an overall economy and balance of nature. Hutcheson also considered how the passions contribute or detract from our happiness. And like Shaftesbury, he speaks of our search for a “just Ballance and Oeconomy” (Essay 47), in which our passions and affections are properly governed, although he takes achieving such economy to be difficult. Hutcheson’s talk of “the government of the passions” (see Essay 66) thus looks a bit different from the command that the passions in general should be governed, a theme found in a number of sermons (see, e.g., Ayloffe, Clarke). Instead, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Hume incorporated the emotions into their efforts to explain how we make judgments of moral worth on the basis of our moral senses. It is our emotions that allow us to be responsive to the moral qualities we evaluate. For this reason, they may all seem committed to a ‘sentimentalist’ moral philosophy. Hutcheson and Hume did indeed oppose the moral ‘rationalists,’ arguing that there is no independent quality in actions or persons to which emotions are sensitive. But their position presupposes a very particular understanding of the nature of our senses and of the ontological status of the secondary qualities to which they are receptive. In contrast, Shaftesbury often suggests both that there are moral and aesthetic qualities intrinsic to the external world, and that we access those qualities through our emotions. On this view, our emotions, at least when functioning as they should, are simply our natural equipment for picking up salient features of the world.