 To this point, we have seen important respects in which Reid’s account of the moral sense both articulates with and deviates from Hutcheson’s. On the one hand, Reid is, like Hutcheson, concerned to distance his view from the rationalists, who come very close to characterizing moral knowledge as a species of ordinary theoretical knowledge such as that achieved in mathematics. On the other, Reid also wants to correct certain deficiencies in the sentimentalist program, such as the tendency to drive a sharp wedge between reason and “sense” and to think of the deliverances of the moral sense as mere feelings. This allows Reid to defend the claim that the moral sense is reliable in a perfectly straightforward sense.