The son of a Presbyterian minister, Hutcheson studied philosophy, classics, and theology at the University of Glasgow (1710–16) and then founded a private academy in Dublin in 1719. In 1729 he returned to Glasgow as professor of moral philosophy, a position he held until his death.

Hutcheson was licensed as a preacher in 1719 by Irish Presbyterians in Ulster, but in 1738 the Glasgow presbytery challenged his belief that people can have a knowledge of good and evil without, and prior to, a knowledge of God. His standing as a popular preacher was undiminished, however, and the celebrated Scottish philosopher David Hume (Hume, David) sought his opinion of the rough draft of the section “Of Human Morals” in Hume's Treatise of Human Nature.

Hutcheson's ethical theory was propounded in his Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), in An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations upon the Moral Sense (1728), and in the posthumous System of Moral Philosophy, 2 vol. (1755). In his view, besides his five external senses, man has a variety of internal senses, including a sense of beauty, of morality, of honour, and of the ridiculous. Of these, Hutcheson considered the moral sense to be the most important. He believed that it is implanted in man and pronounces instinctively and immediately on the character of actions and affections, approving those that are virtuous and disapproving those that are vicious. Hutcheson's moral criterion was whether or not an act tends to promote the general welfare of mankind. He thus anticipated the Utilitarianism of the English thinker Jeremy Bentham, even to his use of the phrase “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” Hutcheson was also influential as a logician and theorist of human knowledge.