Philosophy 433
History of Ethics
Darwall
Winter 2008
HUME
I
I Actions and passions
neither in
accord with nor contrary to reason.
David Hume is often praised as the greatest philosopher ever to
write in
English. In addition to his
philosophical works, including most prominently, A Treatise of
Human Nature
(1739,40), Hume published essays on many
topics, and
wrote a History of England of several volumes which was the
standard
English history for a very long time.
An aim of
Hume’s in the Treatise is to discover the foundation of "moral
distinctions." He is famous for
arguing that morality cannot derive from reason. Before
we consider his arguments for this
view we need, first, to consider his arguments in Part III, Section III
of Book
II for the proposition that reason cannot provide any motive for action.
Let us
begin with Hume's first paragraph:
"Nothing
is more usual in philosophy, and even in common life, than to talk of
the combat
of passion and reason, to give the preference to reason, and to assert
that men
are only so far virtuous as they conform themselves to its dictates. Every rational creature, 'tis said, is oblig'd to regulate his actions by reason; and
if any other
motive or principle challenge the direction of his conduct, he ought to
oppose
it, 'till it be entirely subdu'd, or at
last brought
to a conformity with that superior principle." (413/265) [Query: WHO DOES IT SOUND LIKE HUME IS DESCRIBING?]
Notice
first that Hume identifies reason with the understanding, and defines
it as including
reasonings of two sorts--demonstrative and
probabilistic [notice the affinities to Hobbes ('reckoning') and
Hutcheson, and
compare with
Crudely
put, Hume's picture is this. Through
reason we can only infer beliefs about the way things are.
But whether we are moved by these beliefs
depends on whether we have desires to which these beliefs are relevant. We cannot be moved by beliefs directly. For
example, if I want a new winter coat at a reasonable price, I may be
moved by
the belief (which we may suppose that I acquire by reasoning from my
experience) that I can get such a coat from the
As it turns out, this picture is not wholly Hume's. For he explicitly says that some beliefs are such that if we come to have them, we cannot help but be given desires which motivate. And so these beliefs motivate, even if at one remove. "'Tis obvious, that when we have the prospect of pain or pleasure from any object, we feel a consequent emotion of aversion or propensity, and are carry'd to avoid or embrace what will give us this uneasiness or satisfaction." (414/266) What should we say about this apparent exception?
Hume has another argument for holding that neither actions or passions can be contrary to reason. According to Hume's definition of reason, something can be contrary to reason only if it can be false, or mistakenly inferred. But, he says, neither actions nor passions can be contrary to reason in this sense since they aren't even the sort of thing which can be false (or inferred). Something can be false only if it has a "representative quality," i.e., if it purports to represent reality in some way, and if it represents falsely. But passions and actions have no such quality--each is an "original existence" (415/266) and "compleat in themselves" (458/295). Therefore, they can neither be false, nor mistakenly inferred. Therefore, they cannot be contrary to reason.
We should note here that Hume is really arguing for two different theses which he tends not to separate: (a) passions cannot be contrary to reason in the sense that they can never have opposing motive force, because reason can never motivate by itself; (b) passions and actions cannot be contrary to reason in the sense that reason cannot criticize passions and actions. Strictly speaking, reason can only criticize beliefs and patterns of thought leading to beliefs, viz., if a belief is false or mistakenly inferred. It is important to keep these claims separate, even if Hume tends to run them together. [Be prepared, by the way, for a similar ambiguity in Hume's claim in Book III that moral distinctions cannot derive from reason. Sometimes he means that reason cannot, by itself, discover moral distinctions. Sometimes he means that moral distinctions cannot be based on whether actions or passions are in accord with or contrary to reason (in the second sense).]
One way Hume puts his second claim is that actions and passions cannot be, in themselves, either reasonable or unreasonable. (e.g., 458/295) There is an extended sense in which we may call a passion unreasonable if it meets either of two conditions: (a) if the passion "is founded on the supposition of the existence of objects which really do not exist," or (b) "when in exerting any passion in action, we chuse means insufficient for the design'd end, and deceive ourselves in our judgment of causes and effects." In either of these cases we may call the passion unreasonable, but "properly speaking" it is the belief that is unreasonable, not the passion.
Assuming no mistaken beliefs, "'Tis
not contrary to reason . . . former than the latter." [Query:
compare this passage with 414/266 where Hume says that beliefs
about the
prospect of pain and pleasure unfailingly give rise to passions. Is there any tension between them?]
II. Moral distinctions not derived from reason. Hume makes use of these claims in Part I, Section I of Book III, in which he aims to show that "moral distinctions" are "not deriv'd from reason." But just as we had to be careful last time to distinguish two distinct senses in which Hume was arguing that reason could not oppose passion, so this time we will need to attend to two different things that Hume tends to run together in arguing that moral distinctions cannot derive from reason. Sometimes what he is claiming is that an action or passion cannot be morally bad in virtue of being contrary to reason. At other points the thesis he has in mind is that no moral proposition can be discovered by reason. We should note that these are strictly independent theses. It could be false that, say, if an act is wrong that is because the act is contrary to reason or unreasonable and still be true that reason can discover the truth of the proposition that it is wrong. It would, of course, then be true that a person would be acting contrary to a moral injunction whose truth could be grasped by reason. In that sense he would be acting contrary to reason. But it would still not necessarily be true that what made his so acting wrong would be that he was acting contrary to reason. On the contrary, he would be acting contrary to reason because of the possibility of grasping the independent fact that his act was wrong.
Hume was
not making a simple confusion in running these two together. Many rationalists who had argued that reason
could discover moral truth had also held that moral truth depends on
reason. Thus, the great early 17th C
natural law theorist, Hugo Grotius, had argued that reason can know the
natural
law and that the natural law expressed dictates of reason itself. And rationalist contemporaries of Hume's in
We can deal
pretty quickly with Hume's arguments that moral distinctions cannot be
based on
rational ones, that is on some kind of
falsehood or
error.
A. Hume's first argument is simply
a repetition
of his argument from Book II that
no passion (and, now,
no action)
can be contrary to reason because only something which
is capable of being
true or false
can accord with, or be contrary to, reason. (458/295)
B. He then goes on to point out
that, while
there are two extended senses in which we can call an action or passion
unreasonable, neither of these seem to be related to whether it is
laudable or
blameworthy. Thus, a passion may be said
to be unreasonable if it is based on a mistaken belief about its object
(say,
about whether it exists). Or an action
may be said to be unreasonable if it derives from a mistaken belief
about what
means there are to accomplish various ends.
[Of course, Hume's prefers to say that in these cases it is
really the
basis belief, and not the consequent passion or action, which is
strictly speaking
unreasonable.] But in neither case are
we likely to hold that these sorts of unreasonableness are any basis
for
holding a passion or action to be morally bad:
"these errors are so far from being the source of all immorality, that they are commonly very innocent, and draw no manner of guilt upon the person who is so unfortunate as to fall into them." (459/296)
Additionally,
he observes that if immorality derives from unreasonableness, then it
should
attach as much to judgments "concerning an apple" as much as one
concerning "a kingdom."
C. He finally considers the possibility that actions become morally criticizable by virtue of bringing about unreasonable beliefs as effects. (461/296) One may well wonder why he sees fit even to consider this possibility, but he takes this view to have been held by a writer "who has had the good fortune to obtain some reputation," viz., William Wollaston. In fact, this was not Wollaston's view. He held that actions express beliefs, and that when they express false beliefs they are wrong by virtue of that. So, he thought, when someone lies, in addition to the propositions she asserts, she also implicitly asserts that these propositions are true, that she believes them to be true, and so on. Because these implied beliefs are false, her action is wrong. Or a thief, in stealing someone else's property, implicitly asserts that the property belongs to him (the thief). Because this is false, the action is wrong.
Now Hume
does not argue against these claims of Wollaston's. Instead, he argues against the thesis that an
action cannot be wrong by virtue of creating false beliefs as a
consequence. Although Hume's example of "a
person,
who thro' a window sees any lewd behaviour of mind with my neighbour's
wife", and who thereby sees something wrong, although hardly by virtue
of
having a false belief, is arguably more titillating, I confess to being
partial
to the example he mentions in 462n/297n of "squint-sighted persons"
who are hardly immoral by virtue of appearing to address one person
when in
fact they are addressing another. Those
of you who have had the pleasure of wondering whom I was calling on
when you
had your hand in the air may appreciate why this is so.
In any case, we need not bother much with the
possibility of an action or passion being wrong by virtue of being
contrary to
reason given what Hume is willing to countenance as ways in which
something may
be contrary to reason. If reason simply
is "the discovery of truth or falshood,"
then he must be right. But is this
indeed the way we should think of reason?
Here we should think back to
III. The argument from motivation. ar the most influential of Hume's arguments for the claim that morality cannot derive from reason depends on his thesis that morality is inherently motivating in a way that no state deriving from reason, no belief, can possibly be. Reason can never motivate, by itself, whereas morality is, Hume seems to say, intrinsically motivating, at least to some degree.
Now, while this idea has been extremely influential, it is also pretty murky, and hard to state precisely. At the end of the last notes, I noted that Hume's evidence for his claim, "that men are often govern'd by their duties, and are deter'd from some actions by the opinion of injustice, and impell'd to others by that of obligation," seems fully consistent with there being nothing intrinsically motivating either in moral convictions or judgments, or in morality itself. Nonetheless, Hume is usually taken to be arguing that moral judgments are intrinsically motivating. So understood, he is taken to argue somewhat as follows:
(1) The judgment that some act is
wrong, or that
some passion is vicious, is intrinsically motivating in the sense that
a person
so judges only if she is motivated (or would be under certain
conditions)
against the action or passion to some degree.
(2) Reason can only lead us to
beliefs that
such-and-such is the case, and no such belief is intrinsically
motivating in
this sense.
(3) Therefore, no moral judgment
can derive from
reason.
Although
Hume doesn't draw any further conclusions, Humean philosophers have
drawn such
further conclusions as
(3)' Therefore,
no moral
judgment is a belief.
(3)'' No
moral judgment
can be true or false.
CRITICALLY
EVALUATE THESE ARGUMENTS
While this
is the usual way of understanding Hume, he rarely expresses himself in
terms
that suggest (1). He is as likely to
say, somewhat cryptically, that "morals" or "the distinction
betwixt moral good and evil" can themselves influence conduct. Note the following:
"If
morality had naturally no influence on the passions . . .
" [he is suggesting it does] (457/294)
"morality . . . 'tis supposed to
influence our passions and
actions, and to go beyond the calm and indolent judgments of the
understanding." (457/294)
"morals, therefore, have an influence
on the actions and affections."
(457/294)
"morals excite passions, and produce
or prevent actions"
(457/294)
AND, in the
passage where he is arguing that actions and passions cannot be
contrary to
reason in the other sense, he throws in:
"as reason can never immediately
prevent or produce any
action by contradicting or approving of it, it cannot be the source of
the
distinction betwixt moral good and evil, which are found to have that
influence." (458/295)
"The
merit or demerit of actions frequently contradict, and sometimes controul our natural propensities.
But reason has no such influence. Moral
distinctions, therefore, are not the
offspring of reason. Reason is wholly
inactive, and can never be the source of so active a principle as
conscience,
or a sense of morals." (458/295)
Note how in
the very same passage here Hume says both that "the merit or demerit"
of actions can itself influence, and that the influence derives from
the
"sense of morals."
WHAT DOES
HE MEAN?
We can
actually get some idea of how his thought is moving here by looking at
another
argument he gives for why moral distinction cannot derive from reason. This is after he has drawn a contrast between
demonstrative reason, which can lead us to knowledge about the
relations between
ideas, and probabilistic reason, which leads us to knowledge of matters
of
fact. He describe
an example in an arresting way. The sort
of things Hume says about this example (at 468/301), and across the
page in his
famous "Is/Ought Passage" (469/302) have led his readers to suppose
him to be drawing a contrast between matters of fact, on the one hand,
and
matters of value, on the other--between 'is''s
and 'ought''s--the thought being that
reason can only enable us
to discover facts, not values--'is''s, not 'ought''s. Whether
that is so or not, consider what he says on 468.
"Take
any action allow'd to be vicious: wilful murder, for
instance. Examine it in all lights, and
see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you
call
vice. In which-ever way you take it, you
find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the
case. The vice entirely escapes you, as
long as you consider the object."
Now what is
the thought here? I think it is
something like this. Whenever we evaluate
something, we do so on the basis of its
features, on
the "matter[s] of fact in the case."
But precisely because our evaluation is of the object, and based
on its
features, what value we take the object to have cannot itself be one of
the
object's features. Since its value rests
on the matters of facts in the case, it cannot itself be another matter
of fact
in the case. Through our use of reason
we can inform ourselves about the object of evaluation, about its
features and
the facts of the case. But this is all
reason can do; it cannot additionally inform us of the object's value,
or of a
passion's morality, because that is not itself a feature of the object
or a
matter of fact of which we can be informed by reason.
But now
notice Hume's suggestion about where we can look to find the
viciousness of,
say, murder:
"You
can never find it, till you turn your reflexion
into
your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises
in you,
towards this action. Here is a matter of
fact; but 'tis the object of feeling, not of reason.
It lies in yourself,
not in the object." (468-9/301)
Notice how
Hume seems to say that the vice itself is in the spectator--it is his
disapprobation. This is paradoxical, and
not his most
considered way of representing his views, but it may help to explain
why he
both says that moral distinctions and the "sense of morals" are
motivating. It may be that, when he
writes these things, he is thinking of the moral distinctions as
existing by
way of the sentiments aroused in a spectator.
Thus:
"Nothing
can be more real, or concern us more than our own sentiments of
pleasure and
uneasiness; and if these be favourable to
virtue, and
unfavourable to vice, no more can be
requisite to the
regulation of our conduct and behaviour." (469/302)
[N.B. as well, Hume's comparison of vice and
virtue to
"sounds, colours, heat and cold, which,
according to modern philosophy, are not qualities in objects, but
perceptions in
the mind." (469/301)