David Hume (1711–76) was born and died in Edinburgh, but travelled extensively in the middle part of his life. He is regarded by most as the greatest philosopher who wrote in English, and by many as one of the three or four most important philosophers of all time. Both through his writings and his personality he influenced many French philosophers of the Enlightenment, and philosophers such as Immanuel Kant in Germany. Books I (‘Of the Understanding’) and II (‘Of the Passions’) of his A Treatise of Human Nature were published in 1739 (when he was 28) and Book III (‘Of Morals’) was published a year later. In addition to the Treatise (as we shall abbreviate the title of this work), Hume’s philosophical writings include An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), as well as many other philosophical and literary essays. Especially important, and too controversial to be published in his lifetime, is The Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). In addition to his enormous philosophical output, during the 1750s Hume published a six-volume History of England, a work that had considerable popularity, contributing to Hume’s income and thereby to his independence.
In Hume’s Treatise – perhaps the most cited source of his moral views and the text for this chapter – one can isolate two aspects of his thought about morality. The first, sometimes thought of as a negative phase, offers a range of arguments aiming to show that morality could not be the product of reason. (See Treatise, III, I I.) However, though these arguments undoubtedly have a negative aspect, their upshot is an important positive thesis, one expressed by Hume in the often-cited words: ‘morality is more properly felt than judged of’.
The second phase in Hume’s thought builds on this claim, both defending it further and using it to construct a comprehensive picture of how human morality works. Hume’s negative contention, and the arguments used to support it, have had a huge influence on moral theorists. The constructive project, sometimes described as ‘moral naturalism’, has been no less influential, though its influence has been perhaps more subtle.
Hume’s views are not merely of historical interest: his ideas figure in many ways in contemporary work on morality, both within and outside philosophy. In studying Hume – in coming to understand both the negative and positive aspects of his thought – you are therefore engaged in moral philosophy itself, and not simply its history. Of course, as should be true of the study of any philosopher, you should aim to achieve an accurate understanding of Hume’s theses, while remaining critical of them.
A brief note here about the relationship between Hume’s Treatise and his An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals: as noted above, the latter was written some years after the Treatise, and Hume seems to have regarded it as his best work. There can be little doubt that it is more ‘literary’ than the Treatise – more polished and filled with rhetorical flourishes – but it lacks the directness and philosophical bite of the earlier work. Does it contain a substantially different account of morality? Some have taken the view that he merely softened the arguments and conclusions of the earlier work, so as to make An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals more acceptable to a public which had been somewhat scandalised by his youthful Treatise. This is an unresolved question in Humean scholarship, and if you want to delve more deeply into Hume’s views – though this is optional – I suggest you read An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals and decide for yourself, and I have included some selected references to that work below.
Primary texts
Two well-known editions are:
Selby-Bigge, L.A. (ed.) A Treatise of Human Nature, revised by P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) second edition [ISBN 9780198245889].
Norton, David Fate and Mary J. Norton (eds) A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford Philosophical Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000) [ISBN 9780198751724].
You can download the Treatise online from Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org). Though this is an older edition and out of copyright, it should serve for this course. Note that you can also download An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals from this same site.
To make your task easier, here are recommended selections from the Treatise most relevant to the course:
Book III, Part I, Sections I and II
Book III, Part II, Sections I, II, V, VI
Book III, Part III, Sections I, V, VI.
These are the core of Hume’s positive account of morality. It might be useful too to have a look at Book II (‘Of the Passions’). In particular:
Book II, Part I, Section I
Book II, Part III, Section III.
And here are some selections from An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals:
Sections I, II, III, V, IX
Appendix (all Sections).
Recommended essential reading
Árdal, Páll ‘Another Look at Hume’s Account of Moral Evaluation’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 15, 1977, pp. 405–21.
* Baier, Annette ‘Hume’s Account of Social Artifice — Its Origins and Originality’, Ethics, 98(4), 1988, pp.757–78.
Cohon, ‘Hume’s Moral Philosophy’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010 edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/hume-moral/
* Fricker, M. and S. Guttenplan Reading Ethics. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) [ISBN 9781405124737] Chapter 3, pp.144–61.
Gauthier, David ‘Artificial Virtues and the Sensible Knave’, Hume Studies, 18(2), 1992, pp.401–27.
Korsgaard, Christine ‘The General Point of View: Love and Moral Approval in Hume’s Ethics’, Hume Studies, 25, 1999, pp.3–41.
Mackie, J.L. Hume’s Moral Theory. (London: Routledge, 1980) [ISBN 0710005253].
* Stroud, Barry Hume. (London: Routledge, 1988) [ISBN 0415036879] Chapters 7–9. (Chapter 8 in the VLE.)
Sturgeon, Nicholas ‘Moral Skepticism and Moral Naturalism in Hume’s Treatise’, Hume Studies, 21, 2001, pp.3–83.
* Wiggins, David ‘A Sensible Subjectivism?’ in Needs, Values, Truth. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) third edition [ISBN 0198237197] pp.185–210.
Further reading
Blackburn, Simon How to Read Hume. (London: Granta, 2008) [ISBN 9781847080332].
Botros, Sophie Hume, Reason and Morality: A Legacy of Contradiction. (London and New York: Routledge, 2006) [ISBN 9780415331807].
Cohon, Rachel Hume’s Morality: Feeling and Fabrication. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) [ISBN 9780199268443].
Harrison, Jonathan Hume’s Theory of Justice. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981)
[ISBN 9780198246190].
Norton, David Fate and Jacqueline Taylor (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Hume. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) second edition [ISBN 9780521677349].
In the Treatise (cited in what follows as ‘T’), Hume presents a range of arguments purporting to show that our moral judgments are not based on our reasoning faculty, though two have garnered most of the attention. One depends on material Hume introduced in T, II, III, III, though the argument itself is in T, III, I, I, and one argument is very short and comes at the very end of T, III, I, I.
Understanding Hume’s arguments requires first that you be clear about what he means by ‘reason’ and ‘reasoning’. As he insisted in Book I of the Treatise, and repeated in Book III, reason is the faculty of the human mind responsible for whatever knowledge we come to have; it is what we might now call the ‘cognitive faculty’. I urge you to pay close attention to the rich detail of Hume’s account, but one can summarise it this way: reason produces knowledge, when it does, either by a comparison of ideas in the mind or by causal and other linkages among these ideas. The first is responsible for mathematical and logical knowledge, the second for our contingent knowledge about how the world works.
Insisting that these two sources of potential knowledge exhaust the possibilities, Hume sets out to show that moral judgments cannot arise from either of these sources, and hence that morality cannot be understood as the product of our cognitive faculty.
The more extensive of the arguments Hume gives for this conclusion depends on an interim conclusion he takes himself to have established in T, II, III, III, namely that knowledge and belief – the output of the cognitive faculty of reason – are not in themselves capable of serving as motives to action. As he often puts it, reason is ‘inert’, and one has to look towards another human faculty – the seat of our passions and desires – to find what Hume takes to be the springs of human action. Leaning on this conclusion, Hume argues in T, III, I, I that it follows from the fact that our moral judgments do move us to act that they cannot themselves be the products of reason. In fact, Hume thinks this conclusion follows in several different ways from what is essentially the same argumentative material. (A discussion of Hume’s texts and arguments is in Fricker and Guttenplan, 2009.)
The second argument is extremely short, and Hume presents it almost as an afterthought in his attack on the role of reason in morality. Hume begins by noting that the cognitive faculty of reason produces knowledge or belief about how things are. In shorthand, reason tells us things of the form: such-and-such is the case. But moral judgments, he notes, are not about what is the case, but about what ought to be the case, and Hume can see no way in which one could ever validly infer a judgement about what ought to be so from any number of premises, each telling us what is so.
Hume’s two arguments have had enormous influence on philosophical writing about morality, though both are controversial. Arguing as it does that reason is inert – that it cannot move us to action – the first of the arguments figures not only in moral theorising but also in the more general project of understanding human action. The second seems to turn on certain linguistic features of moral judgments. Discussion of this argument has served to focus attention on the role of language in moral judgment. Hume himself said little explicitly about this role. The literature on both of these arguments is extensive, but the items of reading mentioned above, and the further reading they suggest, should help you understand them and the consequences they have had for work in ethics.
Having established to his satisfaction that reason is not the source of morality, Hume, rather more positively, introduces his own proposal (in T, III, I, II) about the real source of our judgments about virtue and vice, and hence about morality itself. This short section repays careful study, not least because it lays out the basic agenda for the remainder of Book III.
Hume claims that moral judgments, in particular those concerning virtue and vice, arise from the special kind of pleasure or pain that is aroused in us by witnessing or even merely contemplating human actions. He writes:
An action or sentiment, or character is virtuous or vicious; why? Because its view causes a pleasure or uneasiness of a particular kind…We do not infer a character to be virtuous because it pleases: But in feeling that it pleases after such a particular manner, we in effect feel that it is virtuous.
In saying this, Hume is aligning his discussion of morality with his discussion of the passions in Book II of the Treatise. There Hume offers an account of how pleasure and pain are intricately connected with a whole range of human passions, emotions, desires, sentiments and feelings. However, the main thing to keep in focus is that all of these mental states are said by Hume to share a special feature. Whereas belief and knowledge are the products of reason – the products of our cognitive faculty – pain and pleasure, and the sentiments with which they are connected, are at least potentially motivational. Using a mechanistic metaphor Hume is fond of, they are the mainsprings of human activity, pushing us or inclining us to act in a way that cognition alone could never manage.
There are certain immediate problems with this identification of virtue with feelings of pain and pleasure. For example, lots of things that have nothing to do with morality give us pleasure and, no less problematically, our judgments about what are vicious or virtuous characters often do not correlate with the strength of our feelings of pleasure or uneasiness. Hume faces these problems, but you must decide whether what he says is adequate. Still, having laid out his positive proposal about the source of our moral judgments, Hume takes his task to be only beginning. It is not enough, he argues, simply to assume that every action or character we come across will be assessable as virtuous or vicious (or perhaps as neither) by the consultation of our feelings of particular pleasure or uneasiness in respect of each such action or character. He writes:
… it is absurd to imagine, that in every particular instance, these sentiments are produced by an original quality and primary constitution. For as the number of our duties is, in a manner, infinite, it is impossible that our original instincts should extend to each of them.
This short and highly original argument sets the stage for the positive account, one which will stay faithful to the idea that morality is fundamentally a matter of feelings, but will bring some order to these feelings.
Hume sees his task as describing in detail the basis on which our sentiments are founded. That is, he aims to discover the ‘general principles’ which govern the way in which our sentiments of pleasure and uneasiness are aroused by particular actions and characters. This sets the agenda of the positive phase of the Treatise, beginning at III, II, I. Fundamental to this task is Hume’s distinction between what he calls the natural and artificial virtues.
The natural virtues are those it is reasonable to think we possess as part of our innate constitution; they are integral to human nature. In respect of the little argument cited above, they are the limited class of duties which are accounted for by our ‘original instincts’. One example of this might be that of parents coming to the aid of their child. We have no trouble in seeing a disposition to act in this way as an original instinctive motive in human beings, and we have no trouble in further understanding that we might react with the appropriate kind of moral pleasure to those who display this disposition. In this way we can understand why there should be acts of parental concern – the motive to such acts is built into our natures – and we can understand why we regard the character trait which leads to such acts as virtuous – we are built so as to react in this way to a child being helped. But, as the passage cited above says, we cannot see all of morality as natural in this way: dispositions to behave morally are simply too varied for us plausibly to consider every one of them as innately given in our natures. For these – which Hume comes to describe as ‘artificial’ virtues – we must find some intelligible set of principles on which they are based. The basic principles themselves are natural – they are part of our innate endowment as human beings – but the virtues we come to recognise as built on these principles count for Hume as constructed, and in this sense, artificial.
Primary among the artificial virtues is justice – the disposition to honour obligations and refrain from usurping others’ property. In T, III, II, I Hume offers an argument meant to underpin his idea that at least some virtues must be artificial. This is the argument concerning the ‘circularity’ of thinking that the first motive to a virtuous act might be the recognition of the virtue such a motive would possess. Brief as it is, it is often considered difficult to grasp, and you should read it carefully. Aside from its intrinsic interest, it is an important first step for Hume’s thinking to distinguish between natural and artificial virtues. Once this step is appreciated, one can then more clearly see the problems which arise in connection with virtues like justice that Hume counts as artificial.
The following comparison of Hume’s understanding of the natural and artificial virtues displays those problems:
Natural virtues (e.g. helping your child)
|
|
Questions |
Answers |
What is our motive to undertake acts of this sort? |
It is in human nature. |
Why do we respond to them with moral pleasure? |
It is in human nature. |
Artificial virtues (e.g. justice) |
|
Questions |
Answers |
What is our motive to undertake acts of this sort? |
? |
Why do we respond to them with moral pleasure? |
? |
The very fact that there are two questions to be answered in respect of any virtue can be seen as a result of his circularity argument. Assuming that the answers he gives to these two questions in respect of the natural virtues is acceptable – and there are those who think this is far from clear – Hume thinks that there are real problems in trying to carry over these answers in respect of justice. (See T, III, III, I for more on natural virtues.) He writes:
… I suppose a person to have lent me a sum of money, on condition that it be restored in a few days; and also suppose, that after the expiration of the term agreed on, he demands the sum: I ask, What reason or motive have I to restore the money?
Given that we would be likely to accept that it would indeed be just to pay back the loan, Hume is here simply asking what motive would lead us to do this. In the pages that follow, he finds every answer to this question either too weak or downright implausible. He does make it clear that in our ‘civilized state’ – that is, after we have been trained in the ways of justice – we could provide some story about the motive. But his question is more fundamental: he is asking whether someone ‘in his rude and more natural condition’ would have the requisite motive, and he clearly thinks that the answer to this is problematic.
The second question in the table above asks not why someone would pay back the loan but rather why we, as witnesses, would find this discharge of an obligation morally pleasing. This is a more difficult question to appreciate, but here is one way. Suppose that the motive for paying back the loan is that the borrower is afraid of losing his reputation, or is simply afraid of harms that the lender is in a position to inflict (suppose that the lender has a gang of henchmen ready to pounce). Given that the moral pleasure we feel on seeing, for example, a parent helping a child is something quite specific to certain kinds of act – and Hume says, it is the very virtue itself – would it be plausible to imagine our having this kind of pleasure when we witness an act done out of self-interested concern for one’s own reputation or fear of bodily harm? Hume thinks not, and he sees the task ahead as finding plausible ways to answer the two queries in the above table.
At the very beginning of T, III, II, II Hume sets about answering these two queries. He begins by describing what he takes to be the origins of human society, and the constraints under which it came into being. He begins by noting that human beings have ‘numberless necessities’ and only ‘slender means’ of satisfying them when acting individually. He concludes: ‘It is by society alone, he is able to supply his defects and raise himself up to an equality with his fellow-creatures.’ While this is something that is clear enough to anyone who thinks the matter through, Hume also contends that mere thought would not suffice to establish the kind of social conventions governing justice and property rights needed to achieve this. Moreover, he cites a number of impulses that make for further difficulties: human beings are typically self-interested and when they do show other-directed interest, it is mostly to their family and friends. Neither of these makes it easy to see how a smoothly functioning society which puts common interest at its centre could be established.
The predicament that Hume imagines is richly described, and he makes it sound inescapable. But he does finally suggest a way in which self-interest can be overcome and social (and moral) conventions established. His opening gambit is expressed in this way: ‘There is no passion, therefore, capable of controlling the interested affection, but the very affection itself, by an alteration of its direction.’
The rest of the story comes in several stages that are intertwined in Hume’s text. Separating them and, in outline, it goes as follows:
It is important to note that the pleasure we feel in this context is not itself the motivation to adhere to the convention. The latter is down to oblique self-interest. But the pleasure is recognisably the same as that we feel in the case of natural virtues – through the mechanism of sympathy it is part of human nature – and that is enough to make adhering to the conventions of justice count as virtuous.
However, when the society grows and freeloaders become a possibility, the conventions of justice are kept in place – we come to have an instilled motive to abide by the convention – by a kind of training or socialisation that is attuned to the fact that we do get moral pleasure in the above way. Thus, though the moral pleasure we feel at others benefiting from adherence to the convention is not strong enough to guarantee adherence, it is part of the explanation of the establishment of the training we receive and which does provide a relevant and strong enough motive. The need for this process of socialisation is the reason Hume thinks justice an artificial virtue.
The story Hume tells is ingenious, but it is not without problems. Most of them centre on his account of artificial virtue, a crucial notion in his account. The first and main difficulty concerns the establishment of the training, the source of our motivation to behave according to the conventions of justice. One way to see this difficulty is to ask yourself what is the guarantee that the training will take the form it does? From the point of view of a reflective member of a large society, what would be best – most in such a person’s self-interest – would be if all the other members of the society acted in accordance with the instilled motive to justice. Assuming some degree of cunning and power, such a person would then be able pursue his or her self-interest outside of the agreement that bound the others. Admittedly, this is merely a hypothetical individual, but given that anyone could be such a person, how can we be sure that the training would take the form it does in the first place and would become established in the transition from small to large society? Or put another way: if you reflect on your own motives and come to see that your motive to justice is ‘artificial’ in the way Hume describes, what is to prevent you from thinking yourself not really obligated by it? Hume somehow thinks that the rather weak pleasure we feel when others benefit is enough to hold the agreement in place, even if it is not the motive for it. But couldn’t one recognise this pleasure, recognise too that one was only conditioned to act justly, but then even so pursue the stronger natural motive of self-interest? (You should read T, III, II, V in connection with this issue.)
Another problem concerns the plausibility of counting the sympathy-induced pleasure we feel at another’s benefit as of the same kind as the moral pleasure of a naturally virtuous act like helping one’s offspring. Remember that just acts produce their benefit by satisfying someone’s self-interest. While it might be plausible to think this affects bystanders positively, is it really plausible to think it leads them to feel moral pleasure? Think of hearing that someone has won the lottery: if we are not of an envious disposition, this might affect us positively, but we would not ordinarily think that what we felt was a peculiarly moral pleasure.
Aside from the issue of whether anything as complicated as human motivation and reaction is wholly ‘natural’, there are special problems with Hume’s account of moral sentiments. He urges us to see moral pleasure as special, just as the pleasure of wine differs from other sorts of pleasure. While we might agree with Hume here, we often think that the difference lies not in the nature of the feeling but in its object. Also, as Hume himself points out, moral sentiment can be weak or calm (imagine merely reading about some injustice that happened a long time ago) or strong (imagine someone cheating you out of your life savings). Yet even if you have been cheated in this way, you are unlikely to rank that injustice as greater than an unjust act such as some massacre of innocents that happened a long time ago. Our assessments of relative moral importance don’t seem to march in step with the strength of our feelings. As noted, Hume recognises these problems, but you have to decide whether he deals with them adequately.