Hume’s Position Considered for the Final Time

The last section raised several matters which will be enlarged upon shortly in Part B. For now 1 leave consideration of legal theory until the second part of this book and finish this chapter, and indeed Part A, by attending to Hume’s unique, and to my taste attractive, response to his own scepticism.

Q. Are there objective, mind-independent values?

A. No. These sort of authoritative prescriptions are sought for in vain. Nor can reason discover values or by itself motivate action.

Q. Are all opinions then equally valid?

A. No. The feelings or sentiments of people are equally valid in having no propositional content but such sentiments supervene on reason’s calculation of consequences. And extrapolations of consequences can be and are right or wrong, more likely or less likely. That the natural, causal world exists, with its uniformity of like cause producing like effect, is a natural belief we cannot escape and anyway would not want to. There are external, imposed criteria for ‘what the case is’ as regards factual consequences. There is an externally imposed regularity, in other words, however much we humans might fdter and interpret it. All opinions therefore are not equally valid. Nor are opinions about value, to the extent their content is influenced by consequences.

Q. Still, it is not so easy to separate opinions about value into those two components. And your response leaves room for uncertainty and relativity does it not?

A. Yes, in two ways. Humans are limited in their ability to predict the effects of multiple causes and moreover, even where all the data are known or the consequences can be fully agreed, preferences and evaluations can and do differ. But merely reaching agreement on likely consequences is surprisingly rare. At least in this causal realm, though, we can say that reason is master and not to be under-estimated.⁴⁹

Q.

A. My philosophy is not paradoxical although human nature may be. People cannot help but feel they have free-will, that they have a continuing and distinct identity over time, that nature is uniform. If reason pretends to undermine these natural beliefs it is reason that is swept away. “Nature is obstinate, and will not quit the field, however strongly attack’d by reason.”⁵⁰ People are also born to judge. Reason, pointing to a second-order moral scepticism, may have some effect here in re-directing passions and evaluations. But that is all it can do. Any ‘discoveries’ reason may make, even about the absence of a rational foundation for some of our fundamental beliefs themselves, can change nothing⁵¹ if our sentiments remain unaltered. Were it otherwise, “reason would not be fully impoverished after all. It alone would have brought us to the final discovery of the ‘illusory’ character of our ways of thinking about the world”.⁵² Yet even here reason is impotent. “[W]e immediately and inevitably return to those same fundamental beliefs and reactions when we live our lives.”⁵³

Hume’s insight is to recognise the human response to this extreme scepticism, which is overwhelmingly — even for philosophers — not to be sceptical. Humans cannot be sceptical like this for any sustained period however inclined any one of them might be to speculation. Hume’s first step is to question our knowledge of the external world and his conclusion is that there are no reasons why similar effect should follow similar cause, no reason even to accept the existence of an external world or our own identity.

But within this naturalistic programme a second, derivative scepticism appears. For my purposes this latter manifestation is the more important scepticism for it is not a doubting about the possibility of basic knowledge about the external world and its regularities; rather it is a doubting that there can in fact be any kind of explanation outside of a naturalistic one.⁵⁷ It is a scepticism about ‘special’ explanations solely within a priori frameworks, be they religious, magical or moral. It is a scepticism of the elevated status such frameworks afford to humans’ place in the natural world, be it their capacities, conceptions or what constrains their actions. It is a scepticism fuelled not by forswearing the empirical evidence but on the contrary by relying only on that evidence. It is a scepticism which one can hold and live by and which leads directly to Hume’s sort of moral theory while at the same time enabling him provocatively to say:

But the life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.⁵⁸

This statement at first seems odd. Both the Treatise and Enquiries are studies of human nature; man is portrayed as central and significant.

To summarize, Hume’s positive response to nihilistic scepticism is not to try to disprove it but merely to shrug and rely on nature. This becomes the standard. Phenomena like politics, morality or religion get explained in naturalistic terms. Applying that standard Hume then weighs the powers of reason and the status of morality; he measures the plausibility of theistic religion; he comments on politics and pronounces on history. Of course the very act of remaining true to his naturalist programme and of rejecting transcendent qualities, goals and ends to history, intrinsic rationality, categorical imperatives or objective values is just another sort of scepticism. But it is neither a destructive nor an inhibiting variety.

To here in this book 1 have concentrated on propounding and defending a distinctively Humean morality. My starting point was an analysis and defence of Hume’s conception of human reason, both of the narrow, deductive and of the broad, causal varieties. In effect, Hume was attacking ‘enriched’ notions of reason that pretended to extend reason’s manifestations and powers beyond his own two-tiered conception. It was these very pretensions of reason that had firstly to be considered and repudiated because it is just such ‘enriched’ notions — those that include, for example, necessary relations and conceptions, or certain objective moral sentiments, within the allowable ambit of what is properly understood as reason and thus tied to truth — that lie at the heart of the moral realist’s case.⁶¹ On the contrary, Hume’s conclusions are that:

[R]cason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will.⁶²

Since reason alone can never produce any action, or give rise to volition, I infer, that the same faculty is as incapable of preventing volition, or of disputing the preference with any passion or emotion.⁶³

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.⁶⁴

So motives for action cannot be only beliefs.

The result of this sceptical thesis is the feeling-based, anti- cognitivist moral theory I have examined and attempted to improve upon thus far in the book. At its simplest that theory admits it is “... some sentiment... some internal taste or feeling... which distinguishes moral good and evil, and which embraces the one and rejects the other”. ⁷ Yet explanation of observed moral systems requires far more than a crude emotivism passing itself off as a least bad alternative to a discredited moral objectivism. A sociological as well as psychological explanation is needed to account for observed systems of values, the values of which prevailingly are believed to be, but are not, somehow objective and mind-independent. J have discussed and elaborated upon just such an explanation in chapter five.

From this conclusion, that there are no virtues or vices independent of the minds of people, it follows too that there are no ideal rational principles which are available to resolve conflicts of interest.

In the chapters that remain in this book I intend to shift my attention away from moral theory towards legal theory. Consequently I have placed what is to come in its own separate part. My goal is to build on the substantive moral theory I have so far defended. I hope to apply the foregoing conclusions and analyses to issues of jurisprudence: to build the core structure of a defensible theory of law which rests explicitly on, and is consistent with, my moral scepticism. In doing so I will continue to refer to a variety of Hume’s views and to weigh their ramifications. My approach in what remains will be to consider just two quite broad areas in legal theory: firstly, judicial interpretation and the separation of law and morals; secondly, rights and natural law. Each will warrant fairly lengthy discussions and I begin Part B with the former.