Hume’s Position Considered for the Third Time

The effect of Hume’s attack on reason is that he propounds a subjective rather than objective moral theory. If reason be impotent, if ultimate desires be not open to a reason-based assessment, if moral distinctions be not based solely on reason, then what is more likely, the objectivity or subjectivity of ethics? I carefully try to pose this question in a way that mimics Hume’s and my inclinations, which are simply to look at the causal evidence and to seek the most likely explanation.

Hume’s areasonable moral theory comes down firmly on the side of subjectivism, of there being no mind-independent values, of values being contingent upon the way humans happen to be. He begins with psychology and from this base offers an explanation of why humans make moral distinctions and how those distinctions have come to be what they are. Basic psychological factors and existing material circumstances shape moral standards and the process of ethical evaluation. The former, being at least partially variable, depend upon the particular evaluator and so are contingent and subjective. Change them and moral values, we learn from experience, will also change. They are linked causally to moral values. But any actual uniformities of psychological characteristics there might be throughout a society — say as regards benevolence, selfishness, cruelty, or ambition — are purely contingent, however unlikely it is that change might now occur. Final explanation of moral distinctions (e.g. why sexism is generally considered unacceptable) depends, for Hume, on observable facts — facts about creatures with given dispositions and feelings in a given world where the given is not necessarily given.

The most fundamental psychological fact about humans for Hume is the impotence and limitations of reason. From this it follows that underlying all moral distinctions are non-rational feelings, passions, desires and preferences. These too are contingent in theory, however widespread in practice. Nor can they be rationally evaluated. Reason cannot evaluate desires as ends.

Merely to assert, in opposition to this Humean position, some such view as ‘Ends can be rationally analysed, though a person must want to be rational’ requires that some definition of ‘rational’ be given — above and beyond the two-part Humean conception of reason I have detailed already. Otherwise such a response reduces to saying a person will better predict the future if he possesses causal reason (unobjectionable) or to the hidden claim that a person must want to have those desires (like wanting happiness, say) that almost all other humans have.

The result of all this, as can easily be guessed, is a moral theory that rejects mind-independent or objective right and wrong and settles, with no small amount of irony, for the relativity of values. The best that can be achieved are inter-subjective standards linked to natural (and sometimes uniform) dispositions and to the conventional process which produces rules out of self-interest, limited benevolence and the contingent fact that humans can and do experience the feelings of others in attenuated form (a sort of emotional resonance). The rest of this chapter and the one following will fill in this outline of Hume’s positive moral theory and consider subjective moral theories generally. In the chapter after that I shall go on to look at Hume’s genetic explanation of specific virtues (especially those connected to law).

Hume begins his positive case⁴ in Book III i 2 of the Treatise, in the section headed ‘Moral distinctions deriv’d from a moral sense.’ This heading for Section 2 is misleading in so far as the phrase ‘moral sense’ is ambiguous and might be taken as suggesting the existence of a sort of sensor picking up or tuning into real moral relations of some primary quality out in the world. Quite clearly that brand of intuitionist moral theory is rejected by Hume. According to him, moral qualities and distinctions do not exist in the world but are the result of a person’s subjective responses to non-moral, causal data. As Hume says in beginning section 2:

Thus the course of the argument leads us to conclude, that since vice and virtue are not discoverable merely by reason, or the comparison of ideas, it must be by means of some impression or sentiment they occasion, that we are able to mark the difference betwixt them.

In other words, evaluations of vice and of virtue, moral distinctions, include a core element of feeling or sentiment. It is a matter of having certain sentiments or feeling certain types of approval pleasures and disapproval uneasinesses. And it is not necessary to mimic Hume’s reliance on the Theory of Ideas, as I stressed in the first chapter, to accept this main point. With broad and narrow reason being incapable of ‘discovering’ moral relations and, though Hume of course did not discuss them, with the implausibility of intuitionism and normative realism, moral distinctions must be traceable to the assessing person. Some feeling, sentiment or areasonable response in that person is required. Conduct deemed virtuous is linked to an agreeable or pleasurable response in that assessing person,⁶ though by no means all agreeable or pleasurable responses in an assessor indicate virtue. Similarly vice is linked to an uneasy or disagreeable response. Thus moral distinctions necessarily include, “... a pleasure or uneasiness of a particular kind.... To have the sense of virtue, is nothing but to feel a satisfaction of a particular kind from the contemplation of a character. The very feeling constitutes our praise or admiration.”⁷ By moral sense Hume means felt moral sentiments.⁸

And as I have just indicated, it is not any exciter of pleasure or satisfaction which Hume says can be called ‘virtuous’. For example, a chocolate bar that gives pleasure does not have virtue ascribed to it; nor do well-tuned, high performance automobiles, high technology spacecraft, or, Hume’s own examples, good musical compositions or good bottles of wine.⁹ Inanimate objects may excite sensations of pleasure but they cannot excite the particular type of pleasurable sensation which virtue (and of course vice) excites because virtue is in, or attributed to, a particular kind of exciter.

Nor is every sentiment of pleasure or pain, which arises from characters and actions, of that peculiar kind, which makes us praise or condemn. The good qualities of an enemy are hurtful to us; but may still command our esteem and respect. "Tis only when a character is considered in general, without reference to our particular interest, that it causes such a feeling or sentiment, as denominates it morally good or evil. ‘Tis true, those sentiments, from interest and morals, are apt to be confounded, and naturally run into one another. It seldom happens, that we do not think an enemy vicious, and can distinguish betwixt his opposition to our interest and real villainy or baseness. But this hinders not, but that sentiments are, in themselves, distinct; and a man of temper and judgment may preserve himself from these illusions.¹²

Finally, Hume indicates¹³ that vice and virtue are related to the four indirect passions of pride and humility, love and hatred, discussed by him in the first two Parts of Book II.¹⁴ Like those four indirect passions, vice and virtue must be in relation to oneself or another person and excite pleasure or uneasiness.

And that is that. In fewer than four pages at the start of Book III i 2 Hume has told us that moral distinctions are the sentiments felt on regarding qualities of character (or action or mind) of people from a disinterested point of view. Virtue gives a certain satisfaction; vice a certain uneasiness. Hume then rhetorically asks whether such sentiments can all be instinctive, whether all our notions of morals can be founded on primary impulses.¹⁶ Such a method of explaining all virtues and duties would explain nothing at all and would seem absurd, as Hume recognises. Nor can virtue and vice be linked to the natural and unnatural respectively. Virtue and vice are both natural in the sense opposed to the miraculous; vice is perhaps more natural than virtue in the sense of what is common and usual; and both virtue and vice are equally natural and unnatural in the sense opposed to what is artificial.

This brings Hume back to his main point. When people distinguish virtue from vice, right from wrong, rectitude from depravity, they are merely having different feelings or sentiments about the virtuous act and the vicious act. There are no “incomprehensible relations and qualities”¹⁷ out in nature or in our imaginations that make the distinction for us. There are only feelings of approval or disapproval on learning facts and consequences about characters and actions. This, according to Hume, “reduces us to this simple question, Why any action or sentiment upon the general view or survey, gives a certain satisfaction or uneasiness.As Mackie notes,¹⁹ Hume is in effect saying that moral questions are psychological and sociological in nature. Why and how do people approve and disapprove as they do?

The answers Hume gives to this last question, and how an interpersonal system of sentiments regarding actions, characters and beliefs can grow up, will bear directly on the Humean legal theory I hope to set out. Nevertheless I postpone discussion of Hume’s account of how various virtues and core morality arise out of one’s own feelings, awareness of others’ feelings, efforts at adopting a steady and general viewpoint, and instinctual tendencies and dispositions, until the next two chapters. I also put aside, until Part B of this book, issues of legal theory which follow from that Humean account. For the remainder of this chapter 1 return to Hume’s basic conclusion — that the fact of the matter about morality is that people have various sentiments — to consider it in greater detail.

At this point it might be useful or helpful to clarify, or re­clarify, some terminology. 1 have used, and will use, the terms ‘objectivism’ or ‘moral objectivism’ or ‘moral realism’ to represent the views that there are in fact objective, mind-independent values and have concentrated on those in which reason is relied on to make ultimate moral distinctions. ‘Moral scepticism’ then represents the view that, in fact, there are no such objective, mind-independent values. This scepticism is not a first-order scepticism about the content of morality (e.g. that all moral judgements are to be rejected or that liberal values are evil) but rather a second-order or higher level scepticism about the status of moral evaluations — that in making first-order evaluations no ‘real’, ‘true’, mind-independent values are being discovered.

A consequence of ‘moral scepticism’ is that values are ineluctably linked to evaluating people, and so 1 have also termed that view ‘subjectivism’ as well. I will continue to use ‘moral scepticism’ and ‘subjectivism’ interchangeably but stress here that in my usage both refer to the status of moral values, in fact, and in no way refer to anything to do with the meaning of moral utterances. That is a separate matter to which I come shortly. I likewise postpone discussion of the reply that mind-dependent values, those linked ineluctably to evaluating people, can also be real and that the place to seek objectivity is in our human natures, not ‘out there’. Suffice it for now to concede that any set of values widely held in a community is obviously real — as in actually felt or followed or of influence. (Afterall, a community of moral sceptics with rules against theft would have real values.) But such really experienced values, however widespread, need not be of any non-contingent status. And values that are merely contingently held or adopted lack the external or non-subjective purchase which moral objectivism seeks. The issue between objectivist and sceptic on this reply is whether the goods-for- humans can ever be said to be more than contingent, whether they can be severed from the way people happen to be constructed (even if it is 99.99% of people who, in some respects, are so constructed).²⁰ Of course if someone is prepared to talk about goods-for-humans in a contingent, empirical, Humean sense, and not make claims beyond what is observed — hence always being limited by the degree of uniformity actually observed — then I believe this sort of reply is completely in accord with the moral scepticism I am defending.

One final word on terminology. As Hume’s positive moral theory is grounded in the sentiments of approval people happen to have, I will occasionally use ‘sentimentalism’ as synonymous with ‘scepticism’ and ‘subjectivism’.

Those stipulations made, a major difficulty in the way of understanding Humean moral theory is that Hume leaves much in his positive case indeterminate and this can allow scepticism or subjectivism to be made to appear implausible, at least when it is presented solely as the theory that morality is the mere expression or reporting of feelings that actions and characters happen to arouse in assessors. Hume’s convention-based explanation of the origin of morality, to be considered in the next two chapters, restores that plausibility in so far as morality is considered as a social phenomenon which imposes constraints on members. Conventions can develop, Hume says, in such a way as to bring people what they want (i.e. satisfy their preferences and respond to their sentiments) without anyone planning the development of the convention for such a purpose. However sentiment-centred moral theories still seem implausible when measured against what most people mean when they utter moral statements. ‘Apartheid is wrong.’ ‘Equal pay for women is just.’ ‘Slavery was despicable.’ All of these, I think, are generally meant to convey more than a subjective feeling; the wrongness is usually believed to be independent of the belief; indeed such evaluations are generally believed to represent something closer to eternal truths than subjective feelings. To offer a plausible subjectivist moral theory then, this threshold issue of the meaning of moral statements must be raised despite the fact that Hume himself shows almost no interest in questions of meaning.²¹ To do this I will leave Hume briefly and consider modem subjectivist ethics and its critique. I will then return to Hume and his positive moral case to give a fuller picture and to consider the canvass he paints at its broadest. That should set the scene for a consideration in the two chapters to come of his sociological, psychological and evolutionary explanation of the origins of morality.

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