e) A Summary

I conclude this first chapter now with a brief summary.

I have discussed Hume’s treatment of human reason in some detail because of its significance in what follows. Hume’s explanation of how and why humans make distinctions between those actions which are good and those which are bad closely corresponds to his explanation of how and why humans believe in the existence of an external, causal world.

What I wish to carry forward from Hume’s analysis of reason is threefold:

Firstly, his distinction between narrow and broad reason together with the assertion that, philosophically speaking, nothing else is properly called reason.

Secondly, his insistence that an underived preference is at the core of all action. Reason needs something to work on. Even the process and state of believing leads nowhere if I am completely indifferent to the object. Escaping from raw indifference is not a task which causal calculation or logic can ever perform.

Thirdly, on the un-Humean question of the evaluation of action, I accept the value of the Humean belief/desire dichotomy, subject to my comments in section c) above that such a bifurcation may be theoretical and instructive rather than practical or possible. With that caveat, 1 also say that, strictly speaking, only the belief component can be justified or evaluated in terms of reason. The desire component can be approved, and commonly this may done with labels such as ‘reasonable’, but the approval process in fact does not have to do with either broad or narrow reason (save in evaluating one desire as a means to another which process must end in an underived, areasonable desire).

But my acceptance of Hume’s assault on reason goes deeper than these. It also has to do with the spirit of Hume’s naturalism, his rejection of metaphysical capacities and of an exalted status for reason. Where a Kantian⁶⁵ posits and argues for the existence of certain capacities and abilities that any mind must have, a Humean calls for observation and experimentation⁶⁶ to see how matters happen to stand. And while there might be agreement between these two perspectives on how matters do in fact stand at one level, the flavour of the two approaches is completely different. Hume is not interested in absolute necessities, ultimate realities or a priori truths. Transcending experience is not his way of escaping from a quandary. Thus reason gets nothing more attributed to it than what can be observed. Yes humans are the most rational of known creatures because they are by far the most proficient graspers of internal logic and calculators of effect and cause.

Of course Hume offers his own explanations for the internal workings of the mind, as I have remarked earlier, in terms of the theory of ideas which occasionally leaves him tied in Gordian knots. But Hume’s naturalistic approach survives perfectly well with a more modem theory of human intelligence grafted on to it. And I can adopt Hume’s alternatives to reason — feeling, sentiment and passions — without accepting his atomistic and rather mechanistic ‘impressions-and-ideas-before-the-mind’ framework because feelings and sentiments for Hume are derived from, or are themselves, unanalysable impressions. ‘Feelings’, ‘sentiments’ or ‘passions’, in short, need not retain their Humean link to the theory of ideas. They will simply refer to areasonable human states of mind. This is deliberately meant to place them outside the boundaries within which broad and narrow reason lie. Whatever feelings, sentiments and passions are, they are not causal or demonstrative reasoning or solely the result of such reasoning. Nor need they be conceived in terms of impressions and ideas. They are simply those human responses which cannot be attributed to either type of Humean reason. On how such responses are actually generated, whether as a result of their comparative advantages over millions of years of evolutionary struggle or by social, cultural and economic imprinting or in purely computational terms from a program inherent in all carbon-based life or anyhow else, I will not in this book attempt to say. But I can and do accept a notion of feeling as distinct from reason, in much the way Hume did, and I do say such feelings and sentiments are theoretically open to explanation in terms of the day-to-day natural causal world (whether or not such a task is ultimately beyond the capacity of creatures such as humans). What is to be stressed is that such feelings, such passions, such desires, are distinct from reason.

A possible rejoinder to this chapter’s arguments would be to argue that, despite there being no necessary connection between humans and their values, there is some other aspect of human intelligence beyond the relation of ideas or the calculation of causes and effects which is worthy of the name ‘reason’ — hence Hume’s circumscription is deficient. But any such rejoinder, in my view, must begin by carefully distinguishing this ‘enriched, worthy reason’ from mere intuitionism, or be prepared to defend the latter as more enlightening than Hume’s conception of reason.

The next chapter considers this task, the general possibility of a reason-based morality.