A Summary

In this chapter I have followed Hume’s positive view about the making of moral evaluations that, ultimately, they result from subjective feelings or sentiments. The weakness of reason-based, objectivist alternatives like intuitionism and normative realism bolsters this positive Humean case.

This left me to consider the most plausible theory of meaning to append to that Humean case and finally to flesh out the positive case — particularly by examining the analogy to secondary qualities. With these various supports and qualifications to Hume’s moral theory I have arrived at a basic moral theory I support. It is areasonable, subjective, not revealed by ordinary moral speech, and has little to say about duty.

Yet a great deal is still missing. Explanation is needed for why people approve, and how they have come to approve, of the things of which they do approve. Answering this, why any action (or character) gives the particularly moral satisfaction of approval or uneasiness of disapproval, is overwhelmingly Hume’s main concern and I turn to it in the next two chapters.

However, there are other issues which are not, or perhaps cannot be, taken up by Hume. For instance, he does not tell us what characters and actions are virtuous and vicious. But then he cannot do this and be consistent with his position that virtue and vice are merely feelings and sentiments in the evaluator. There are no objective, mind-independent answers, whatever people might normally think.

Nor does Hume say much about the good life. He does note that it will vary greatly amongst individuals,¹⁰⁹ and that there are different goods for different people. But he is certainly in no position to adjudicate between ‘the good action’ and ‘the right action.’ Both, for him, are evaluations traceable to areasonable sentiments or desires. He cannot then take a Kantian or Nagelian line to the effect that there is an obligation to choose the moral over the good.¹¹⁰ The motive behind moral obligation, as I have said, reduces to self-hatred and one can always ‘choose’ to be amoral or immoral. In a powerful sense morality and duty are contingent for the Humean. People have the proclivities they have and all that Hume can say is how much he pities the psychopath who has no moral feelings at all.¹¹¹ It is simply a fact of a healthy society that most people are happier (therefore satisfy their own good) by being, on the whole, virtuous. That is, for most people the moral is generally part of the good. This tendency is increased as people, especially when young, can be indoctrinated towards ‘the right’ for the benefit of society. ¹² But for those lacking self-hatred (i.e. the motive behind a sense of duty) there is only the sort of obligation imposed by external standards (i.e. law) and sanctions. Some prudent free-riders will get caught (and being punished will incur a lowering of their happiness or the goods of their lives) and some will not.

Finally, 1 cannot conclude this chapter on Hume’s basic moral theory without commenting on his response to the absence of real, objective, mind-independent values and thus to the paradoxical nature of moral scepticism.