f) A Summary

Hume’s attack on rationalist ethics and his own sentiment-based moral subjectivism or moral scepticism need to be buttressed with a causal explanation of what supports and sustains a system of constraints on action.

For moral scepticism to be more plausible in its own right, rather than merely as some least bad alternative to a discredited moral realism, an account has to be offered both of certain practices and certain sentiments. Given that no actions are objectively or mind-independently right, an explanation is needed for the existence of certain action-guiding and action-restraining standards that do influence actions. Why actions in accord with those standards are generally approved of then also needs to be explained. Hume offers just such explanations in terms of convention¹³⁵ and sympathy, using the basic virtue of justice to illustrate the explanation. The relation of core practices — like abiding by rules of stable possession — to a wider, more fully developed moral system then also becomes clearer. The former are based on the experienced advantages of aid to others being tied closely to reciprocity. ³⁶ Thus rules do not rest on anything as implausible or incoherent as an explicitly agreed, rationally motivated social contract but on conformity to practices which are seen to be mutually beneficial and which raise expectations of compliance. The core standards or rules are well-explained in Hume’s conventionalist terms involving a very gradual re-direction of self-interest. As I have argued above, this explanation can be coherent and consistent with the Humean view of the scope and powers of human reason.

However the lynch-pin of any convention is reciprocity. In a broader-based social grouping the reciprocal nature of the rules’ obligations are frequently and easily lost sight of.¹³⁷ Any system supported only by re-directed self-interest might be in jeopardy.

Hume, though, was well aware that morality consisted not only in the action-restraining (and of course action-guiding) standards but also in the attendant sentiments in favour of the standards. Any more fully developed moral system seems to have these annexed approval and disapproval sentiments. They are a part of moral thought and speech. Indeed it is these veiy sentiments that Hume argues do not have any objective status or are not determined by any mind-independent criteria or logically necessary relations. These are the areasonable feelings which distinguish right from wrong, virtue from vice. It is these feelings or sentiments which supervene on the observed facts and which, as discussed in the second and third chapters, lie at the heart of Hume’s anti-cognitivism. Hume explains these subjective sentiments in psychological terms as a function of sympathy — sympathy with the feelings and expectations of others. I think that Mackie improves on Hume by adapting Hume’s own sociological account of the basic moral practices to explain the moral sentiments. Hence Mackie offers an explanation which also includes a conventionalist, sociological component. Approval and disapproval sentiments are re-inforced and weakened by the perceived sentiments of others and by the general standards of what is to be approved and disapproved that have emerged in the group. Indeed this, rather than sympathy, seems to be the main explanation of adopting the unbiased or disinterested vantage. Once having emerged, such standards foster sentiments which appear or seem to the experiencer to be as mindindependent and non-contingent as the natural, observable features of the world. It is this perceived objective or categorical or mindindependent quality of moral sentiments that facilitates their communication and which, when the contingent but widespread desire to abide by what is objectively right is added, provides a spur to seek impartiality.

This supplement to the Humean account of approval does not eliminate the need for emotional resonance, the tendency or disposition to feel what others seem to be feeling, as part of a causal explanation of the concomitant sentiments which reinforce and encourage basic moral practices.

Without the capacity to sympathize, Hume’s conventionalist explanation would not be able to elucidate how expectations and even sentiments themselves are communicated. In fact it would seem that Humean style conventions could not arise without sympathy. And so if Hume be correct, and moral practices and sentiments do not reflect objective values, then morality — at least as a more fully developed system which includes sentiments supporting the system — is as contingent as the principle of sympathy.

This does not mean that the principle of sympathy must be universally present in all human breasts. A fairly widespread capacity to feel what others feel would amply suffice. The odd misfit could easily be tolerated without endangering the convention. And as an empirical matter it does seem that occasional people are devoid of most traces of sympathy. For such ‘psychopaths’ Hume says we can only feel pity as they will never experience the pleasures of society.¹³⁸ But this is part of a realistic recognition of the heterogeneity of the mass of individual human beings, diversities of desire, inclination and taste as well as of receptiveness to the feelings of others, which a moral system serves partly to correct.

So a moral sceptic like Hume, having offered an account, in natural terms, of the forces that create, re-create, support and modify a system of morality, is in a stronger position to go back and say again (as at the end of chapter three above), that morality rests on feeling not reason. Moral scepticism has been made more likely and convincing with this natural explanation, an explanation pointing to morality’s function as an attempted solution to the partial conflict situations in which human beings naturally, and continually, find themselves. A moral system of constraints on action and attendant sentiments tries to counteract the centrifugal forces resulting from the natural facts of human nature’s limited benevolence and self-interest and of the scarcity of goods and opportunities in relation to wants and desires.

Seen in this way it becomes obvious that morality socializes desire, not reason.¹³⁹ It does not really matter if actual moral systems were created partly or largely by force. These systems continue because they offer inter-subjective standards and perspectives which create moral desires whose mind-independent feel or objective quality takes on a life of its own thereby serving to entrench those same standards. However, there are, in reality, no objective, mindindependent values and standards and so one can choose ‘not to be moral’ when moral and non-moral desires clash. The usefulness of any morality can always be weighed afresh. But I leave discussion of this and other ramifications of my Humean moral theory until the next chapter.

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Source: Allan James. A Sceptical Theory of Morality and Law. Peter Lang,1998. — 277 p.. 1998

f) A Summary

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