The Search for a Disinterested Perspective

In this section I want to gather together the various strands already examined to see how they relate to the need for an impartial or unbiased or disinterested perspective. In other words I want to examine the critical transition from limited and partial sentiments to the general point of view.

The absence of any objective, mind-independent status or metaphysical correctness attaching to values and standards of behaviour appears to portend the twin spectres of nihilism and extreme relativity. What content can there be to moral standards if such canons are not ‘found’, not ‘discovered’?⁹¹ But this question, rhetorically raising the first spectre,⁹² conflates two sorts of nihilism. The first sort has to do with ‘finding’ and ‘discovering’ value — the suggestion being that no value-standards are true in any real or metaphysical or non-relative-to-people sense. The second sort has to do with the content of value-standards — it being suggested that no value-standards are of any use or function. Implicit in Hume’s moral theory (and made quite explicit by me) is a nihilism of the first sort. But Hume is certainly not a nihilist of the second sort. (He clearly thinks that sentiments of approval do exist and can lead to ‘good’ social consequences; it is some purported categorical quality attaching to values that he rejects.) Indeed there is not even a need to argue with value-nihilists of the second sort because their lives show that they do not believe what they assert.⁹³ Hume’s main concern is, again, with the how and why questions.

The second spectre has to do with whether the lack of a ‘real’, ‘true’, non-contingent status for values condemns all evaluations to being biased. Certainly if, as is being argued, there are no higher, objective, mind-independent standards and values then an objective perspective — one which corresponds to an actual, higher reality — is impossible. The best that can be achieved is an inter-subjective, relatively impartial perspective. And indeed this is just what Hume insists is a part of all moral evaluating. But as moral sentiments ultimately rest on sympathy, according to Hume, and sympathy is biased,¹⁰'’ how can this be?

It is essential at this point to follow Ardal in distinguishing between firstly, a causal explanation of how the sentiments or emotions of approval and disapproval emerge in human consciousness and secondly, an analysis or definition of those passions of approval and disapproval in simpler, constitutive terms.

Bearing this in mind, that Hume wants to explain how moral sentiments arise (not what such sentiments are, and certainly not to justify particular sorts of evaluations), we can return to our difficulty. Sympathy is a biased principle operating more powerfully the closer the agent feels the relation or resemblance of the creature sympathized with to be.¹⁰³ The issue of the possibility of the unbiasedness of approval and disapproval follows from this grounding of these sentiments in sympathy. And this issue is not independent of what the sentiments of approval and disapproval are meant to be.

But here, not for the first time, a degree of looseness and ambiguity in Hume’s language causes difficulties. At one point, for instance, virtue and vice are said by Hume to be any mental qualities that arouse the indirect passions of love or pride and hatred or humility respectively.¹⁰⁴ At another, virtue and vice are said to give rise to approbation or blame which are fainter versions of love and hatred and which require a general survey or view.¹⁰⁵ This apparent confusion, to my mind, is the result of Hume’s not being careful to qualify some sorts of virtue as specifically moral virtues.

Approval and disapproval can be distinguished from other kinds of love and hatred by describing the circumstances in which they arise, and in this case it would seem that the special circumstance is that they arise from objective reflection on the object in question... [T]hey are still a species of the class of passion we generally call love or hatred.¹⁰⁸

I dislike Ardal’s use of the term ‘objective’ to describe the perspective required for approving and disapproving. I feel that term suggests a sort of un-Humean moral realism. The connotation that I dislike is not so much an implied link to some ‘rationale attitude’ (because to me it is not clear what ‘rational’ is supposed to mean). Rather, it is the implication that there can be a non-subjective or pure or disembodied standpoint from which to value. In short, I doubt the coherence, strictly speaking, of the notion of an ‘objective’ valuing standpoint (though in an everyday sense the term is widespread and perfectly good). My preference is to describe approval and disapproval as taking place from an inter-subjective, unbiased, disinterested vantage. With that said, I am prepared to understand approval and disapproval sentiments as related species to love and hatred, both falling into the genus of the indirect passions. That is, I agree with Ardal that this is what Hume means by approval and disapproval. But that acceptance is merely one of meaning, of what we are to understand by ‘approval and disapproval sentiments.’ Accepting Hume’s definition, that ‘moral’ evaluations of approval and disapproval require an element of unbiasedness and inter­subjectivity, does not guarantee the possibility of such a vantage.

Hume himself gives little guidance on these how and why questions about the transition to a general and steady point of view save to tell us that adopting such a vantage is certainly possible and is an acquired habit. Ardal elaborates.¹⁰⁹ Of course many valuations feel and seem impartial, even what he terms ‘objective’. One can occasionally see, though, that it is love or hatred that is affecting the assessment, that without the relation to oneself the evaluation would be different. So the possibility of some impartiality at least seems borne out by experience. The appearance is of a struggle between passions and reason. However that is to mistake calm passions for reason."⁰ The differentiation between the calmness and violence of a passion is one based on emotional intensity and amounts simply to a generalisation, from experience, of the usual level of intensity of certain passions.¹¹¹ But a difference in emotional intensity is not equivalent to a difference in motivational force. A passion weak in motivating force is not necessarily a calm passion nor is a violent one necessarily a strong motivator. Thus a calm passion, of generally low intensity, can at times move one to act despite a conflicting violent passion. And this makes it seem to the agent that it is reason combatting passion.

However, and more pertinently, calmness or low emotional intensity is neither equivalent to nor the defining component of an impartial, unbiased, disinterested perspective. Many passions besides approval can be and are calm. Conversely, disapproval and approval are not always of low emotional intensity as, for example, the opposition to apartheid amongst many whites in Europe (some of whom at least would have been relatively disinterested) attests. It is, again, merely a ‘vulgar’ but observable generalisation to say, after noting that approval and disapproval are usually of lower intensity than love and hate, that approval and disapproval are calm passions.

That the motive to adopt an unbiased vantage is not reason but a passion must be Hume’s opinion if he is to maintain consistency.¹¹³ Reason, broad or narrow, is inert. In agreeing with Hume that the motive for finding a common point of view is a passion, though, one need not concur with him that sympathy provides a sufficient causal explanation of the moral sentiments that reinforce basic moral practices and make a moral system complete. It is true that sympathy, the principle that allows one agent to experience what appears to be the feelings of another, is a pre-requisite to the communication of sentiments and that without such communication expectations could probably not form by convention. They would then have to be explicitly stated or guessed at. But mere sympathy together with a preponderance of limited benevolence does not seem sufficient to explain how a system which modifies, amplifies and diminishes the communicated sentiments is maintained and facilitated. Hume’s argument, it will be recalled, is that approval is due to sympathy. We share the happiness of people affected by natural virtues which directly benefit those affected. More indirectly for justice and its ilk, we share the happiness of the public at large which is generally increased by artificial virtues, albeit that in specific instances those affected, and even the public, may not benefit. But although sympathy plays a role, I shall argue that it is only one necessary causal explanation; it is far from providing on its own a remotely convincing explication. Answering why we add the moral gloss to practices that arise from re-directed self-interest needs more.

Sympathy’s paucity of explanatory power becomes clearer when one focuses on the motive for adopting an unbiased perspective. With only the principle of sympathy on which to draw, all Ardal can say is that:

Experience teaches us that it is convenient to judge all objects from a common point of view, abstracting from the different locations in space and time, and from our personal interest.¹¹⁴

The motive for judging of things from a special point of view, distinguishing the subjective appearance from the objective reality, is simply convenience.

However this appeal to utility and experience (together with Hume’s previously mentioned reliance on habit) is hardly convincing when it depends solely, or largely, on sympathy. A fundamental property of sympathy, of feeling another’s feelings, is its biasedness. It is this quality more than anything else that throws the possibility of impartiality into question at the start. How is unbiased valuing, then, to arise out of biased valuing? //'the whole system-wide tendency to approve and disapprove were explained and supported only by sympathy then:

a) the useful, convenient advantages of the unbiased vantage would be difficult to perceive;

b) unbiasedness would be unlikely to have the chance to become firmly enough established actually to be useful;

c) there would seem to be too many forces in favour of partiality, were only the biased sharing of feelings at work, to produce passions (reason being inert) to overcome bias.

In addition there are two further difficulties in the way of understanding unbiased evaluation solely in terms of sympathy.¹¹⁶ Firstly, evaluation is, even for Hume, of character and disposition not of outcome. How can sympathy alone explain this? Secondly, if sympathy itself could lead to impartiality then Hume’s claims about the limited nature of benevolence would be mortally wounded. A sympathy that could alone achieve impartiality and disinterestedness would also require a more robust benevolence.

All these are serious objections to the sufficiency of sympathy as a causal explanation of moral sentiments and more particularly to its potential to account for disinterested evaluating. One possible response is to say that sympathy has to be regulated.¹¹⁷ The steady and general points of view arise because the effects of sympathy have been regulated. Charlotte Brown takes this line. She reads Hume as offering two regulative components of sympathy which make a general viewpoint possible. One is that a person’s character is to be surveyed from the perspective of his or her narrow circle, “the people with whom she regularly interacts”,¹¹⁸ or, perhaps, the typical point of view of those affected by her. The other is that we must rely on general rules which tell us the usual tendencies and consequences of particular traits. “We do not then respond sympathetically to the actual effects of a person’s character traits but rather to their usual tendencies.”¹¹⁹ The first, for Hume at any rate, applies to the natural virtues; the second to either. And once sympathy has been regulated by general rules and the evaluated person’s narrow circle, this response continues, the utility of adopting a general vantage will become clear. “Experience soon teaches us this method of correcting our sentiments, or at least, of correcting our language, where the sentiments are more stubborn and inalterable.”¹²⁰

Unfortunately this response does not really answer the question of what motivates us to adopt the impartial perspective. At best it changes the focus somewhat to the issue of what motivates a person to regulate sympathy (while opening up new issues such as whether regulated sympathy produces a different passion or feeling than raw sympathy). But how the transition is made from limited and partial sentiments to the general points of view remains opaque. Sympathy alone cannot seem to explain the transition.

Mackie provides greater insight.¹²¹ It is the categorical, objective quality or feel or appearance of approval and disapproval sentiments that helps to maintain and support the whole system of such sentiments. ‘Objectification’, the projecting out and spreading on to the natural world of subjective sentiments, causes the agent to feel as though and believe his evaluations are somehow as real as natural, observable features like trees or gravity. This perceived, but merely apparent, ‘realness’ or objectivity or mind-independence of evaluations leads normal language and thought to be in moral realist terms. In other words this (illusory) belief can be compared to the (usually true) beliefs discovered by causal reason. Either sort might guide or influence the volitions. And if this all be true then it seems to me a much easier task to begin to explain why the unbiased perspective is adopted. The motives to do so are still not provided by reason but, at least in part, by some inclination to evaluate from this ‘real’ (but in fact illusory) standpoint that is being perceived. Indeed a fuller explanation of those motives and the role of reason, the how and why questions about the transition, might well follow the pattern I traced in section b) above in explaining the adoption of justice.

Add to this the reinforcing pressures from any system which is reciprocal and the need for, or at least desirability of, an impartial vantage is stark.¹²² The advantages can be seen by looking at language where the differing speakers must use terms in more or less the same way whatever the individual relations.¹²³ Gradually experience clearly does teach us that an unbiased perspective is convenient, as Ardal argues.¹²⁴ However we cannot understand the adoption of that perspective when approval and disapproval sentiments are explained solely in terms of the biased principle of sympathy. That explanation is manifestly inadequate, and indeed obfuscating by presenting the question of impartiality in an almost logical (z.e. as a function of sympathy’s properties) rather than an empirical way.

From within any system it is natural for participants to believe and feel that what they call or think of as vicious or virtuous really, objectively is so and that the defining characteristic is (somehow) ‘out there’ not inside themselves.¹²⁵ So while any social system puts pressures on people to evaluate in roughly similar ways the ‘objectification’ of those values augments that tendency. We adopt a less subjective point of view not simply after experiencing its advantages in society but because we want to judge in accord with what we perceive has been externally mandated, be that mandate one to fulfil God’s commands, to abide by prescripts that give meaning to life, to follow nature’s laws, or something else that is seen to be in the evaluator’s interest. Within this explanatory framework we can understand the usefulness of the adoption of an inter-subjective, disinterested viewpoint. And we can see, retrospectively, ²⁶ the advantages such an impartial evaluative system has in reinforcing the basic reciprocal practices and encouraging virtuous conduct of both the artificial and natural varieties. Sympathy is a sine qua non of approval and disapproval yet the tendency of these sentiments to support the moral system also owes much to conventional and reciprocal pressures. Hume’s psychological explanation of the approving sentiments needs to be supplemented by a sociological explanation similar to the one he gave to account for the practices of the artificial virtues. How, without planning and without an instinctive desire to approve of ‘just’ acts, people living in a group can come to approve of ‘just’ acts because of the benefits, in the group living context, of doing so. Such a system of approval can give support to conduct well beyond what sympathy could offer while making clearer the motivating forces behind adopting a more disinterested perspective.

I have argued at some length that sympathy is an insufficient causal explanation of the approval and disapproval sentiments that tend to support a moral system. Instead reciprocal social pressures, which amplify and diminish these sentiments, together with the perceived objectivity and mind-independence of these projected sentiments, are also involved in supporting the system and facilitating the adoption of an inter-subjective viewpoint. Thus that second spectre of an extreme relativity is at least partially vanquished. And a great irony is that the perceived objectivity of moral evaluations is one of those very vanquishers that helps to further the move towards unbiasedness.¹²⁷

I want very briefly to consider the possible extent of impartiality before concluding this section. Hume does not directly raise this question although it is clear that he believes that no human can ever completely conquer, perhaps even feel himself to have conquered, partiality.¹²⁸ Hume’s view aside, I re-iterate that in the absence of a real, objective set of values there cannot be an objective, mind-independent perspective or vantage from which to evaluate. The purely impersonal viewpoint is an idealised fiction; it is a theoretical extension drawn from a composite of individual viewpoints much as a perfectly straight line or a point without length is an idealisation of what we actually find in experience. In the natural, causal world we all inhabit there are many ‘facts’, however much they be filtered and interpreted, which are independent of sensing minds. But this is not the case with values (if my Humean moral theory be correct) nor, more obviously still, with a completely neutral and real, objective evaluating vantage. Roderick Firth’s¹²⁹ ideal observer is just that — an unreal ideal. He or she (this in itself raises questions) represents an evaluator without biases or interests, one either lacking in personal experiences or preferences that might affect the raw calculation of value or else one completely immune to all such sentiments, desires, inclinations or preferences. Of course in unpackaging any ideal observer in this way it soon is apparent how ethereal and inhuman such an ideal observer would have to be and how impossible for real people fully to emulate. On the other hand, a limited unbiasedness, an elimination of more and more of the obvious partialities of the evaluator, is quite possible without ever reaching the purely impersonal.¹³⁰

The same conclusion, about the unattainability of a complete, thorough-going unbiasedness, can be reached by considering the characteristically moral process of universalizing.¹³¹ The exhortations ‘to put oneself in others’ shoes’ or ‘to do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ are highly ambiguous. How far is one to go in ignoring personal qualities and imagining oneself in another’s place when weighing a proposed course of action? The traditional approach of Christianity and indeed of Kantians seems to be for X to adopt, figuratively and by means of imagination, Y’s position and condition in the world (so that the Nazi considers what he would feel were he a Jew). But although this involves adopting Y’s situation it also involves X retaining her own tastes, preferences and values.¹³² (The sincere Nazi might well, as a Jew, wish to be exterminated.) To universalize in the fullest possible way would be to abdicate, in addition, one’s own tastes, values and point of view in favour of a cumulative average of others’ tastes, values and viewpoints. Then a proposed action would be considered from all vantages, each vantage being composed of particular values and tastes. In other words a full-blooded universalization appears to involve a utilitarianism which leaves little, if anything, of the evaluator’s character. Yet even this radical self-denial would still involve subjective preferences. It would raise again the utilitarian dilemma discussed in chapter two of whose vantages are to be counted in the cumulative average. (All existing people? Future generations? Animals?) And more importantly, adopting such a full-blooded universalization is itself a completely subjective choice. There is nothing objectively ‘right’ or ‘true’ or categorically mandated about any such approach. Moreover, such a robust form of universalizing is not widespread or common — indeed it is very uncommon and certainly not a normal or characteristic part of moral thought and speech. Therefore even in universalizing, that archetypal moral practice, there must necessarily be subjective elements and choices and thus no such thing as the completely or purely impersonal vantage. Worse, the fullest version of universalizing, the one reaching closest to the purely impersonal and involving a virtually complete abdication of one’s own tastes, sentiments and preferences in evaluating morally (say, on the question of the mandatory wearing by females of a veil), would be unwelcome both generally and by me.

What my arguments lead to is this: A perfectly complete or pure impartiality involves the ‘peeling off’¹³³ of all proclivities, viewpoints and inclinations leaving nothing recognisably human within. In practice, no moral system can require that its annexed approval and disapproval sentiments arise from some such purely impersonal or perfectly unbiased vantage. Thus, moral sentiments are not to be distinguished from the indirect passions by such an unworldly, idyllic and overly strict criterion. Hume’s demand that we take up the unbiased perspective if we are to evaluate morally should be seen not as a logical or linguistic stipulation of what it will mean, or must mean, to evaluate morally but as a very practical and realistic call to put aside one’s felt^iU partialities and prejudices. What Hume seeks is the nurturing of desires (usually quite weak desires) aimed at standardisation of assessment — something pretty close to the traditional universalizing of station, condition and opportunities. This to me has great appeal. The merit of such a standardisation, as I have hinted and will return to in chapter nine, is the consequences that follow, in particular standardisation’s contribution towards sustaining the actual system of practices constraining actions.