Whence Duty?

Having secured the flank seemingly threatened by moral speech, 1 return in this part to Hume’s explanation of moral evaluations, of the moral subjectivism that follows from his scepticism about the powers and scope of reason.

Note firstly that sentimentalism implies that people cannot ‘decide’ of what to approve. Of course anyone can and might use the language of approval instrumentally to influence the behaviour of others, but actual (as opposed to feigned) approval involves a feeling. Not I, nor you, nor anyone else, can simply ‘decide’ to have such a feeling. This ramification of the subjectivism or sentimentalism I have been defending is an important reason, 1 think, why Hume concentrates on virtue rather than duty.⁹⁴ Those persons who happen not to have a particular feeling (say of benevolence or love for their children) cannot ‘decide’ to have this virtue. Certainly reason or belief can tell them that others appear to have a feeling or sentiment they lack. It can also indicate the sort of behaviour normally evoked in others by those particular sentiments absent in them. Reason can even help to moderate those passions or feelings they do have by providing causal information of what unrestrained satisfaction of particular desires generally leads to. (And assuming reason does this well and that there is an underlying desire or feeling not to reap the normal consequences of, say, licentiousness, the path of temperance and moderation will be aimed for.) But none of this amounts to reason alone motivating virtuous conduct, to anyone ‘deciding’ to have some virtue.

The most persons lacking some feeling, like love of their children, can do is to embark on a programme of habitually acting as if they did have the feeling in the not unwarranted hope that in time they might come to have the actual feeling.

A further discussion of virtue will be offered in chapter four. But for now merely note what we call ‘duty’ or ‘obligation’ must reduce to for Hume. It cannot ultimately be anything more than a feeling or sentiment about some course of action (this feeling or sentiment itself arising causally from the self-hatred spurred by the contrast between my pre-duty sentiments and the perceived ones of most other people). By emphasising virtue and vice Hume was consistent in his positive moral theory. There is very little about duty on which to grasp for the second-order moral sceptic. In a world without objective, mind-independent moral values, where reason is inert, obligation and duty must be the result of some feeling. Of course it might result from a desire to be moral but such apparent circularity requires explanation. A great strength of Hume’s moral theory is the conventional explanation he does in fact give and which I discuss in chapter five. But it should come as no surprise to find virtue of much greater significance to the sceptical Hume than duty.

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