Hume’s moral and political philosophy constitutes a sea change in Western letters. The fundamental constitution of the change can be explained as follows. In ordinary life, people evaluate their own moral emotions, and those of others, based upon the factual circumstances that are seen to prevail. If someone is very upset, the ordinary individual wonders what the cause is. She seeks to know. From the vantage point of Hume’s philosophy, however, there is no longer a domain of fact to appeal to. The only thing each individual really has to appeal to, are certain mental objects of perception in her head, which have allegedly no probative value when it comes to determining what facts are. The very manner in which philosophy now begins to approach moral emotion is severely different.
From the vantage point of Hume’s philosophy, we have no way of knowing where the “impressions” or perceptions in our minds come from. Hume allows that it is possible that these feelings are simply outgrowths of our own bodies. Thus, it is the individual who feels a disturbance who needs to come up with some explanation. If someone is angry, the problem is the person who feels the anger. The anger is not allowed to indicate some external factual situation, in Hume’s analysis of the passions. It can only be a referenda on a human type or kind of personality. There are enormous political implications in this new point of view. In this chapter I can only begin to draw out a couple of weak threads, and hope that the reader remembers that all of this philosophy under review is obliged to the atomist thesis.
The moral sanction possessed by public opinion is easily the most devastating force in politics. That individual whose name is publicly linked to something shameful is instantaneously convicted by public outrage. The legal process, which moves very slowly, takes a considerable amount of time to ascertain truth of fact. Individual lives are destroyed sometimes in a matter of hours. How that popular moral sanction is directed is a mighty political concern. Early Modern philosophy from the outset has been expert in caressing and directing this primal force. One wonders what politics and morals will look like in the new civilization that Locke and Hume have sculpted: for while it is impossible, from the atomist point of view, to be certain of any truth of fact; it is also possible, from the atomist point of view, “for anything to go with anything.”
Hume’s philosophy climbs into morals in the very domain of inductive science. When Hume argues that the human being is only capable of knowing mental objects, that perceptions cannot be ascribed to external objects—he is making a case for a new form of judgment alleged to be in human beings. When the ordinary individual claims that she perceives an apple, and that the apple is before her on the table, this involves moral judgment in Hume’s scheme. For the individual, according to Hume, is not really capable of knowing that the apple is there as an external object. Accordingly, the individual who claims to know that the apple is there, is said to be enacting a “fiction.” The individual, in other words, lies, from Hume’s point of view; and this lie, as to the real existence of the apple, is self-serving. It enables the individual to appropriate and make use of the objects in nature for her own benefit.
This moral story is woven into Hume’s philosophy of perception. The people are unaware of this category of morality. From the atomist vantage point, Hume is in a position to claim that the entire fabric of ordinary moral beliefs is woven out of illusions and rationalizations. Since human beings really can’t know what objects actually exist, the moral feelings that they would feel towards those objects must be mere fictions too. Other causes, deep in the physiology of the organism, must be accountable for the actual moral feelings of the human being. These causes, in Hume’s view, despite the fact that they cannot be known, are selfish. No matter what feelings an individual believes herself to possess—since they are all alleged to be based on the supposed fiction of actually knowing what objects exist—a new explanation is called for.
The most conspicuous example in Hume’s philosophy of morals is the case of justice. For some reason, Hume argues, there must be a cause for justice that it not itself bound up with justice. The motive that underlies the moral motive of justice, must itself be amoral. Justice, in Hume’s view, is as illusory and fictitious as the objects that people believe themselves to actually know about. The rhetoric of justice, when Hume finally peels away the layers, is seen by him to be self-serving. Justice is not just.
It is impossible to imagine morality without feelings. The people use the language of virtue and vice when they talk about strong feelings. Yet Hume, in his theory of the passions, separates the strong feelings from moral character. The passions, in Hume’s model, are part of human physiology. Hume has taken great pains, and gone far out of his way, to attempt to vacate the competence of the ordinary individual to know truth of any fact. To be sure, this philosopher will allow people to conduct their business in consonance with their “habits,” as if these were unconscious drives; but if any of that business should become ripe for a determination as to truth of fact, Hume wants us to know, the ordinary fellow is unfit to judge what is right. The ordinary fellow does not possess a clear sense of morals, or a decent sense of morals, in Hume’s view. Philosophy, in this case Hume’s, must supplant the individual’s judgment.
Hume, in his second theory of causation, founds all human action upon the suppression of knowledge. Allegedly, nobody can know matters of fact with certainty. Thereupon, the mind, as Hume narrates, is compelled to produce its own fictions, or make-believe, to enable it to cope with the pressing task of getting along in the world. Hume christens this supposed impulse as a mysterious part of the human being’s nature. From this point of view, the calling into question of our ability to know is converted into a launching pad for self-aggrandizing impulses which are blind to any common set of facts.
I suppose it is important how Hume defines the conception of a self, or identity. As we have seen, during the discussion of human reason, Hume presents us with a portrait of vacant identity. The individual is as if reduced to the scene of momentary impressions, whose identity is wholly bound up with the passing show. Nor does Hume allow for the category of morality to undergird identity. Passion alone is the source of “pride” for Hume, as it is for the source of disgrace or “humility.” Truth is separate from the category of identity, for Hume; and so too is morality. Yet the self that emerges in Hume’s domain of passion is blistering and ubiquitous. “Tis evident, that pride and humility, tho” directly contrary, have yet the same object. That object is self, or that succession of related ideas and impressions, of which we have an intimate memory and consciousness.”[1]
In Hume, however, this quantum of attitude is being ascribed to the person’s subconscious. It is no longer necessary for human beings to be aware of this moral predilection for the self as against all others. The point is that with Hume’s philosophy, this commitment to interest is alleged to be hardwired into “human nature,” such that men are not free to choose anything else. In fact, Hume does away with the category of choice. All impulses and actions are said to be fated and necessary. “Nature, by an absolute and uncontrollable necessity, has determined us to judge as well as to breathe and feel,” Hume writes. In his view, “belief is more properly an act of the sensitive than of the cogitative part of our natures.”[2]
Annette Baier disputes that there is any conflict between the versions of human identity portrayed in books I and II of the Treatise. “There is, I think, no contradiction between what book I said about the self and what book two says: rather, there is supplementation and completion.”[3] There is definitely a relation between the versions of personal identity put forward in books I and II, but nothing like completion. Book I of the Treatise concerns perception. Hume denies the capacity of perception to know facts about the external world. The resulting portrait of the self is vacancy. In book II, identity is translated into sharp passions, angular emotions of subordination and superiority. The portrait of the self that emerges in book II is what we are left with when truth is suspended.
It is not too much to say that when Hume unfurls for us his version of human identity in Treatise II, that this version of the self is plagued by unseemly emotions. Petty feelings of superiority, or humiliating feelings of degradation, are the poles of experience that Hume’s doctrine of identity leads us into in the second book of the Treatise. When Hume enters into the second book of his Treatise, the dense language of his natural philosophy has abated. In the first book, it is as if human beings have no identity at all. Nor is the appendix to the first book without special significance. Hume there left us with the desideratum: forsake the search for truth in any matter whatsoever, or confront the consequence of torment as inflicted by his philosophy. Man is urged to clip the wings of his desire to know. Man may rescue himself from torment by indulging himself in amusements. To forget about the search for truth, Hume indicates, is to be delivered from all of the vexation that attends to the humblest search for any true reality.
In book II of the Treatise, Hume does not waste any time. Hume undertakes to argue that his analysis of the passions follows with the same degree of necessity that he thinks attend to his doctrine of indivisible bodies. That much vexed question of modern philosophy, as to whether or not there can be a free will, is decided by Hume in the negative. “Since reason alone can never produce any action, or give rise to volition, I infer, that the same faculty is as incapable of preventing volition, or of disputing the preference with any passion or emotion,” Hume argues; “Thus it appears, that the principle, which opposes our passion, cannot be the same with reason, and is only called so in an improper sense.”[4] In Hume, identity is resolved into a current of turbulent emotion, coordinates of dominance and submission. These emotions in Hume’s view are fated, absolutely independent of human reflection and judgment.[5]
Hume is resolved that man can be more reliably managed by his passions. Whereas the issues of fact and truth are subjected to the dimming light of the first book, all restraint upon perception is removed from the second book. The individual goes from a condition of vertigo, to a lens of self-awareness which is terribly sharp, piercing, and omnipresent. Man, in Hume’s Treatise book II, is to be set loose in a room of mirrors. His every attribute must be experienced as a relative one. It is a prism of comparisons into which the individual is compressed.
Among human beings, there are no passions more tumultuous than comparisons of beauty, wealth, or other such appearances. Hume employs his philosophy to blind us to certain ranges of experience, but he also employs his philosophy to magnify other domains of experience, to the degree that they simply loom over all thought. The passions that Hume has chosen as the principal vectors of human awareness are destined to orient moral experience: they involve a zero-sum interaction of statuses, of comparative attributes. The individual can be either a loser, a winner, or the comparison can be an emotionless equality. Hume will eventually unveil a new roster of virtues, but they will be lacking in the intensity of these passions.
The relationship between reason and passion is therefore certain, but indirect. It is reason’s attack on the capacity of people to know any truth that breeds the passion that Hume seeks to build upon in book II of the Treatise. Hume also begins to speak of passions as simply attributes of a personality, as if they were permanent features rather than what they are much more likely to be, reactions to particular situations and events. There are many situations in which it is not only excusable to feel anger, but in which it would be evidence of disease to fail to feel anger. Yet in the culture that Hume undertakes to formulate, the passion of anger is to be evaluated as if it is strictly native to the personality or character of the human being who feels it.[6]
It is Hume’s claim that reason and passion have no relationship to one another; that human feelings are not rational or intelligent.[7] The only significance that passions have for Hume is in terms of the hierarchy outlined in Treatise I. In Treatise I, passion properly emerges (by natural instinct) in response to thwarted, or frustrated perceptual faculties. When philosophy denies that people can know the facts, the most modest facts of his experience, the result is anxiety and frustration. When this frustration literally carries a person to forsake reason, and to act on irresistible impulse, this is certifiable as self-preserving reason for Hume. So even in Hume, reason and passion are actually intimately related. The artificial version of reason on display in Treatise I is sufficient to not only kindle a range of passions, but to validate them in the familiar modern language of self-preservation and “necessity.”
If we look at Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, however, we can remind ourselves of the degree of reason in our emotions, since it is precisely the correlation of emotion with fact that makes for virtuous feeling; and it is precisely the correlation of action with the same facts, and what they warrant, that makes for virtuous conduct.
Not indeed that courage arises in one entirely without passion and impulse. But the impulse must proceed from reason and be directed to the right. He, then, who is carried by a rational impulse to face danger for the sake of right, being free from fear about these things, is brave; and these are the things with which courage has to do. When we say “free from fear,” it is not to be understood that the brave man feels no fear at all. For such a person is not brave, for whom nothing at all has any terrors.[8]
If we think about the range of passions that we feel, and the occasions for the feeling, it is hard to deny that perception of factual situations has a lot to do with it. A friend’s sense of humor can provoke us to laughter; the friend’s experience of a terrible hardship can provoke us to sadness; and yes, the criminal’s escape with his booty can lead us to feel indignation. In actual life, as in the Aristotelian discussion, rationality pervades human emotion. The passions of anger or indignation, the two passions most implicated in resistance to injustice and oppression, are for Aristotle indicative of realities, of common facts, of intelligence. So too is the disposition of courage lauded by Aristotle, as indicating the need to oppose that which threatens to enslave us. “It is for facing what is painful, then, as has been said, that men are called brave,” Aristotle claims. “Hence also courage involves pain, and is justly praised; for it is harder to face what is painful than to abstain from what is pleasant.”[9] Yet in Hume, it is fervently denied that the passions have any rationality in them whatsoever. Passions, for Hume, are mere emanations of a personality. Anger and indignation in Hume’s philosophy are simply indicative of unattractive and socially useless personalities.[10] Hume’s portrayal of passions as effectively self-generating reflections of characters, as opposed to indicating commonly experienced external facts, is an oppressive theory. It reflects the degree of authority that philosophy seeks to have in a world where the knowledge of truth has been proclaimed effectively unavailable to human beings.
One must study Hume’s theory of the passions in tandem with his philosophy of morals, since morality amounts to passive feeling for Hume. When Hume says that reason does not have the power to produce volition; that reason lacks the power to restrain passion; that all feelings and behaviors are “necessary,” one cannot refute this until the embargo on perceived knowledge of fact is disproved, and removed. Morality or practical reason is, most of the time, all about particular cases, specific facts that are usually much more than psychological questions. It is not hard to see that we all depend on reason to tame passion, that we are responsible for what we choose, and that what we choose could easily not be.
Hume insists that we may not define these passions of pride and humility, yet define them he does. Humility is the Christian virtue par excellence. “Wisdom is with the lowly.” Equality before God, and before death, is its nature. Common feeling, community, is what true humility tries to hold together. Yet in Hume’s metaphysics of the passions, “humility” is reconceived of as a sign of inferiority, as being less than the others. Note how Hume insists: (a) that the self is the constant object of pride and humility; (b) that it is impossible to feel them both at the same time. Real friendship, as real justice, cannot take place absent a substantive equality. This sort of equality seems to be banished from Hume’s world. In Aristotle’s view, the friend is a second self. “For without friends, no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.”[11] It is acknowledged that for Hume, a man will feel as if his wife, children, and friends are second selves, but only in the sense that he will receive shame or praise for how their respective eminences reflect upon him. Real friendship cannot endure such conditions.
Hume, in the Treatise, very carefully assigns the passions their own separate book. “Moral” philosophy is not specifically addressed until the third book, which Hume advertises as a book that can well stand on its own. However, the third book cannot stand on its own if the reader is to actually understand it. For the passions are an intimate part of the moral philosophy that Hume unfolds; whereas the origins of these passions, discussed only in the second book, are ascribed to the same mysterious causes as the sense impressions of book I. Aristotle defines anger as that emotion that a human being feels when he believes that someone has done him wrong. The entire foundation of this definition is eliminated by Hume. Anger is said to be akin to one’s height or weight, absolutely unrelated to a social context. Ordinary people praise and blame individuals for what they feel in certain contexts; Hume is making the argument that passions are entirely aloof from character and moral judgment. Passion emerges as a new kind of magic, of mysterious origin. The causes of moral emotions are obvious to people in the context of facts. For philosophy, these facts are fictions; thus some other cause must be sought for the feelings. The individual herself must be held responsible for feeling in this or that way. “A passion is an original existence, or, if you will, modification of existence, and contains not any representative quality which renders it a copy of any other existence or modification,” Hume insists. “When I am angry, I am actually possessed with the passion, and in that have no more a reference to any other object, than when I am thirsty, or sick, or more than five foot high.”[12]
In book II of the Treatise, Hume lays down a schematic for what it is possible for the human being to feel. Pride and humility are the two dominant passions that govern the human psyche, in Hume’s view. Pride and humility as Hume defines them, while assigned to the category of the “indirect” passions, are nevertheless the dominant ones.
In customary speech, pride is associated with honor. We use the name to indicate the person who is conscientious about her work; faithful in her relationships; brave in the face of adversity; life-affirming in the impact she has on loved ones and friends. The pride that David Hume is talking about is much closer to the name “conceit” as it is used in ordinary speech. It is certainly true that most people admire those who possess great riches, or great beauty, or even much learning. Yet this admiration fades quickly, if there is any suggestion that the individual so referred to regards herself as superior to others for any of these qualities. Such a belief would be regarded as the height of shallowness, as the evidence of an unattractive self-love. Yet this is precisely the version of “pride” that Hume regards as the building block of the social order. It is the sort of pride which can only exist, if other people are made to feel less. This is not the sort of competition which breeds excellence. It is the sort of competition which breeds contempt. It should be noted as well, that Hume never gets around to indicating how these riches are to be gotten in the first place, since it is wealth which Hume is overwhelmingly concerned with as the basis for pride.
It is only with the experience of pride or humility, that is, interpersonal passions where Hume allows that the individual experiences for the first time a self. Amelie O. Rorty wrote an article on the role of pride in Hume’s philosophy that has spurred a flurry of subsequent attempts.[13] Rorty was not the first to take up the issue; but she seems to have been the first to have focused on the significance Hume envisions for pride insofar as the emergence of a self is concerned. Rorty calls our attention to the relationship that Hume recognizes between pride and identity, that is, the origination of a self. Rorty believes that Hume’s definition of pride is close to, or even identical with, the customary sense that I have described above. Yet it is not. When it comes time for Hume to found a new self in the passions of book II, Hume takes great care to oblige the passions to the doctrine of impressions in book I. All efforts to expand Hume’s discussion of pride to encompass truth of fact are therefore unfounded. Yet this is the line of argument that Rorty pursues. “Hume introduces us to the idea of self as a fictional construction,” Rorty writes; “He brought the passions into their own, no longer marks of invasive forces, but our own motivating attitudes.”[14]
Rorty chooses interesting words to describe this form of pride that Hume places so much emphasis on. Rorty characterizes this pride as a “fiction,” that is, as something that the individual generates out of her imagination. Yet imagination is obliged to what other people respect. By “invasive forces,” Rorty seems to be referring to community standards of excellence, of virtue and vice, or ordinary praise and blame. Rorty writes of a pride that is reflective—but to be reflective one must be capable of knowing something. Hume chooses, nevertheless, to link the passion of pride to the doctrine of impressions from Treatise I. The impressions rise up against the authority of what is ordinarily known. They deny the possibility of knowledge; and define the passions, or “sensitive” part of the soul, as quite incompatible with the intellect or “cogitative” part of our natures.
Rorty extrapolates from Hume’s strict discussion of pride—a very distinctive definition (although Hume denies that he defines pride and embellishes it with something Hume is quite hostile to: pride as ordinarily understood. “It is with this aside that Hume changes the history of philosophy,” Rorty writes. Hume allegedly “introduces the idea that the sense of self derives from social recognition and admiration of what is visible, prized, and rare.”[15] It once again needs to be pointed out that pride can only exist for Hume, where the others are made to feel “humility.” Humility, in Hume’s lexicon, is a painful feeling, akin to shame. In this sort of superiority that Hume retails in his theory of pride, he is not a founder. Machiavelli and Hobbes precede him. In ordinary opinion, humility is easily understood as a virtue which can be a proper basis for pride. Jesus is the only name one needs to utter in this context. Yet for Hume, “Tis impossible a man can at the same time be both proud and humble.”[16] In ordinary experience, humility is often a sort of grace which attracts admiration. It is certainly compatible with what ordinary opinion believes to be meritorious, but this does not fit Hume’s definition of pride, which he bases the true self upon.
Pride and Humility, as Hume discusses them, have very little, if anything to do with choice. Choice involves a rational element, and Hume is adamant that the passions cannot be governed by reason. This will be discussed more below. If we own a house, we cannot feel pride in it, unless or except as we compare it to someone else’s. Change the object of comparison, and one converts pride into disgrace.[17]
Hume does say that there are other causes of pride, besides riches or beauty. Hume says that the causes of pride can include “imagination, judgment, memory or disposition; wit, good sense, learning, courage, justice, integrity” (T 279). The problem is that most of these qualities are elsewhere derided by Hume, or even repudiated. Justice, Hume will argue, is but an artificial virtue the true root of which is self-love. As for courage, Hume later presents this as a semi-barbaric virtue, proper only to times past. As for learning, what are we to make of this claim to pride? For the only knowledge that Hume thinks it is possible to obtain is that there is no knowledge that it is possible for us to have. Hume clearly regards wealth as the ultimate basis for pride, as he regards poverty, or even simply modest means, as the subsoil of disgraceful humility.[18] “But the relation, which is esteemed the closest, and which of all others produces most commonly the passion of pride, is that of property.”[19]
The point about humility and pride that Hume seeks to establish, is that this is simply the mental household that nature has set up in human beings. According to Hume, we have no alternative but to espouse these feelings of pride and humility, as he has defined them, as the necessary parameters of our experience as human beings. Our souls, in Hume’s argument, are determined by these principles. Our relationships with others must be characterized as following from these principles. Hume makes rather complicated arguments about how passions can be compounded out of diverse materials; but all of the diverse materials are derived from the isolated passions of pain and pleasure, or the social passions of superiority and inferiority.
Hume does not lie when he claims that man is a social being. For “pride” and “humility” as Hume defines them are indeed social passions. Yet they are perverted passions insofar as Hume has determined the signification of these names. If scholars have tended to interpret Hume’s claim that human beings are social animals, to indicate that they are well disposed to one another, we cannot square this with the definition of the essential human feelings that Hume has ascribed to us. It is not for accidental reasons that Hume defines the other moral attributes of human beings as “artificial.”[20]
In truth, perception of fact is a great conduit of passion. Nor is it true that people forever exist in a haze of passion, diverting it here and there as circumstances warrant. Facts are perceived. Often, passion does not emerge absent the determination of fact. Passion or feeling follows fact. Fact then exists as the baseline, against which the degree and trajectory of feeling become known to us. This is not to deny that human beings harbor motives, feelings, goals and imperatives that are not induced by external facts. People can be, and are, jealous, mistrusting, and ambitious, as well as kind, forgiving, understanding, and just. It is to argue that all of our moral experience is sunken into a fog when the domain of fact is made obscure.
It is of course true that matters of fact cannot be proved, for that which is the proof must ultimately be obtained directly. Particulars cannot be proved, only general propositions can be proved in particular cases. Hume’s model, which undertakes to interfere with the comprehension of fact, is certainly attempting to affect the formation of opinion in society. Hume’s model of causation, or alleged search for facts, is designed to thwart that enterprise, in reality. In Hume’s theory of probability, the search for fact finally is designed to give way, under pressure, to the passions of observers. It is not that by nature the reason of man is slave to his passions. It is rather than when philosophy has interfered with the human investigation into truth, this may result. It is thus Hume’s intention that “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions,” that truth bow before desire.[21]
The great cornerstone of Hume’s philosophy is his theory of indivisible body. It is through this lens that Hume undertakes his critique of the veracity, competence, and authority of perception. This attack on the authority of perception enables Hume to make the case that the essence of the human will is a subconscious phenomenon, that it is not eligible to be formed consciously; that reason itself, when properly applied, merely results in frustration, but that the frustration of the rational faculties only calls forth the natural “instincts” or “secret springs” from which human nature emerges.
Hume is explicit on this point. Pride and humility, as Hume defines them, are every bit as fated as the movement of the atoms are alleged to be.[22] Hume denies that the passions of pride and humility can be governed by character, much less that they can give rise to a conception of principled dignity.[23] Annette Baier appears to neglect some of this information as she undertakes to analyze Hume’s philosophy of pride and what it means for human beings in society.[24]
Baier labors with a theory of pride that is a conscious and necessary foundation for a self. This is to say that for Baier, pride coincides with every human being’s need for respect.[25] Hume nowhere enumerates such a need or “secret spring” in human nature. To the contrary: conceited pride and slavish humiliation are, in Hume’s view, ineluctable and constant vicissitudes of human experience. They form the very core of the self for Hume, and he at least does not allow for any way out of this circle. If an individual wants to feel superior, she must find someone who, comparatively, is poor and lacking in power to compare herself to.
There is nothing in Hume’s model that allows for the possibility of a human being advancing past vanity in material possessions, to some more fundamental attributes of character such as moral principle. Readers will object to this that Hume enumerates a whole roster of social virtues: benevolence, mercifulness, generosity, amiability, that contradict this claim. Those virtues will be addressed below. For the present moment, it remains the case that Hume’s book on the passions in the Treatise does not provide any foundation for these social virtues. The true feelings are ensnared, for Hume, in competitions.
Yet Baier interprets Hume in very different terms: as a thinker for whom pride holds out the possibility of actual respect, not merely for those who have the most possessions, the best looks—but for those who have comparatively little.[26] Baier’s analysis of the relationship between pride and humility, if it is separated from the premises of Hume’s philosophy, does indeed offer an insight into a distinct metaphysics of mutual respect; but Baier actually ascribes this philosophy of mutual respect, as derived from a dialectic of pride and humility, to Hume, which appears unjustified.
On independent grounds, Baier produces a truly masterful discussion of the relationship between resentment and pride. Baier dismisses some other opinions of resentment, which would confine it to motives of envy and spitefulness. For Baier, resentment is the reaction to the deprivation of pride, that is, it bespeaks the proper and even constructive, liberating impulse to throw enslavement off.[27] For Baier, and this seems to me to be excellent and accurate reasoning—resentment is indirectly very often a healthy desire for pride; it indicates oppression, painful subordination, and therefore essays a natural link with the individual’s assertion of a proper pride for herself. This is indeed the direction for emancipation in society, for the general improvement of social relations. Yet it is not Hume’s theory.
The problem is that Baier thinks this attitude towards resentment, is characteristic of Hume. Baier is willing to fuse the impulse of pride to possession, which is Hume’s position. Yet possession, as Hume makes clear, does not protect pride in a stable manner. We are at the mercy, in Hume’s construction of pride, of the object of comparison. Next to a pauper, for Hume, we are haughty; in relationship to the more opulent we feel a degrading sense of humility or inferiority. Thus it is pride itself which is resentful in Hume’s philosophy. For it can never be fully satiated.
Baier is of the opinion that Hume has women in mind when he speaks about resentment, and when he speaks about those whose resentment is so impotent that it need not be feared.[28] Hume makes it clear that those with dominant power have no obligation whatsoever to take into account the resentment of radical inferiors.[29] The fact that Hume was raised by a self-sufficient single mother is a piece of biographical evidence that Baier leans upon. Yet this does not really bear scrutiny. Men do have to fear the resentment of women, since it is the fealty of women alone that can assure to a husband the truth of his paternity. The entire regime of chastity which, in Hume’s analysis, men impose upon women is in this sense defensive, for men’s reputation is at stake.[30]
Moreover, Baier neglects the power relationship that exists between the philosopher and the demos. The discussion of morals is brought back repeatedly by Hume to the relationship of causation: contiguity, resemblance, cause and effect. Impressions as a doctrine negate the perceptual knowledge of the demos in the effort to ascertain truth of fact. The attitude of the philosopher, who denies that the perceptions in his mind are actual reports of external objects, is juxtaposed to the philosopher’s appraisal of the ordinary opinions: that at best they do disclose “unconscious instincts” which drive the human beings regardless of what they consciously think. Indeed, Hume ranks virtue and vice as secondary qualities in the Lockean sense, as mere epiphenomena of body.
The only thing that moral feelings reveal, for Hume, is truths about the one who has the feelings. For the individual is to be held accountable for what she feels, as if this is a kind of Rorschach test of her own personality. Since there are no external facts to point to as causes for moral emotions, they are to be diagnosed as evidence of personality types. “So that when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, You mean nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation of it.” Hume sees no reason to be shy about expanding Locke’s concept of the “secondary qualities” of bodies to include moral emotions. Morality itself for Hume is essentially another fiction in the mind of the individual. Virtue and vice are like “sounds, colors, heat and cold,” which are mere “perceptions in the mind.”[31] Hume celebrates this point of view as a great advance in the speculative sciences.
In my view, when Hume discusses the relationship between radical superiors and inferiors, he is thinking of the relationship between philosophy and the commonweal. Hume’s definition of the passions, if they ever were to be implemented, would visit considerable misery upon the human race. Would this bother Hume? According to Hume, it is not irrational for him “to prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching of my finger.”[32]
Baier has made a splendid argument about the political implications of the feelings of resentment. From Baier’s point of view, every individual needs a certain minimum amount of respect from others, which cannot be the product of charity or tolerance merely. People need to be able to make others take their opinions seriously, to have respect for their feelings and dignity. Yet I do not see how we can argue that this is Hume’s intention. The individual who feels resentful, in Hume’s analysis, has no basis for making new political claims upon other members of society. Hume will explain these passions away as unique outgrowths of the human physiology and body, rather than as evidence for any kind of political dignity or the need for such. Passions cannot properly refer to political contexts, for Hume. Baier’s analysis contains a great deal more respect for the feelings of the ordinary individual than Hume’s philosophy is willing to bestow. For Hume, it is the individual who feels who is guilty if the feelings are unpleasant. The problem must be hers, it cannot be that of society.
Baier is arguing for each individual’s need for some portion of pride that is not dependent on charity.[33] The ability to compel some form of respect is crucial in the predicament of resentment that Baier analyzes. Yet the atomism of Hume, the doctrine of impressions, all bespeak an authority of hierarchy that has no room for mutual respect.
At the outset of the third book of the Treatise, the book expressly on morals, Hume begins by informing the reader that one must keep the whole long chain of argument in mind as we move into the familiar territory of praise and blame. Hume observes that it is difficult to follow such a long train of argument as he has set forth, and suggests that the discussion of morality in fact depends on the first two books of the Treatise, contrary to the advertisement that precedes it. Hume is correct that his argument is abstruse and hard to follow. However, the reality of the relationship between reason and passion is not so difficult to follow.
Hume wants to set up abstract reason, as the thing that cannot mix with passion. In other words, he wants to draw a line between a set of abstract principles on the one hand, and the immediacy of passion on the other.[34] Evidently Hume has certain philosophers in mind who envision that men and women harbor a moral code of sorts, against which they can calmly evaluate their passions, and act accordingly. Hume denies that such a convergence can occur. Reason, or abstract principles, are not “active” in the sense that Hume indicates; whereas passion, certainly, is as immediate as a fire which singes our fingers. Passion propels, and the abstract reason that Hume adumbrates for us can do no such thing.
Hume wishes to draw from this reasoning some astonishing principles. The primary teaching that Hume is interested in conveying here is that reason by itself cannot govern passion. Reason, in other words, cannot control behavior.[35] It should be noted that such a claim is fully in keeping with the major argument of book I of the Treatise. There, Hume uses his critique of sense perception to claim that there is a very definite relationship between reason and passion. In that relationship, the utter incapacity of the sense faculties to relate reliable matters of fact to the human mind, leaves the mind lunging and desperate. This desperation is intended by nature, Hume promises, to unleash “secret springs” of passion which themselves will tend to our interest.
Even in book III, when Hume presents the category of reason, he is careful to place into the mixture the status of matters of fact. Whatever can be true or false, Hume argues, pertains to reason; and whatever pertains to reason, cannot pertain to passion.[36] As I have indicated, this argument, prima facie, is likely to appeal to the reader; because the domain of abstraction that Hume labors to paint upon the name of reason, certainly doesn’t strike the reader immediately as in any way linked to feeling or the control of feeling. Yet the issue of matters of fact, as Hume admits, is part of the category of reason. We do not praise or blame when we observe of an object that it is a tree. Yet, it is certainly true that the observation of matters of fact evokes feeling; and that this feeling, in turn, is apprehended by us in terms of the truth of the facts that we observe.
We certainly do observe of passionate actions that they are reasonable or unreasonable. If a man has insulted his guest in front of us, we judge it reasonable if the guest should feel offended, and looks for a way to excuse himself; or even if the guest should retort with some tart comment, in order to rebuff his host’s disrespect. Yet if the guest should take out a gun and fire four bullets into his assailant, we should certainly judge this action excessive, that is, as out of proportion to the facts of the case, that is, as unreasonable.
It is the matter of fact which is the sort of reason that is intimately involved with morality. Hume concedes to his reader that morality is associated with practical reason. Aristotle is the founder of that discipline. For Aristotle, perception is the original determiner of moral truth. Practical reason cannot be a science, Aristotle teaches, because we cannot know in advance what is going to happen in our lives, or what situations we shall be confronted with. Since it is the truth of fact that constitutes the situations that we are confronted with, practical reason involves a good deal of difficulty: for we must first feel our emotional reaction to the situation, and then figure out quickly how the situation should be made to come out or be resolved. To the extent that we are moral actors, we must play a role in helping the situation come out correctly; and the true challenge of practical reason is devising the means whereby our action can help to bring the correct outcome about in that situation.[37]
More importantly, according to Aristotle, ordinary praise and blame semi-consciously underlies this function. When a certain matter of fact is observed, there is a general feeling or passionate reaction to that event by the observers. The observers, then, judge the moral actors, both in terms of what they feel in this context, and secondly, in terms of what they decide, by practical reason, to do. This is, Aristotle informs us, what ordinary praise and blame is.
Hume is a careful writer, as most serious philosophers are. Hume argues, then, that “reason alone” cannot govern passion. Aristotle certainly never argued to the contrary. Yet reason as in perceived fact generates passion, or many passions anyway (though not all); and in the sorts of behaviors that ordinary human beings praise and blame, they are indeed judging the reasonableness or unreasonableness of certain actions. In these cases, observed facts have evoked a feeling, and that feeling is understood in relationship to the facts that have induced it.
Individuals evaluate their emotions by what they judge in terms of facts; and we are all capable of deliberating on our feeling, that is, of measuring our feeling against the observed facts, to make sure that they are proportionate. In the discussion of book II of the Treatise, Hume prefers to regard human emotions as caused by “secret springs” which lay deep in human nature, as somewhat inscrutable. This, Hume would have us believe, is the origin of the “pride” and “humility” which he proffers to us as the cornerstones of human nature. Instead, the pride and humility that Hume characterizes as the metaphysical foundations of human feeling, are an ideology.
The dislocation of truth from morals, the attempt that Hume makes to isolate reason and passion from one another, is the key to the understanding of Hume’s discussion of morals and politics. In ordinary experience, the cause of our feelings is usually some fact or set of facts. Either we perceive these facts or remember them, or they are recalled to us. Our passions usually have causes like this. However, “matters of fact” qualify as part of the larger category of “truth.” Truth cannot be known, for Hume. Therefore, when it comes time to discuss the cause of moral emotions, we are not permitted by Hume to refer to any truths. Hume instructs us, instead, to look for other passions which he claims lay underneath the moral emotions. The virtues and vices are artificial constructions, Hume argues. If we roll over the rock of moral emotion to see what lies underneath it, in Hume’s view, what we find is nothing but self-love.
Allegedly, if justice is a virtuous disposition, then it must have a cause; and that cause cannot be another virtuous passion, for this would be to reason in a circle. “In short, it may be established as an undoubted maxim, that no action can be virtuous, or morally good, unless there be in human nature some motive to produce it, distinct from the sense of its morality,” Hume writes.[38] Thus, Hume argues, while civilization may have instilled certain precepts of moral behavior in human beings, this cannot be the truth of the genealogy of morality. Allegedly, the moral motive must have originated from a non-moral, or amoral motive. The answer that seems obvious is that facts evoke the dispositions and emotions attendant to justice. Hume however insists that there must be prior motives underneath the very disposition to justice itself.
The attempt to sink the pattern of justice into the category of passion is the first problem. Justice first of all pertains to matters of fact. Hume forces us to talk about men in their “natural” state, that is, before civilization is very developed, or at all developed. Hume provides us with an example. He, Hume, asks another person to lend him a sum of money. This, so far as I can tell, is factual, that is, it falls into the category of reason, observable fact. What motive did Hume have to ask the man for money? Perhaps he is short of cash, and needs to obtain victuals. Perhaps he wants to go on a journey to see his sick mother, but lacks the funds. Even in the natural state, if it is a state wherein money exists, there is some degree of civilization in the example that Hume has furnished us with.[39]
Everything that I have observed so far is in the category of fact. Reason. Evidence. It is from facts and reason that we obtain our bearings in practical reason. We should observe a couple of things in terms of Hume’s request of his neighbor. The neighbor, presumably, is as concerned for his own weal as the average man in Hume’s natural state of affairs. Why should he lend the money to Hume? What is involved in the man’s lending money to Hume? It does not seem likely that he simply does not care for his money. That would be indicative of a madman. Hume has not so specified. If we assume that the lender is an average person, he would not part with his money recklessly. First, presumably, he knows Hume a bit. There is the gist of familiarity between them, even in the natural state. The man must be allowed, in such circumstances, to have formed some judgment as to Hume’s character. Is he trustworthy? Is he reliable and honest? The lender must ask himself these questions, because we need to understand his motive in making the loan in the first place. If he knows Hume to be a scalawag and lends him the money anyway, he is not wise. Yet if Hume has presented himself as a trustworthy person, then the request for the loan is also to ask that lender to trust him.
Everything that we have discussed thus far is of a factual nature. No loan has been made yet. No appeals to “public interest” have been advanced. We are dealing with two individuals, in what Hume has characterized as a primitive state of humanity. As observers of this situation, and since Hume is the one who initiated the transaction, and since this is a fact, we must interpret this fact. It seems, as clear as day, that in asking the other fellow for a loan, Hume is engaging the other fellow to trust him. In short, a moral relationship is created out of this request. If the prospective lender agrees to provide Hume with the loan that he has requested, a bond of trust now stretches out between them that did not exist previously. This relationship cannot be reduced to two self-interests; because one man has exposed himself to possible injury at the request of someone else. In that dependence which the lender willingly undertakes toward the borrower, a moral obligation emerges. The moral motive, therefore, did not emerge out of non-moral motives. The obligation was created through the formation of a new relationship between the two individuals, Hume and the lender.
Hume, for his part, may have been acting purely on self-interest in seeking the loan. Yet if he represented himself to the prospective lender this way, the lender had never given him the time of day. The borrower must ask the lender to do him a “favor,” that is, to do some generous act for his sake. And in making that request, however tacitly, an obligation is generated, to requite that debt. Part of Hume’s personality, at this point, must consist in his felt obligation to the person whose good will he has engaged and profited from. The point is that the lender has exposed himself possibly to humiliation, financial injury, the pain and travail of betrayal, in order to help a man who has advertised his need. It is because of the relationship that has been formed that Hume owes the money back to the lender.
What Hume wishes to do, however, is to make the claim that no moral engagement is subject to any standard of truth of fact. For Hume, the domain of the passions is segregated apart from reason and truth. This is the whole point of his attack on the ability of the human mind to actually know truth of fact. And hence in Hume’s analysis, it cannot be a moral motive that requires him to return the money that he has borrowed. We have demonstrated that a relationship has been created between Hume and his neighbor, a relationship partly caused by Hume’s request to borrow money, and partly caused by the neighbor’s decision to lend him the money. A trust has passed between them. This trust has been called at least out of the breast of the lender, regardless of what Hume’s motive may have been. The vulnerability which this display of trust exposes the lender to is a serious matter.
The Humean natural man however, is not like most men. There are “proud” men, who seek superiority, and there are “humble” men, whose destiny it is to live in shameful obscurity. This is the story of the secret springs of “human nature” as Hume delivers it to us. The Humean man never does anything except to enhance his possessions, to enlarge his plenty, to aggrandize himself. Yet the majority of men and women make contracts with one another, make promises to one another, because they need assistance from others. For Hume justice is an “artificial virtue,” a curtsy that vice pays to virtue, en route to enacting exploitation. Vice must bow before virtue, with fraud, in order to succeed; because virtue is the common standard, the one which the generality of men and women put their trust in (and thereby, the faith in which they are most vulnerable).
For Hume self-interest is the mother of justice. Self-interest is how Hume prefers to characterize man in his natural state, as if he was not needy—as if he did not need what the others could do for him, just as much as the others need people to exchange services with them. Hume tries to make it appear as if his natural man is able to govern himself entirely by self-interest, neither needing, nor beholden to relationships of trust. What Hume wants to insist upon is that no new relationship is created with the others through contracts and promises. Echoes of Spinoza can be heard in this aspect of Hume. For Spinoza, the arch principle is that all contracts may be broken.[40] Hume masks that teaching, but it is implicit in his definition of justice as an artificial virtue.
Man cannot survive without other men and women. Man cannot live without society. Hume at least confesses this much. Hume wants to argue however that natural man can exist in society without creating the bonds and relationships which thereafter exercise independent control over his self-interested ways. In truth, man does not repay the loan because it is in his interest to do so. He repays it because he has created a relationship of trust, in debt to which he stands; and which, if he violates, he commits a crime against that individual. Reason can indeed judge passion. Reason can indeed govern morality.
Hume is quite determined to avoid the above reasoning. Man, in his natural state, Hume insists, simply is not acquainted with the need for other people; nor is he enlightened as to this chain of benefits which he may reap in society. It is necessary, therefore, that nature has supplied man with other causes, namely sexual desire, to originally unite him with another; and therefore Hume follows Locke, in establishing that conjugal society is the origin of sociality.[41] By degrees, the couple produces children, and the rudiments of a family emerge. Yet even this does not make man fitter for larger societies, Hume argues. The reason for this is that man is said to love himself, first, and secondly to love those with whom he has closest blood ties. Not even these things fit men for the larger society, and the ties of justice do not emerge until that larger society does in Hume’s view.[42]
Hume announces that human beings have three classes of goods: the pleasure of their mind, the external advantages of their bodies, and the possessions which they enjoy. None of these goods except the last, according to Hume, is strong enough to make us feel the desirability of a larger society. In accordance with this metaphysics of social origins, Hume argues that it is the possessions that we enjoy which alone are capable of making us appreciate the need for human society, and therewith the conventions of artificial justice that it will entail.
Moreover, Hume does not rank society among the goods that human beings originally feel. As if men cannot feel the inadequacy of their laboring for their solitary selves, and ending up with a surplus of one sort of product only. Hume insists that we do not feel this need for the others in a way sufficient to originate human society. Selfishness, as Plato taught, comes mostly with the provision of plenty.[43] It is when human beings have advanced past the stage of immediate necessity, and towards the category of luxury and delights, where the problem of jealousy, selfishness, enmity, and the need for justice and government emerges. Society however is well established by this time, as it must be; or else every man would be a pauper, and have nothing worth the stealing.
The philosophical movement of which Hume is a part, especially the work of Bernard Mandeville, labors mightily to deny the distinction between need and luxury. Why, Mandeville claims, who is to say what is luxury or what is necessity? We may well observe, in Mandeville’s view, that the victuals needed for sustaining bodily strength qualify as luxuries in some areas. Mandeville equally argues that the most extravagant tastes and preferences may be ranked among the category of absolute necessities, employing a similar logic.[44]
Mandeville, in his Fable of the Bees, presents an unpleasant view of the prospects of society. He is determined to argue that what are known as “vices,” among men privately, serve the category of “public benefits,” or virtues, when we take a larger view of them. Hume labors very much in the same direction: he struggles to make it appear that the nature of justice emerges out of the self-guidance mechanism of selfishness, of our individual preference for our own possessions and their increase. Yet justice is the debt we owe to other people.
Writers like Hume and Mandeville are surely entitled to their view of what an ideal human society might be like. I am entitled to examine their model of an ideal society, to see if it is indeed ideal. I do not think that the life Mandeville envisions for the generality of human beings is one that they would willingly bear. In Mandeville’s utopia, there is a relentless cycle of hard work and hard partying. To attempt to raise a family on such a matrix, would be to summon hell itself. Moreover, human beings value affection and friendship more than the vicissitudes of extremity in pleasure and pain. The utilitarian society that these writers hope to bring about cuts quite against the conservative grain of human nature. Instead, Hume offers us a moral model, that of the knave.[45]
For Hume’s man, the idea of justice is something very abstract. It concerns certain “general rules” that society needs in order to hold together; yet it does not necessarily apply in particular cases. Hume makes the spectacular claim that many just acts are in fact detrimental to the very fabric of society. Thus, the suggestion is that justice can easily be evil. There is hardly a question that could be of more interest to society than this one. Hume has demonstrated to us his own wonderment at the origin of morality: in his view, there must be a non-moral motive underlying the moral motive. Hume’s knave, as he tells us, harbors the view that society in general needs the rules of justice to hold things together, but that this does not mean that any particular violation of these rules must necessarily injure the general rules.[46]
Why ought not the knave to seek to obtain advantage in his transactions when the rules are something that he can devise means to get around in his personal transactions? David Gauthier supposes, and correctly so, that Hume does not think there is a good reason for the knave to observe the rules of justice, so long as his plundering of some limited number of men does not resound in a tumultuous cataclysm for society at large.[47] Hume avers, however, that a man would suffer greatly in his reputation if he were to break social rules in this manner.[48] Yet, this must take us back to the second book of the Treatise, and the discussion of the passions that Hume has provided us with. It insists that pride, pride based in superior possessions vis-a-vis some other, is an original and in fact the original experience of what Hume calls a self. Hume nowhere indicates that this pride is dependent upon just acquisition.
Is this not the point of Hume’s insistence that morality is solely a matter of feelings, and none of “reason”? Hume is attempting to deny to us our ability to base feelings upon knowledge of truth, of truth of fact. If we are to blame someone for doing a foul deed, Hume argues, we must make our accusation entirely against his character, and the unrelenting motives that it harbors; we cannot recur to a transient deed as the basis for our condemnation.[49] In a world governed by such a point of view, it would be a criminal’s paradise. We must suppose that the worst of men have moments when they are not possessed by poisoned motives; as we must allow that the more decent individuals nevertheless can be guilty of immoral judgments and actions. Even more than this, Hume wants to erase our feeling of moral condemnation as if it were a mere “secondary” quality in the objects of atomist metaphysics. These philosophers who argue that the heat is in us, but not in the fire; who argue that the melody originates in our ear, not in the instrument that is played; Hume adds on to this line of argument, that the condemnation we feel upon observing a murder is in us merely, and is no part of the vicious action that has been performed and that we have witnessed.[50]
That thing which is called the distinction between “facts and values” in modern epistemology was greatly developed by Hume. Hume was not the founder of this doctrine, but perhaps he perfected it. It is Hume who makes the distinction between the “is” and the “ought.” The problem resides entirely with the category of the “is.” Ordinary opinion believes that it perceives and knows the actual facts, the reality of external existences. Hume’s philosophy denies that this is possible. Therefore it is the movement that the ordinary individual makes between perception and belief as to external reality, where the domain of the “is” collapses. This is the true object of Hume’s attack in moral philosophy. Where the external facts cannot be known, and from the atomist point of view they cannot be—then the moral emotions that arise in the mind of the individual are simply evidence of some quality in the percipient. When Hume makes his famous argument that there is no way for us to derive knowledge of the “ought” from knowledge of the “is,” he omits to note that his own philosophy has exploded the domain of “what is.”[51]
It is Hume who insists that it is not justified to leave off talking about the “is,” and to commence to talk about the moral attributes of what is, or what ought to be. If we see someone about to step onto an ice-covered lake which we know to be thin and incapable of supporting a person’s weight, this perception constitutes what “is.” To observe this fact therefore, is instantaneously to feel the passion, that we must warn the person not to go any farther; we should, that is, ought to utter this warning, as soon as we have perceived the facts of the situation. Thereby the “ought” emerges effortlessly from the “is,” as the ought emerges always from some truth which we have originally perceived or been informed of.
The attempt to separate the domain of truth from the domain of feeling is the logic which provides Hume’s discussion of justice with its deadening abstractness. Justice for Hume belongs to the category of the “ought.” Accordingly, for Hume, justice belongs to the category of passion, not truth or matter of fact. In the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume formally subordinates justice to the new view of utility. Or is it an old view?
The formation of the doctrine of utility in fact has Epicurean roots as well. The Epicurean cannot admit that there are natural kinds in nature, for to admit that there are natural kinds is to admit that there is intelligence in nature. Hume’s intellective version of religion can go so far as to countenance that there is some order in the universe; but only when he is speaking about the universe as a whole. The universe is not a whole. In other words, the universe is not a single object, with one set of extremities, one nature. The absolutely smallest object in the universe is composed of infinite parts, parts which are not like one another. Yet more importantly, there is a diversity of objects in nature. Always with the atomists, it is the diversity in the objects of nature which is most repudiated. Everything must be reduced to the atoms, to the simple ideas, to the impressions, to the clear and distinct ideas. Everything must be reduced to pleasure and pain, generic categories which obliterate the distinctions between objects in themselves, especially those objects which are good and which are bad. Goodness and badness are opposed objects, opposed forces in the universe. David Hume, when he insists that “vice and virtue, moral good and evil, and indeed all natural qualities, run insensibly into each other,” is a faithful Epicurean.[52]
If, Hume argues, man were to be born into a paradise, where the abundance of goods, and the generosity of men were such that there was no possibility of conflict, justice would be a useless phenomenon. If there is no possibility of conflict, then why any need for justice?[53] Justice would be entirely useless in such circumstances; and therefore it must be regarded as a conditional phenomenon. Nor is this, in Hume’s view the only set of circumstances in which justice is useless.
If human beings should find themselves in conditions of desperation, then men would be pushed towards the more powerful impulses of self-preservation and necessity. In such circumstances, and Hobbes’s state of nature or Machiavelli’s condition of civil war both constitute such predicaments—the value of justice would be swept to the side, as human beings found it useless, and inferior to the passions which rose to the apex of their souls in such dire straits.
It is particularly relevant to examine Hume’s support for the luxurious state in this regard, since it provides us with the parallel of Mandeville’s work. It can be seen in Mandeville’s argument that it is the express intention of the new theory of government to lead the generality of the human race into a style of living where justice is so afflicted with uselessness. It is not merely the submergence of the self in delights which Mandeville’s political economy contemplates; but it is also and equally the tethering of the working majority to circumstances of grinding necessity that is relevant for our discussion.
For Mandeville, the ideal state will rivet the majority of the working population in a veritable vice grip in between these two vectors, and far indeed from the “monkish” virtues that Hume derides with such unremitting severity. That the working individual should have to work hard, everyday, in order to survive, is a given in Mandeville’s system; but that individual must also, in Mandeville’s order, spend everything that he makes, which the new luxury economy can well stimulate.[54] The result is an individual suspended between the phenomenon of grinding labor in the face of scarcity, and unrestrained engorgement of the senses on the delights and extravagances which the luxury economy makes available.
The result is a perfect drone: a life which is tossed to and fro from ecstasy to misery. Of what use justice in this model of government? Justice would no doubt interfere in the individual’s code of relentless labor, with the pursuit of labor unions and collective bargaining agreements and the like. This would ease, rather than intensify, the pangs of necessity in the soul of the worker. Similarly, of what use self-denial, which enable the citizenry to throw off pernicious habits that enslave the human race, such as insolvency, and the general plague of over-indulgence?
It becomes clear in such a situation what Hume indicates by the principle of utility. Not even a promise, or a contract, can Hume suffer to acknowledge as lifting the individual out of his self-interested motives. Whichever individual can be seen to traffic in the soft virtues of benevolence, mercy, easygoingness, lenity, generosity, these are the individuals who are most worthy of admiration in Hume’s version of the utility based society. “Humanity, generosity, charity, affability, lenity, mercy and moderation”: these are the virtues Hume lionizes in the Enquiry Concerning the Principle of Morals and in the Treatise as well.[55] What is foremost for Hume in his enumeration of these virtues is that there be no moral imperative involved. Truth is the desideratum which confers an obligatory nature on the virtues. Truth alone is the reality which makes justice obligatory and sometimes, a burden. Yet truth belongs to the category of the “is” in Hume’s analysis. For Hume, as we have seen, such matters of fact cannot ever be known.
The moral virtues that Hume singles out are about behavior, not motive. For the individual who has learned the lesson that Hume wishes to teach—that moral emotions themselves are physiological disturbances in the individual who feels them—the only morality that is left is conformity, the deflation of emotion, putting a happy face on.
One must think too of Hume’s roster of utilitarian virtues in the context of book II of the Treatise, with its discourse on the passions of human beings. The fundamental passions, and thus the moral vectors of the human personality, are laid upon the foundations of drives for proud superiority. One will notice, that Hume does not single out humility as one of the utilitarian virtues in the ECPM. For humility is shameful by nature, in Hume’s analysis of the passions in the Treatise.
What, then, of these newly baptized virtues of “benevolence” and “humanity”? If they do not bespeak humility, or modesty, or self-restraint, or a feeling of equality with the others, then they must dissolve as all the Epicurean values do into the amorphous, shapeless, almost generic hoppers of pain and pleasure. What exactly is it that Hume finally wishes to indicate by benevolence? It is not, as Hume admits in the Treatise, a true reduction of the principle of vanity that is the substance of his theory of pride. Vanity and pride are the individuals road to happiness, Hume insists; and Hume also allows, that this quality renders men toxic to one another, to such a degree that they must dissemble and conceal their pride with airs of geniality and self-abnegation, which are mere diversions from the actual passions which are contained in their breasts. Hume refuses to yield on his formulations in book II.[56] In this way, Hume argues, when the individual finally does reveal himself, his peers will at least be able to tolerate him.
What dimension of existence is left to “benevolence,” to “utility”? In my view, this is a very repressive principle. It is has been established that the utilitarian movement among Hume and Mandeville seeks to form a culture that has but a limited and auxiliary use for justice. Therefore, the individual in need of justice, who is almost always a plaintiff, can be understood in the following way. He is protesting. His face registers misery and hurt, his address is importuning and impatient. From the vantage point of the disciples of utility how shall they respond to this man? They will glower at him, with barely concealed disdain. He is “raising a stink,” he is exuding unpleasant moral odors, he is neither quietly laboring for the sake of survival nor participating in the general indulgence of the luxury state. He is, in this context, most noxious. His call to justice is an irritant, and Hume has made it clear in the Treatise that the great issues which bestride the public opinion are, effectively all of them, much ado about nothing from the vantage point of the learned philosopher.[57] Humean philosophy of the understanding is a recipe for retarding cultural and intellectual life—for arresting, bridling, deterring thought.
The legacy of the “selfish” philosophers lives on in the Scotsman. In the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume expressly attempts to separate himself from that legacy. Hume makes the argument that human beings feel approval and disapproval, approbation and disapprobation, praise and blame for events and circumstances that have nothing at all to do with self-interest.[58]
It is important to understand the true genesis of Hume’s “general point of view.” Hume insists that we must evacuate any interest that we have in a particular situation in order to be capable of judging it from a truly communal point of view.[59] What does Hume mean by this? Hume, who has made his most powerful arguments to divorce truth from feeling, is certainly not seeking to eliminate self-interest as ordinarily understood from the percipient’s moral register. Self-interest is not always a factor in how we feel; and the ordinary run of human beings knows well enough that a person with a particular ax to grind in any situation, that is, any material interest at stake, or relationship implicated, cannot on that account be trusted to deliver any impartial verdict on the event being considered. What Hume means by individuals deliberately detached from their self-interest, towards the cultivation of a moral point of view, is separation from their very sense faculties themselves. This is why the general point of view must be concerned, not with the point of view we take upon any events that happen near to us, but rather that the entire general point of view must lead us to contemplate remote objects in such a way that we really can’t know the truth of them.[60]
Hume has constructed an argument whereby the passions that an individual feels simply are not eligible to relate to anything other than self-interest. The point of this line of argument in Hume is to sever moral emotion from the political context. It is not true that the individual is incapable of feeling moral emotions that are fundamentally about other people. Indignation is the passion that people experience when they see some individual committing a wrong and getting away with it. From a Humean standpoint, this would be envy. Yet this is not what people mean by the name of envy. For Hume, morality that concerns the public must be entirely dislocated from factual experiences. The individual is held to be accountable in such a way that she must feel in terms that the entire human race can feel along with her, even when they have neither witnessed the relevant facts nor heard testimony concerning them. This is the origin of Hume’s general point of view.[61]
In the second book of the Treatise, Hume has defined what he means by sympathy. Sympathy is a passion, and it is committed to those principles of “human nature” which Hume adumbrates in the first two books. For Hume, the individual who has sympathy cannot help but do so. For this is a biological process, a mysterious instinct of human nature. In Hume’s definition of sympathy, the individual simply absorbs the outward feeling of another individual by a kind of osmosis. It is as if the individual is simply infected or enhanced by the misery or joy of the person in his vicinity. “A cheerful countenance infuses a sensible complacency and serenity in my mind,” Hume writes; “an angry or sorrowful one throws a sudden damp on me.”[62] No knowledge of the truth of fact is involved, in the case of Hume’s theory of sympathy. As such, we don’t, and can’t really know the truth of the situation that the other person is involved in, pace Hume. All we can know is that the way other people feel, outwardly, most externally, seems to rub off on us. Their despair provokes our despair, and therefore our misery. “The passions are so contagious that they pass with the greatest facility from one person to another,” Hume writes, “and produce correspondent movements in all human breasts.”[63] Whereas their joy rubs off on us too, lending pleasant embellishment to our own quality of mood, sympathy has nothing to do with the truth of the other person’s situation, via Hume’s definition; and Hume’s theory of the “general point of view” as unfolded in book III of the Treatise and in the ECPM, is fused to that Humean principle of sympathy.
What does the “general point of view” finally amount to in Hume? It is, in the end, superficiality. Those people who seem content, who bring no turbulent emotions before my view, who seem to be making their companions gleeful, are to this degree causes of my pleasure, and moral approbation. Whereas those persons upon whose countenances I find grimaces, or frowns, or who seem to be arguing with the individuals around them, automatically fall into the category of the unserviceable. These individuals exude an unpleasant quality: they soil the otherwise genial atmosphere which is about the deepest feeling which one is capable of from Hume’s general point of view.
For Hume, wealth itself distinguishes human being into classes of merit. “In short, the different ranks of men are, in a great measure, regulated by riches, and that with regard to superiors as well as inferiors, stranger as well as acquaintance.”[64] As to why, he does not say. It is left for us to infer the causes. It can be none other than selfishness; for there is not any other root of passion available in Hume’s repertoire to give birth to any other source of valuation. The general point of view that Hume unfolds presumes a dazed and dull people. It is the world of entertainment to which Hume’s general point of view beckons. Everybody has a moral obligation to be amused all the time. Those things which are not amusing, or terrifying, since they do not keep the passions at a boil, have no use in Hume’s utopia.
It can be easily seen however that Hume’s general point of view suggests a false depth, a kind of shadow reflectivity, as if those who engaged in it were really taking their souls to some objective moral terrain. This is not possible to do, from any other point of departure except for truth of individual facts. This is not something Hume’s general point of view is compatible with.
In Hume’s book on the passions, the pride of the rich is dependent upon the painful subordination of the rest. “Humility” is the ineluctable passion of the generality of the human race for Hume, and by “humility” Hume indicates degradation. The bounty of the proud wealthy in Hume’s conception of society share nothing in common with the people. When Hume argues that the poor take pleasure in the beautiful objects of the wealthy, certainly there is some truth in this. Yet if there is no other basis for the modestly circumstanced to obtain pride for themselves in the world, this could not be a good thing. In Hume’s calculus, the rich love their wealth; the poor love the rich for their wealth; and the rich love the poor for loving them for their wealth. Despite all of that mathematics, things don’t quite add up.
A Treatise of Human Nature II.i.1, 277.
A Treatise of Human Nature I.iv.1, 183.
A Progress of the Sentiments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991, 79.
A Treatise of Human Nature II.iii.3, 414.
A Treatise of Human Nature II.iii.1.
A Treatise of Human Nature II.iii.1, 404.
A Treatise of Human Nature II.iii.1, 403.
Magna Moralia. In The Complete Works of Aristotle. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984, 1191a18.
Nichomachean Ethics 1117a32. In the Collected Works of Aristotle.
A Treatise of Human Nature II.iii.3, 415.
Nichomachean Ethics 1155a5.
A Treatise of Human Nature II.iii.3, 415.
Amelie Rorty. “‘Pride Produces the Idea of Self’: Hume on Moral Agency.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 68(1990): 255–69.
“Hume on Moral Agency,” 256.
Ibid., 261.
A Treatise of Human Nature II.i.2, 278.
A Treatise of Human Nature II.i.5, 289.
A Treatise of Human Nature II.i.9, 307.
A Treatise of Human Nature II.i.10, 309.
A Treatise of Human Nature III.ii.1.
A Treatise of Human Nature II.iii.3, 415.
A Treatise of Human Nature II.iii,1, 400–403.
A Treatise of Human Nature III.i.1, 457.
Annette Baier. “Hume’s Analysis of Pride.” The Journal of Philosophy 75(1978): 27–40. Also The Cautious Jealous Virtue. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Cf. “Hume on Resentment.” Hume Studies 6(1980): 133–49.
The Cautious Jealous Virtue, 158–59.
Ibid., 156.
Ibid., 158–59.
“Hume on Resentment,” 134.
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 88.
A Treatise of Human Nature III.ii.12, 570.
A Treatise of Human Nature III.i.1, 469.
A Treatise of Human Nature II.iii.3, 416.
“Hume on Resentment,” 134.
A Treatise of Human Nature II.iii.3, 414–16.
A Treatise of Human Nature III.iii.3, 413.
A Treatise of Human Nature III.i.1, 458.
Nichomachean Ethics 1112b12, 1129b27. In The Complete Works of Aristotle. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
A Treatise of Human Nature III.ii.1, 479.
Ibid.
Spinoza. Political-Theological Treatise. In The Complete Works. Chapter 16, 526–29.
A Treatise of Human Nature III.ii.2, 486.
Ibid., 487.
Republic 372e.
Bernard Mandeville. The Fable of the Bees: or Private Vices, Public Benefits. Commentary by F. B. Kaye, volume 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924, 108.
For David Gauthier, Hume’s discussion of the sensible knave reflects the proposition that human beings are incapable of morality. If Hume is an Epicurean of the Machiavellian line, then he certainly has moral motives. These motives concern his personal pleasure and pain. The Machiavellian dimension to Hume’s Epicureanism indicates a will to take, without giving. This would be referred to as injustice by ordinary speech, but a key part of Hume’s acquisition or “taking” is his expropriation of the very moral vocabulary of the community. Hume, in Treatise I, denies that people can know truth of fact. In Treatise II, Hume insists that the will to superior property is the very center of the self. These are Machiavelli’s postulates. “Besides this, human appetites are insatiable, for since from nature they have the ability and the wish to desire all things and from fortune the ability to achieve few of them, there continually results from this a discontent in human minds and a disgust with the things they possess.” Discourses on Livy. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, book 2, chapter 1, 125. In Treatise III, where Gauthier picks up his analysis, justice proves to emanate from self-love. Gauthier’s claim, that “the sensible knave’s message is that human society . . . lacks any moral foundation” (423), overstates the case. Hume has a positive morality, that of acquisition. “Artificial Virtues and the Sensible Knave.” Hume Studies 18(1992): 401–28. Rachel Cohon’s discussion of Hume’s artificial virtue is sympathetic to Hume’s narrative. Virtue, Cohon agrees, is artificial. “Our natural sentiments enable us to cooperate reasonably well with those we love. . . . But, Hume argues, our natural sentiments are too partial to give rise to traits that would allow us to cooperate with those with whom we have no intimate bond.” Hume’s Morality: Feeling and Fabrication. Oxford University Press, 2010, 164. This certainly sounds Humean.
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, chapter 9, 155.
“David Hume: Contractarian.” Philosophical Review 88(1979): 26.
Ibid.
A Treatise of Human Nature III.i.1, 468–69.
A Treatise of Human Nature III.i.1, 468–69.
A Treatise of Human Nature III.i.1, 469.
A Treatise of Human Nature III.ii.6, 530.
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 83–84.
The Fable of the Bees, volume 1, 193.
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 117. In the Treatise, III.iii.3, 603, the list is slightly different.
A Treatise of Human Nature III.iii.2, 597.
A Treatise of Human Nature III.ii.10, 563; cf. Treatise III.ii.5, 521.
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 164–65.
Ibid., 116.
Readers of Hume are at risk for surrendering to the length and difficulty of his arguments. Annette Baier, when she writes that Treatise I is basically irrelevant to Treatise book III, ignores Hume’s express statements. Treatise III.i.1, 455.
Ibid., 115–116. Cf. A Treatise of Human Nature III.iii.3, 603: Yet human beings are not eligible to become disembodied spirits. Nor does this indicate that people are incapable of sharing in a point of view with the others. Truth is what they can perceive in common, and truth is not a personal possession.
A Treatise of Human Nature II.i.11, 317. Cf. Treatise II.i.11, 319.
A Treatise of Human Nature III.iii.3, 605.
A Treatise of Human Nature II.ii.5, 362. Cf. Treatise II.ii.5, 357.