by Tim Sommers
In honor of “Reading Hume Today,” a conference honoring professor Elizabeth Radcliffe and her work on Hume, here at my new home, the College of William and Mary, I thought I would read Hume today and revisit the topic of my very first 3 Quarks Daily article over five years ago, “Two Sources of Objectivity in Ethics.” (I also highly recommend Massimo Pigliucci’s essay responding to that piece.) However, if you just can’t wait to find out why Hume was in favor of gossip you can scroll down to the last few paragraphs.
What I want to talk about, and find endlessly interesting, is why David Hume, the fourth greatest philosopher of all time, thought morality must be subjective. Every time I return to it, I manage somehow to be surprised by his argument. In particular, what’s striking (to me) is that his argument is based on motivation. Morality must be subjective, he says, otherwise it couldn’t motivate us to action.
In Book II, Part III, Section III of his Treatise on Human Nature (subtitled, “Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects”), Hume sought to put an end “to talk of the combat of passion and reason.” “Reason is, and ought only be,” he famously proclaimed, “the slave of the passions”. He makes a number of striking claims in this section that epitomize this view. Perhaps, most shockingly he says, “It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”
Here’s his line of reasoning, I think. (As befits the fourth greatest philosopher of all time there are many, many other readings of Hume.)
(1.) The wrongness of an act must be, in some sense, in us and not in the world. Suppose you witness a robbery or an assault. When the police arrive you give them a complete physical description of everything that happened. But suppose they ask, “Was what happened wrong?” and you say, “Yes.” Where was the wrongness, then? It doesn’t appear in your initial description of events. Where does it come from then?
From us, one might think.
(2.) If the wrongness of an act is in us, it must either be a matter of reasoning and belief or of motives and desires. Hume argues that when it comes to human psychology, at a high enough level of abstraction, everything fits under the umbrella of either reason or desire.
(3.) Wrongness must, at least to some extent, motivate us. For morality to do its work, it must motivate. If we say something is good or bad, that means, at least in part, that we are attracted or repelled by it.
(4.) Reason alone can never be an influencing motive of the will. Reason alone never motivates. I think Hume as a couple of different arguments for this. One is that if you follow any chain of reasoning that you think motivates, you will find at bottom a desire doing the real work. The other is that reasoning is either about “relations of ideas” (math and logic, roughly) or “relations of objects” (cause and effect, probabilistic reasoning, etc.), and neither of these motivate on their own.
Therefore, (5.) Since wrongness must motivate, and reason can’t, the distinction between “wrong” and “right” must be made via desires and not reason.
At the conference, philosopher Katharina Paxman, in a paper entitled “Hume as Affectivity Theorists,” argued that Hume’s role as a seminal theorist of “emotions” has been underappreciated. As I understood the argument, Hume was one of the main sources of the modern understanding of emotions. Paxman also argued that for Hume emotion, or some form of affectivity, underlies every aspect of our psychology.
But this seems to be contradicted by Hume’s resort to “reason alone” in the argument above. If there is no such thing reason alone, what happens to this, one of Hume’s core, arguments? Or, my preferred line, if there is an affective component to reason, maybe that can do the motivating in which ever direction reason points.
I don’t want to put words in her mouth, but I think that (one thing) Paxman said is that, even if reason always has some affect in the background, Hume can make due for his argument with the idea that the reason part (reason alone not in not being concurrent with some affect, but in not making use of it) is obviously not doing the motivating in the relevant kinds of cases.
Philosopher Rachel Cohon gave a surprising and amusing talk on “The Role of Gossip in Hume’s Artificial Virtues.” I can’t do it justice in such a short space, but I’ll try. Hume thinks that some virtues, like sympathy and benevolence, have a natural, obvious, first-order source, but that other virtues require a substructure of institutions or conventions. No promising without conventions, maybe even without rituals about what constitutes promising. No property without a regime or system of property. Even “female chastity,” greatly prized by Hume, requires background social conventions.
Cohon’s fascinating argument is that gossip plays a positive role in establishing and enforcing the artificial virtues. With female chastity, the point of virtue is to assure male paternity. “People think marital fidelity would be a good idea,” Professor Cohon says, “but they wouldn’t be able to make it a common practice without gossip (because the temptations to be unfaithful would be great and infidelities could be hidden). Once it becomes a practice, then people will notice that it works – husbands are supporting children as a result – and they will approve, making conjugal fidelity a moral requirement. Gossip will then also provide enforcement of the moral rule.”
Hume thinks it’s dangerous to mess with the conventions undergirding the artificial virtues, but how might one attempt to change some of the conventions surrounding our version of female chastity? Maybe, the way to change that regime is also through gossip, either changing the narrative (about fault or consent, for example) or by refusing to gossip at all (no “slut shaming,” Cohon suggested).
Perhaps, I am too optimistic, but this may be what is happening right now.
___________________________________________________
For a complete list of scholars at the conference, see the link to the program at the top. I have surely made mistakes in trying to summarize the arguments of scholars writing for scholars (not to mention Hume), so if something here is wrong, it’s on me and, if you catch it, please, let me know. In fact, thanks to Professor Cohon for corrections on an earlier draft.