Emotions & Morals, pt. 3: David Hume -- British Sense Theorists

Francis Hutcheson importantly influenced fellow Scot David Hume, although Hume would argue against Hutcheson's particular view of benevolent affections (see prior post on Hutcheson here). Before analyzing closely some places where Hume's moral theory differs from that of his mentor Hutcheson, what, first, is the main area of agreement between them?

Hume, like Hutcheson, believed that reason alone does not motivate human action in the necessary way.  Professor MacIntyre explains:

Moral judgments, so Hume argues, cannot be judgments of reason because reason can never move us to actions.  Reason is concerned either with relations of ideas, as in mathematics, or with matters of fact. Neither of these can move us to act.  We are moved to act not by this or that being the case, but by the prospect of pleasure or pain from what is or what will be the case.  It is the passions and not reason which are aroused by the prospect of pleasure or pain. Reason can inform the passions as to whether the object they seek exists and so as to what the most economical and effective means of seeking it may be.  But reason cannot judge or criticize the passions.  It follows without paradox that "'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger."  For reason cannot in any sense adjudicate between the passions.  "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." (MacIntyre, Short History of Ethics,169; quoting Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, II.3.3)

It is important to see that, on the one hand, Hume agrees with Hutcheson that affections, or in his language "passions," motivate actions: "Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality therefore, are not conclusions of our reason" (Hume, THN, III.1.1, para. 6). On the other hand, contra Hutcheson, Hume believes that the passions are oriented to and are "aroused by the prospect of pleasure or pain."

What, then, grounds moral judgments?  For Hume, feeling fosters approbation.  Reason has limited powers, a major point that Hume makes in his Treatise of Human Nature.  MacIntyre summarizes Hume's view in this way:

We cannot discover the ground for moral approval or disapproval in any distinctions or relations of the kind that reason can grasp. ... "To have the sense of virtue is nothing but to feel a satisfaction of a particular kind from the contemplation of a character.  The very feeling constitutes our praise or admiration."  (MacIntyre, Short History of Ethics, 169-70; quoting Hume, THN, III.1.2)

Hume also gives pride of place to sympathy as a channel through which the pleasing sense of morals works:

It follows, that sympathy is the source of the esteem, which we pay to all the artificial virtues [by which Hume means virtues that depend on a human convention; they are not less important than the "natural" virtues].
          Thus it appears, that sympathy is a very powerful principle in human nature, that it has a great influence on our taste of beauty, and that it produces our sentiment of morals in all the artificial virtues. From thence we may presume, that it also gives rise to many of the other virtues; and that qualities acquire our approbation, because of their tendency to the good of mankind. (THN, III.3.1)

David Hume (1711-1776)

In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751, rev. 1777), which he regarded as his finest writing, Hume summarizes the heart of his moral theory:  "The hypothesis which we embrace is plain. It maintains, that morality is determined by sentiment. It defines virtue to be whatever mental action of quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation; and vice the contrary" (EPM, Appendix I).  He also says elsewhere in the Enquiry, including a notion of utility observed earlier in Hutcheson, that "every quality of the mind, which is useful or agreeable to the person himself or to others, communicates a pleasure to the spectator, engages his esteem, and is admitted under the honourable denomination of virtue or merit" (EPM, 9.1).

Don Garrett rightly highlights in his new book the fourfold classification of virtues in Hume's thinking: those that are (1) useful to the possessor, (2) useful to others, (3) immediately agreeable to the possessor, and (4) immediately agreeable to others (see Garrett, Hume, p. 258). This view of morality reflects Hume's decided humanism. As J. B. Schneewind explains, "Hume’s idea was that the human world could be explained not in terms of the working of reason but in terms of the working of feeling. This insight, he thought, called for a revolution in our understanding of humanity" ("Introduction," in Hume, Enquiry, p. 5).

In Appendix I of the second Enquiry, Hume provides a vivid example of what he means.  Regarding the Roman statesman Cicero's speeches against Verres or Catiline, Hume writes:

The orator may paint rage, insolence, barbarity on the one side; meekness, suffering, sorrow, innocence on the other. But if you feel no indignation or compassion arise in you from this complication of circumstances, you would in vain ask him, in what consists the crime or villainy, which he so vehemently exclaims against? ... No satisfactory answer can be given to any of these questions, upon the abstract hypothesis of morals; and we must at last acknowledge, that the crime or immorality is no particular fact or relation, which can be the object of the understanding, but arises entirely from the sentiment of disapprobation, which, by the structure of human nature, we unavoidably feel on the apprehension of barbarity or treachery. (Hume, EPM, Appendix I)

However much we may still have questions about Hume's moral philosophy, including the relation of agreeableness and utility in it -- not to mention  questions about its source of normativity in distinction from its explanatory adequacy -- it strikes me that Hume has a point about the directness with which moral sense is connected with emotional response.

A partial explanation may be that Hume's moral philosophy is based on his ontology of perception:  Moral matters do not create an "impression" in the mind.  If humans do not have a sense organ that can detect virtue, since virtue is not something, for instance, like a physical tree that can be perceived by the eyes, then reason, which processes the visual stimuli, cannot be involved in virtue's discernment in the same way.  We must have a moral sense separate from reason that processes moral stimuli.  

This moral sense, which makes us responsive to moral qualities, may be trained and directed, both by cultivating superior character (e.g., after exhortations and imitation of virtue in others), and by benevolent and beneficial conventions of society (e.g., honoring promises and esteeming chastity). The passions are not wild and unrestricted. Sentiment in this sense dictates what is morally good or bad. Pleasures and pains, not rational ranking of consequences, are the moral sentiments that serve as the ultimate source of moral judgments. "While the consequences of actions typical of a mental trait play a crucial role in determining whether the trait will be approved by the moral sense," Don Garrett explains, "it is the moral sense itself, not the balance of consequences, that is the source of moral evaluations, and that sense fundamentally evaluates characters, not consequences" (Hume, p. 279). It is those sentiments of pleasures and pains that -- to some degree, and especially through sympathy -- causally influence volition in moral belief, action, and judgment.

As we will see, sympathy also plays a central role in the moral theory of Hume's good friend to whom we turn next, Adam Smith.