Emotions & Morals, pt. 5a: Reflections -- British Sense Theorists

Since introducing this short series of posts on the interplay between emotions and morals, I have taken a brief look at how the major British moral sense theorists -- Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith -- addressed that question. It is now time for some reflections, which I will break up into two parts.

Each of the moral theories of these thinkers is subject to critique.  It is worthwhile to mention some limitations.  For the most part, however, I want to focus on what I think is perceptive and valuable in these theories and to note some areas that I think deserve additional consideration both in their own right and in their potential application to life.

1) Hutcheson

Let me begin with Francis Hutcheson.  His view, to recall, is that we have a moral sense (a special faculty) that responds to actions that we interpret as traits of character; we approve as morally good those actions that we perceive according to this sense reflect benevolence, and we disapprove of the opposite, namely, self-interest.  Hutcheson believes that humans are benevolent by nature, innately.  In some way, therefore, Hutcheson is affirming that we approve morally what we are wired as humans both to do and to find, out of good will, genuinely beneficial to others.

The chief value, I think, in Hutcheson's theory is his recognition, although he would use different terms, that the human psychological apparatus is keenly involved in our perception of, response to, and thinking about moral matters.  Feelings connect to ideas.  Both are involved in judgments.  To understand human moral reasoning, we might say, we need to understand also human modes of perception and feeling, and we need to explore the link between feelings and ideas.  Cognitive psychology and neuroscience should have a seat, along with other disciplines, at the table of moral philosophy.

In large part Hutcheson's moral system depends on his belief (assumption?) that humans are innately benevolent.  It is interesting to note, by the way, that Hume's first major work was titled A Treatise on Human Nature -- and it is primarily human nature (or our psychological composition) against which he and Hutcheson before him seek to elucidate morality. Recently Paul Bloom has attempted in Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil (2013) to offer experimental evidence in support of a view of human nature similar to Hutcheson's that has moral implications:  a natural goodness is corruptible by socialization to culture and stereotypes, yet reason can be employed to overcome our emotional inclinations. The evidence that he adduces and the arguments he makes may not prove innate goodness conclusively, and I am unsure what Hutcheson would say in response to Bloom's equal optimism in human reason to overcome naturally benevolent inclinations that have been corrupted.  Still, one can see in the work of Bloom and other psychologists the long shadow of Hutcheson.

We also see in Hutcheson what might be an ever-present matter to answer in ethics, namely, psychological egoism, which posits that human nature is (entirely) self-interested and that human actions are motivated by that self-interest.  Hume and Smith ride in some ways Hutcheson's argumentative coat tails in rejecting the descriptive form of egoism and in building their moral views on a more optimistic observation of human intentions and other-oriented actions.  More generally, Hutcheson's campaign against Hobbesian egoism reminds us that any satisfactory moral theory must account for counter-evidence.  A theory based on innate human benevolence must explain acts that seemingly tell against that tendency, and a theory based on innate self-interest must explain acts that seemingly point to altruism or benevolence as the motivation.

2) Hume

As I was reading David Hume, I could not help but be, well, skeptical about his claim that he wished his mature ethical view to be judged by his Enquiry on the Principles of Morals rather than by his more detailed discussion on morals in A Treatise of Human Nature.  Of course, the latter was his earliest major writing, and he continued to revise the second Enquiry up until shortly before his death. That Enquiry was meant for more public consumption, and it reads that way in its treatment of various virtues and vices, as well as its demonstration of Hume's classical learning. Still, much as he wished his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion to be published only posthumously because of his more overt attack in it on religious doctrine, I wonder if he also really endorsed the more potentially upsetting views to the religious establishment of his day that he voiced in the Treatise.

Alasdair MacIntyre does not address this subject per se in his introduction to a collection of Hume's ethical writings, but he does helpfully illustrate some tensions between the Treatise and the second Enquiry by juxtaposing two passages and commenting on their differences:

“In general, it may be affirm’d, that there is no such passion in human minds, as the love of mankind, merely as such, independent of personal qualities, of services, or of relation to ourself.” (Treatise III, ii, l, p. 207.) “It appears also, that, in our general approbation of characters and manners, the useful tendency of the social interests moves us not by any regards to self-interest, but has an influence much more universal and extensive. It appears that a tendency to public good, and to the promoting of peace, harmony, and order in society does always, by affecting the benevolent principles of our frame, engage us on the side of the social virtues.” (Enquiry V, ii, p. 76.) That is, in the Enquiry, a native disposition to sympathy and benevolence is the effective basis of moral judgment and action. While in the Treatise there is a problem as to how, granted that by nature we are not disposed to the public good, we nonetheless have developed a morality in which the public good is given priority over the private. ("Introduction," in Hume's Ethical Writings, p. 15)

Hume may partially answer that problem through his, to my eye, greater emphasis on utility in the Enquiry than in the Treatise.  In the Treatise, utility appears, especially in conjunction with his discussion of justice and property (i.e., social virtues), which are after all public goods as Hume conceived them.  But utility as a basis for moral assessment, along with the pleasure received from an action and how that pleasure is useful, seems to me more prominent in the Enquiry.

First, this alerts us to an important point. Whether for political reasons or personal change of mind (which is naturally enough for anyone to make over time), Hume's ethical writings contain tensions at the core.  In this case, it is the ambiguity surrounding the mechanism by which we approve of actions that are pleasing to and beneficial to others and not only to ourselves.  Second, although I think that Hume would not be altogether pleased by or see the benefit in the rise after his death of the ethical theories of emotivism and utilitarianism, I cannot help but see him as one of their progenitors.  The explication of this surmise, however, would be better left for another time.

3) Smith

Both Adam Smith and Hume interpret perceived moral actions as traits of character.  This is remarkable for at least two reasons.  One is that it suggests to me, as I have written about previously, how quickly (maybe instinctively) we typically assign greater weight to dispositional influences on people's motives and actions than we do to circumstantial influences. If someone says something that we judge (or feel) to be kind, then a common human response is to attribute goodness to that person, to her character, to who she is more than we attribute the kind action to some supervenient circumstance.  It may be hasty to do so.  If this so-called fundamental attribution error is a default function of human psychology, then at the very least it points to the need in moral philosophy to disentangle, if only for analytic purposes, virtuous acts from virtuous people. Even motives must be checked, motives as prompted by certain situational factors and motives as reflecting a cultivated, habituated disposition.

Kongzi, a.k.a. Confucius (551-479 BCE)

Smith's and Hume's respective observations that we interpret morally approved or disapproved actions as traits of character are interesting for a second reason.  If that is an accurate description of regular human moral and psychological processes, then it points to our human preoccupation with not just virtues but also virtuous people.  This is the flip-side of the first point.  It really is important to us that people act out of something deeper than situational prompts.  For us, what is virtuous, what really counts as morally good, reflects something imprinted on the human core, with that "imprint" being the literal meaning of the Greek word character.  The idea of being what you routinely or habitually do, or the idea of doing routinely or habitually that which reflects who you really are at your core, is an idea that goes back at least to Aristotle and Kungzi (Confucius).  It is also an idea that, suggested by its philosophical (and religious) staying power, seems right.

(As a total aside, I sort of see Hume's moral philosophy as a blend of virtue ethics and proto-utilitarianism, with a bit of skepticism about the powers of reason mixed in -- something of a blend of Kungzi/Xunzi and Mozi, with a bit of Zhuangzi.)

Smith's most vital contribution to moral theory is perhaps his development and emphasis of  sympathy and imaginative exchange.  On the one hand, in our lives, getting outside of ourselves and failing to enter into the thoughts, feelings, and experience of others is a chief cause not only of relational conflict but also stunted personal development.  Smith had a bead on this.  We see it manifested in his concern for social cohesion and interpersonal harmony.

Aristotle (384-322 BCE)

On the other hand, the strength and attraction of this (what I might call) contextualist approach to ethics makes it susceptible to an adverse and protean particularism.  By particularism I mean a view that pertains to one's local, cultural, or ethnic group.  The impartial spectator notwithstanding, such an oscillating imaginative exchange as Smith describes and endorses -- a sympathy whose use is social cohesion -- could lead to the sort of ethical contingency advocated by Richard Rorty in which we have “nothing to be responsible to except persons and actual or possible historical communities” ("Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism" in Pragmatism, ed. L. Menand, p. 330).

I previously commented on Rorty's position in my post "Rorty and Kant on Ethics," and it is perhaps fitting, in retrospect, that I compared his view with that of Immanuel Kant's.  I say fitting because Smith also saw the tendency of humans to generalize into rules those behaviors that were observed to be frequently practiced and widely approved.  Smith left the rule specifications somewhat ambiguous, appealing to self-command as a necessary virtue to navigate through the particular complexity.  Where Smith left room for individual judgment within the rules formulated, Rorty removes the rules, and Kant absolutizes them.  In this respect, akin to Hutcheson, Smith's moral theory casts a long shadow over subsequent ethical thought. It may reflect a weakness of sense approaches to morals, namely, a strong tendency is seemingly to evacuate rules from the scheme, as in egoism, or seemingly to reify them, as in Kantianism and utilitarianism.  This weakness may stem from lingering questions about what grounding, if any, there really is for moral judgments, that is questions about the source of normativity.

Having offered some reflections specific to each of these three Scottish philosophers, let me now turn in the final post in this series to moral musings of a more general nature about the relation of emotions to ethics.