3 - Morals and Politics

Summary

In this chapter, we turn to Hume's treatment of morals and politics, areas in which the imagination looms large, although one would hard hardly know it from the secondary literature, much of which tends either to gloss over the issue or ignore it entirely. Hume regards morals and politics as two sides of the same coin – and for that reason it makes sense to consider them in the same chapter – though, as an exegetical matter, it is possible to disentangle the two and trace the way he draws on the imagination in each case. On the side of morals, the faculty is implicated in the process of moral judgement through which virtue and vice and their attendant sentiments are constituted, a process that depends in turn on the capacity to sympathise with others and the ability to put oneself in the disinterested attitude that Hume calls the ‘general point of view’, both desiderata furnished by the imagination. The capacity to sympathise depends on the mimetic power of the faculty to copy the sentiment of the other as an idea in the observer; its productive power to draw connections between the object (the sentiment in the other) and the observer; and the capacity to feel the pleasure that sympathetic connection with others produces. The ‘general point of view’ relies on the imagination to produce an ideal standard from which to reflect upon and correct the consequences of partiality and prejudice.

On the side of politics, the imagination makes an appearance in two ways. First, in its preference for the contiguous over the remote, the faculty encourages short-term gain over long-term interests; the result is an ongoing threat to social order, a problem for which the imagination also provides the solution in the form of the general point of view and reflection, from which arise the institutions and various contrivances that ensure furtherance of the public good. Imagination also enters, second, to explain the rules that determine property. These, too, arise with a view to public utility, but are only possible through the tendency of the imagination to make as easy a transition as possible among its ideas, and its power to invent a vulgar fiction that inspires a firstorder natural belief.