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Monkish Virtues, Artificial Lives: On Hume's Genealogy of Morals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Hans Lottenbach
Hans Lottenbach*
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA15260, USA
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Extract

The merchant's toil, the sage's indolence,

The monk's humility, the hero's pride,

All, all alike, find Reason on their side.

(Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle II, 172-4)

Hume's moral philosophy is often interpreted as an example of a naturalistic approach to ethics. J.L. Mackie, for instance, writes that in Hume the questions of moral philosophy are answered ‘in sociological and psychological terms, by constructing and defending a causal hypothesis.’ Similarly, Páll S. Árdal claims that Hume ‘is concerned with an attempt to discover those psychological laws that explain human emotions (including moral emotions) and the behaviour of people in society.’ I argue in this essay that if Hume is read in this way as developing a general explanatory theory of moral sentiments, he faces an inescapable dilemma. Section I presents the dilemma. In sections II and ill, I argue why for Hume — interpreted as a proponent of general psychological laws — there is no way out of this dilemma.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , September 1996 , pp. 367 - 388
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1996

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References

1 Mackie, J.L. Hume's Moral Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1980), 6Google Scholar

2 Árdal, Páll S. Passion and Value in Hume's Treatise (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1989), 2Google Scholar. In the same spirit, Barry Stroud holds that in all his philosophy Hume is concerned with a ‘completely comprehensive empirical investigation and explanation of why human beings are the way they are, and why they think, feel and behave as they do’ (Hume [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1977], 224).

3 Ibid., 2

4 From now on, simply Enquiry. References to Hume's works are given according to the following abbreviations:

T: A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed. Selby-Bigge, L.A. and Nidditch, P.H. eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1978)Google Scholar.

E: Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd ed. Selby-Bigge, L.A. and Nidditch, P.H eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1975)Google Scholar.

AD: A Dialogue (appended to the Enquiries; see edition referred to above).

ES: Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, Miller, Eugene F. ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics 1985)Google Scholar.

D: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Smith, Norman Kemp ed. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1947)Google Scholar.

5 Some people approve of justice even if the ‘circumstances of justice,’ i.e., the circumstances under which justice is useful, are absent (and they may do so not because of a habit first acquired in these circumstances). Such people, for instance, would be shocked by the ‘gentle usage’ Hume envisions for ‘a species of creatures intermingled with men, which, though rational, were possessed of such inferior strength, both of body and mind, that they were incapable of all resistance, and could never, upon the highest provocation, make us feel the effects of their resentment’ (E, 190).

6 See the essays The Epicurean, The Stoic, and The Platonist (ES, 138-58). As we shall see, in these essays Hume parodies perspectives on moral approbation that differ from his own.

7 E.g., E, 174; T, 552; ES, 166 (n. 3).

8 AD, 343; see also E, 270: ‘And as every quality which is useful or agreeable to ourselves or others is, in common life, allowed to be a part of personal merit; so no other will ever be received, where men judge of things by their natural, unprejudiced reason, without the delusive glosses of superstition and false religion.'

9 T, 473ff.

10 E, 307f., n. 2

11 As we shall see, even the approbation of the virtues Hume calls ‘natural’ involves some artifices.

12 For the sake of convenience I will call those mental qualities Hume disapproves of ‘useless or monkish virtues.’ (It is important to keep in mind that this phrase is an epithet of Hume's.)

13 See T, Book II, Section XL

14 In taking moral sentiments to be indirect passions I follow Árdal's interpretation of Hume. See Árdal, ch. 6. This is not the place to defend this interpretation (which allows for a very plausible reading of Hume's remarks about the relation between the paradigmatic indirect passions of pride and humility and the sentiments of moral [dis]approbation). For a contrary view, see Smith, Norman Kemp The Philosophy of David Hume (London: Macmillan 1941), ch. 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Caused by this idea and the ensuing impression of pleasure. (More precisely, the sentiment arises from this impression of pleasure and two distinct ideas: the idea Hume calls the ‘subject’ of the sentiment and the idea he calls its ‘object.’ Hume claims that indirect passions are characterized by a ‘double relation’ between two ideas and two impressions. See T, Book II, Sections IV and V.)

16 This may look obvious given Hume's discussion of unreasonable passions in the Section Of the influencing motives of the will of the Treatise (Book II, Section III). Note, however, that for Hume, ‘properly speaking,’ only judgments (or ideas) and not passions can be unreasonable (T, 416). Moreover, in this Section Hume does not seem to argue that passions with false judgments or ideas in their causal history differ in type from passions caused by true judgments or ideas.

17 Note that ‘inconsistency’ in the passage quoted cannot mean a demonstrable falsehood.

18 According to Hume, all ideas give rise to (secondary) impressions (T, 373).

19 Given his dislike for verbal disputes, Hume would, however, hardly think that simply defining moral approbation as a sentiment of approbation with a particular type of causal history cuts any philosophical ice. Moral approbation, defined in this way, might still be a mistake.

20 In the eighteenth century ‘conversation’ could have a wider meaning than today. In the passage quoted, however, Hume seems to use it in the modem sense. In the parallel passage in the Enquiry he seems to use ‘conversation’ and ‘discourse’ interchangeably. For ‘conversation’ in the wider sense his term appears to be ‘social intercourse’ (E, 228f.).

21 In this essay Hume argues against the conceptions of happiness advocated by the speakers in the essays The Epicurean, The Stoic, and The Platonist (ES, 138-58). I take it that in The Sceptic Hume speaks in his own voice. In defense of this interpretation it must suffice here to point out that the tone and diction of the essay is close to that of the Enquiry and markedly different from the tone of parody in the three preceding essays. That The Sceptic can be used to illuminate Hume's own moral theory seems accepted in the major recent book to emphasize the unity of Hume's works: Baier's, Annette A Progress of Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1991)Google Scholar, ch. 8. For a similar, though slightly qualified, view, see Siebert, Donald T. The Moral Animus of David Hume (London and Toronto: Associated Universities Press 1990), 187-94.Google Scholar

22 I have extracted these criteria from three brief paragraphs in Hume's text.

23 See also Of the Standard of Taste (ES, 233).

24 ‘No man would ever be unhappy, could he alter his feelings’ (ES, 168).

25 Remember the ‘agreeable melancholy’ produced by delicacy of taste (ES, 7).

26 ‘Natural’ must here be read as opposed to ‘artificial.’ It can hardly be opposed to ‘unusual’ or ‘miraculous': in the context of the passage quoted it would be pointless for Hume to emphasize the frequent occurrence of ‘perverse frames of mind.’ That such dispositions are no miracles goes without saying.

27 This autobiography, of course, shows Hume not as a solitary moral judge but as a member of a society in which moral principles serve useful purposes ‘in company, in the pulpit, on the theatre, and in the schools’ (T, 603).

28 ‘Principle’ refers here, of course, not to a moral rule, but to the causal origin of the sense of morals.

29 In this way Hume’ s genealogy differs from the famous Genealogy of Morals, a negative genealogy in which Nietzsche attempts to loosen the hold certain moral notions have on us.

30 Or, less misleadingly, the ‘tolerably virtuous’ person. See the passage quoted at the end of this section.

31 They could, of course, also give a negative genealogy of the Humean ‘virtuous’ disposition. See, for instance, Macintyre, Alasdair Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press 1988), chs. 15 and 16Google Scholar.

32 E.g. ES, 169, 170.

33 Baier, Annette A Progress of Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1991)Google Scholar

34 Ibid., 277

35 Ibid., 215ff. The last is a phrase of Hume's. See T, 620.

36 Baier, A Progress of Sentiments, 217

37 Ibid., 215f.

38 See T, 452.

39 See T, Book II, Section X.

40 E, 279. This remark is, of course, ironic since Hume believes philosophical truths to have very little influence in society.

41 Franklin, Benjamin The Autobiography (New York: First Vintage Books/The Library of America 1990), 35Google Scholar.

For helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay I thank Annette Baier, Jon Mandle, Alec Walen, an anonymous referee of this journal, and, especially, Sergio Tenenbaum.