Hume draft...

I've been writing most of the morning on Hume (though I was a good husband and broke away for lunch with the wife)

 

Here's the biggest coherent chunk...

 

In book three, part one, section one, of A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume argues that reason alone cannot distinguish, "betwixt moral good and evil."¹ In this paper I will walk through Hume’s argument discussing what it means. I will then interject some problems or questions that could be asked–as points of challenge and clarification that one might ask of Hume’s claim. Following this I will try to defend Hume’s argument to these challenges. My hope is to help clarify and expand on one way of reading and responding to Hume.

Hume begins his argument talking about perceptions. To Hume, the only thing the mind does is perceive. This includes judgements of good and evil–"to approve of one character, to condemn another, are only so many different perceptions." Perceptions take the form of either impressions or ideas. This leads Hume to ask how we can make moral judgements–how do actions take the form of good or bad, right or wrong, just or unjust? Are these qualities that are unconditional, eternal, and unchanging; which all rational beings can find? Hume notes that some have made such a claim, that morality is like truth and can be determined by ideas through reason–such that it would be true even to a deity. This would leave us to base judgments of good and evil on ideas rather than perceptions which is contrary to Hume claims.

To resolve this question Hume begins by commenting that common experience finds humans compelled and moved to action merely from duty, obligation, and standards of justice and injustice; that this is why morals are seen as a project of practical rather than speculative philosophy. Hume argues that this leaves us no choice but to see that morals rather than reason have influence on actions and affections. If reason alone cannot derive moral rules it is an "inactive principle," and "[a]n active principle can never be founded on an inactive [one]."

Hume notes that earlier in the Treatise on Human Nature, he has backed up this claim that reason is "perfectly inert," with a number of arguments and state that he is therefore only reviewing in this section one arguments why this claim is true. Here, Hume points out that reason is a process to find truth and falsehood. Dealing with relations of ideas, real existence, and facts; reason applies solely to questions of truth and falsehood with, "no reference to other passions, volition's, and actions." If reason only applies to questions of true and false one cannot find moral distinctions of good or bad, nor can one praise or blame the actions of someone based on reason alone. If reason is inactive, one cannot found morals or principles on it, as these principles and claims are dynamics of active passions. Why is this so? To find out, Hume considers a "what if."

What would it mean for reason to have an influence on our conduct? It can only happen in two ways says Hume: (1)when it excites a passion by informing us of the existence of something which is a proper object of it; (2) when it discovers cause and effect and makes such connections. But as Hume points out, these judgments can sometimes be false. Such an error, if reason could influence the passions, would therefore, often lead one to passions and actions that would be unreasonable due to their falsehood. But looking at the real world these kinds of errors of fact are seen as quite innocent and leaves no sense of shame or feelings of immorality on the guilty party. Errors of fact do not speak to the moral character of people–can these truly be the source of all immorality?

 

Posted via email from Jim Nichols