Passions, Promises and Punishment (review)

Hume Studies Volume XXVI, Number 1, April 2000, pp. 195-197 PÕ LL S. Õ RDAL. Passions, Promises and Punishment. Edited by Mikael M. Karlsson and Jorundur Gudmundsson. Reykjavik: University of Iceland Press, 1998. Pp. 256. ISBN 9979-54-348-5. For all of us who have had our understanding of Hume's thought deepened by Páll Õ rdal's ground-breaking work on the centrality of Hume's theory of the passions, it is a great pleasure to have these essays gathered in this volume. The editors are to be thanked for making them all available together, and for including Fred Wilson's substantial essay on Õ rdal's work as an introduction. There are fifteen papers in the collection. Part I contains three essays on punishment and sympathy; Part II comprises six essays on the nature of promises; and Part III consists of six essays on Hume. While it is most appropriate for readers of this journal that I concentrate on the papers in Part III, I begin with brief comments on some of the others. "Some Reflections upon a Standard Definition of Punishment" is a critique of H. L. A. Hart, and a warning against using legal punishment as a paradigm for all forms of it. "Does Anyone Deserve to Suffer?" is a stimulating argument against the common belief in what Butler called "ill-desert"—the belief that the wicked, just by being that way, merit suffering (here or in Hell). One can, as Õ rdal says, qualify this belief by denying that anyone is entitled to inflict the suffering; but Õ rdal is against the core belief itself. I only wish this piece were longer, and that he had said something in it about the natural correlative thesis that virtue ought always to be its own reward. In "Of Sympathetic Imagination," he argues for the moral centrality of sympathy, indicating the importance of it in the moral systems of Hume and Adam Smith. He points out some of the inadequacies of Hume's account, while omitting, strangely, the importance sympathy has in his system for the generation of justice, through making us conscious of the effects of unjust behavior on others. The six essays in Part II give us a detailed and resourceful theory of the nature of promises, a theory that includes perceptive criticisms of Hume's position on this issue (see particularly essay 7, "Hume and Reid on Promise, Intention and Obligation"). The essence of Õ rdal's own analysis, presented at the outset of the first essay ("And That's a Promise") is that promises are statements of intention that need not involve the use of the word "promise" in order to be made. This qualification is important in view of the disproportionate attention given to promissory locutions in the wake of Austin's treatment of performative utterances. Õ rdal sums the point up nicely when he says that " ' "I promise" does not make a statement' does not entail 'promises are not statements'" (75). In order to derive the obligatoriness of promises from artifice, Hume attacks the opposing view that this obligatoriness is natural. He does this by Volume XXVI, Number 1, April 2000 196 Book Reviews saying that if it were, promises would express either resolutions or desires or volitions; each view leads to absurdities. Since there is no independent motive to entrench promise-keeping other than the sense of duty, its obligatoriness has to be derived from convention. His account typically centers upon the commercial interest we all have in the institution of making undertakings on which others can rely; this institution comes to have a moral dimension attached to it in the same way that other forms of justice do. Õ rdal rightly parts company with Hume by denying that the promising convention, and its obligatoriness , attaches to the use of a particular form of words. His own view that the force of the convention attaches to a special class of statements of intention is an undoubted improvement on Hume's view (though his modifications on pages 128-31 must be noted). Altogether, this group of essays amounts to a monograph of high quality on a basic social practice, graced with many wise and humane observations. The...