Moral Judgments in History: Hume's Position

Hume Studies Volume XXII, Number 2, November 1996, pp. 339-367 Moral Judgments in History: Hume's Position S. K. WERTZ "History is but the shadow of ethics." Anonymous Introduction This essay consists of four sections and a conclusion. The first section is a brief description of the problem of moral judgments in history from the standpoint of contemporary analytic philosophy of history. With this context, Hume is introduced into the debate and it is asked where he would stand on this issue. In this second section, his notion of history and conception of moral judgment are examined with an eye on illustrations (such as Hume's account of the fate of Montrose) from the History of England. As Hume's position emerges, it is compared and contrasted with Butterfield's and Collingwood's. Common experience, sympathy, and presensation appear to be the Humean basis of historical understanding. Hume anticipates the Butterfleld-Collingwood theory of historical imaginative reconstruction. Section three continues this argument with a look at various accounts of Cardinal Wolsey—including Hume's and Lord Acton's. The fourth and final section attempts to analyze Hume's crucial concepts of common experience, sympathy, and presensation in light of later theories (Smith, Burke, Dilthey, Freud, Livingston, and Capaldi). My conclusion points to concerns other than those I have dealt with and how the subject could be further developed. S. K. Wertz is at the Department of Philosophy, Texas Christian University, Box 297250, Fort Worth TX 76129 USA. 340 S. K. Wertz One of the long-standing and important issues in the philosophy of history is the permissibility or desirability of moral judgments in written history. The contributions of R. F. Atkinson,1 Herbert Butterfield,2 and Adrian Oldfield3 supply the context for a discussion of David Hume on this issue. What is at stake, of course, is whether or not historians should make such judgments in their narratives. Butterfield (127) thinks that if they do, the narratives lose objectivity and transform the historical enterprise into a new and different one. This sounds very much like a positivistic doctrine, and Butterfield (103) goes on to amend this argument: "the historical realm emerges as a moral one in what we may regard as a higher sense of the word altogether." Unfortunately he does not tell us what that sense is, so we have to try to determine what he means from the clues he provides. The question is not whether or not moral judgments are made, but how they are made—are they either implicit or explicit in the historian's story? Either way their presence demands explanation and argument. Butterfield's argument is primarily directed against Lord Acton's view that pronouncing moral verdicts is central to the task of history.4 Butterfield denies that moral judgments make their appearance in narratives as pronouncements . Rather, he adds: There is one way in which the historian may reinforce the initial moral judgment and thereby assist the cause of morality in general; and that way lies directly within his province, for it entails merely describing, say, the massacre or the persecution, laying it out in concrete detail, and giving the specification of what it means in actuality. It is possible to say that one of the causes of moral indifference is precisely the failure to realise in an objective manner and make vivid to oneself the terrible nature of crime and suffering; but those who are unmoved by the historical description will not be stirred by any pontifical commentary that may be superadded. (Butterfield, 123; emphasis added) So it is by description that the historian communicates or invites moral judgments on the part of the reader. Moral judgments are embedded in narrated actions that move the audience to interpret them. Sounding very much like R. G. Collingwood,5 Butterfield (120) says: "Working upon a given historical event, then, the historian knits around it a web of historical explanation" by way of description.6 Moral judgments are woven into the very fabric of human life, and if history is to adequately reflect that fabric, history will have to possess them. You and I as human beings recognize them in the historian's portrayal...