Hume's Difficulty with the Virtue of Honesty

Hume Studies Volume XXIII, Number 1, April 1997, pp. 91-112 Hume's Difficulty with the Virtue of Honesty RACHEL COHON In Book III, Part ii of the Treatise Hume makes the following claims about the virtue of equity, or honesty with respect to property: ...it may be establish'd as an undoubted maxim, that no action can be virtuous, or morally good, unless there be in human nature some motive to produce it, distinct from the sense of its morality. (T 479)1 'Tis requisite, then, to find some motive to acts of justice and honesty, distinct from our regard to the honesty; and in this lies the great difficulty. (T 480) ...we have no real or universal motive2 for observing the laws of equity, but the very equity and merit of that observance; and as no action can be equitable or meritorious, where it cannot arise from some separate motive, there is here an evident sophistry and reasoning in a circle. Unless, therefore, we will allow, that nature has establish'd a sophistry, and render'd it necessary and unavoidable, we must allow, that the sense of justice and injustice is not deriv'd from nature, but arises artificially, tho' necessarily from education, and human conventions. (T 483) Although our topic is honesty, we should note that later Hume offers an intentionally parallel claim about the virtue of fidelity to promises: Rachel Cohon is at the Department of Philosophy, Stanford University, Stanford CA 94305-2155 USA. email: cohon@leland.stanford.edu 92 Rachel Cohon Now 'tis evident we have no motive leading us to the performance of promises, distinct from a sense of duty. If we thought, that promises had no moral obligation, we never shou'd feel any inclination to observe them...it follows, that fidelity is no natural virtue, and that promises have no force, antecedent to human conventions. (T 518519 )3 The Difficulty What we seem to see here is a set of contradictory claims: 1. Honesty is a virtue. (This is implicit, since Hume's intent in discussing honesty at all is to show that "some virtues...produce pleasure and approbation by means of an artifice" [T 477].) 2. For every virtue there is in human nature some nonmoral motive— some motive distinct from moral approval and disapproval (the "sense of virtue" or the "sense of duty")—that characteristically motivates actions expressive of that virtue and that, by eliciting our approval, renders virtuous the actions so motivated. 3. There is no morally approved, virtue-imparting, nonmoral motive of honest action. The only approved, reliable motive of honest action that we can find is a moral one, the sense of virtue or "regard to the honesty" of the actions. (2) and (3) together imply the negation of (1). As Hume points out, the three propositions also jointly generate a vicious definitional circle, discussed below. But Hume does not conclude from this that (1) is false—that honesty is not a virtue. Instead, he somehow infers from these claims that honesty is artificial (the product of human invention), not natural. Since Hume asserts (2) and (3) in close proximity, one might well ask how he ultimately reconciles these incompatible claims. Since Hume introduces them in the course of providing "a short, and, I hope, convincing argument" that honesty is one of the "virtues that produce pleasure and approbation by means of an artifice or contrivance, which arises from the circumstances and necessities of mankind" (T 477), one might ask how the artificiality of honesty is supposed to follow from these mutually inconsistent claims. And since Hume himself draws dramatic attention to the circle or "sophistry," one might expect him to tell us how that may be avoided. The answers to these questions do not leap easily from the text. How does Hume solve his "great difficulty" with the virtue of honesty? In what follows I offer an interpretation that answers these questions. According to it, the circle and the contradiction result, on Hume's view, from Hume Studies Hume's Difficulty with the Virtue of Honesty 93 a misapplication of some of our ordinary moral concepts; and the moral sentiment plays a motivating role in the...