Reply to Radcliffe and Garrett

I thank both my critics for their praise, their searching comments and objections, and their careful attention to my book. In the very short time allotted to respond to them both, I will address their objections in an integrated way, following the order of my book.

Both Elizabeth Radcliffe and Don Garrett protest that for the last twenty years the noncognitivist reading has not dominated Hume scholarship in the way that I suggest when I include it in the common reading of Hume's metaethics. In the book I admit that noncognitivism is not as popular among experts as the other two elements of the common reading, and I discuss the alternatives to it that have been proposed. But most of those who offer such alternatives read Hume as saying that beliefs alone cannot cause passion or action, and that moral judgments alone can and do. These two claims together entail that moral judgments are not beliefs, which is hard to distinguish from noncognitivism or non-propositionalism. So the noncognitivist reading is implicit in more interpretations than it seems.

I try hard in the book to look afresh at Hume's moral psychology, and to resist the pull of the common reading myself in interpreting it. In order to respond to Professor Radcliffe's and Professor Garrett's objections, I must explain a little more of what I do there.

Hume says that pleasure and pain are the sources of most of our motivating passions or affections. (By "motivating passions" I mean those passions that proximally cause action.) These passions are caused not only by the agent's occurrent pleasure and pain, but also by pain and pleasure "conceiv'd merely in idea, and . . . consider'd as to exist in any future period of time" (T 2.3.9.2; SBN 438).¹ In [End Page 277-] particular, beliefs about one's own future pain or pleasure (I call these hedonic beliefs) yield passions that influence the will. (See also T 1.3.10.2; SBN 118-19.) According to the common reading, the only role of a belief in influencing the will is to provide information that directs some already-present passion toward its object. If this were true, then when Hume says that beliefs about pleasure and pain influence the will, he must mean that there is a desire for pleasure and an aversion to pain already in the mind to be directed by such beliefs. Garrett mentioned several ways in which I argue against this interpretation. A further point I make is this one: Hume says that when an idea of pain (for example) becomes enlivened to the point of being a belief, it comes to have the same influence on the passions and the will as does an impression of pain, though in a lesser degree (T 1.3.10.3; SBN 119-20). Now, an occurrent feeling of pain when I touch a hot kettle does not merely provide me with information about how to avoid the object of an independent aversion to pain; rather, it generates an aversion. Hume's hedonism, I think, appeals to the inherent aversive power of felt pain and attractive power of felt pleasure. So if the belief that touching a hot kettle will cause me pain has the same influence on my passions as a present impression of pain, then the belief, too, does not merely provide me with information about the object of an independent passion, but actually causes me to form a new passion.

I also argue that Hume understands reason as a process or mental activity, reasoning. He describes it as one of comparing perceptions and discerning relations between them, finding some ideas to correspond with other impressions (that is, to be true). As an empiricist, he cannot identify the faculty of reason first and then figure out what functions it performs; he must start with what we can observe, which is the comparing and linking of our ideas and finding evident their relations to one another. I propose that when Hume says something is produced or made by reason alone, he means it is produced by a...