A Very Brief Summary of Hume's Morality: Feeling and Fabrication

Earlier versions of the four articles which follow were presented at a book panel session, on Rachel Cohon's Hume's Morality: Feeling and Fabrication, at the Hume Society meetings in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in August 2009.

I am deeply grateful to Lívia Guimarães and Donald L. M. Baxter for planning this session, and to Elizabeth S. Radcliffe and Don Garrett for serving as my critics. I have been asked to begin by summarizing my book in a few minutes.

Hume's Morality: Feeling and Fabrication (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), is primarily an analytical, interpretive work about two main issues: the nature of ethical evaluation, according to Hume, and the artificial virtues. The book has two parts: "Feeling Virtue" and "Fabricating Virtue." In the first, I reinterpret Hume's moral psychology, and argue that for Hume our basic grasp of moral good and evil is a direct apprehension by feeling, but one that gives rise to truth-apt moral beliefs. In the second, I reinterpret Hume's distinction between the natural and artificial virtues in a way that explains and resolves the paradoxes and puzzles Hume finds in analyzing them.

In the first chapter I set out, in slightly exaggerated form, what I take to be the common reading of Hume on moral judgment and the nature of moral properties. This reading is what most philosophers and other scholars imbibed in our graduate education, and it retains some influence over us—myself included—even though many of us now reject some of its parts. It includes three theses that are attributed to Hume:

1. 1. belief alone cannot move us to act,

2. 2. evaluative propositions cannot be validly inferred from purely factual propositions, and

3. 3. moral judgments lack truth value.

Most philosophers who are not Hume scholars attribute all three of these claims to Hume. So do some Hume scholars. I know that many of you in the audience do not attribute one or two of them to him. But it's rare for anyone to claim that Hume held none of them.

In my first chapter I grant that there is textual evidence for Hume's acceptance of each these theses. But I argue that if Hume is committed to them, and in the ways he seems to be in the texts, then his moral philosophy as a whole is riddled with errors, puzzles, and contradictions. I have never seen (nor devised for my-self) any interpretation that preserved the common reading yet eliminated those problems; so in the next few chapters I develop an alternative interpretation that finds in Hume a more coherent moral philosophy. In doing this, I find that Hume holds none of the three theses.

Chapter 2 is about what is usually called motivation to action. I consider two possible ways to interpret the roles of pleasure and pain, desire and aversion, in Hume's account of the causation of passions and intentional actions: the Background Impulse Model and the Spontaneous Creation Model. I conclude that even on the most subtle interpretation of the text, for Hume beliefs about available pleasure and pain can cause new motivating passions, and are not limited merely to directing existing passions. But if they can, then why is reason alone not a motive to the will, and why are moral distinctions not derived from reason?

I work out answers to these questions in Chapter 3. "Reason" for Hume is the name of a type of process or activity, one of comparing perceptions and finding relations between them. Given the nature of this process, no new impression can be its outcome. When he says no passion or action can be produced by reason alone, he means none can be produced by a reasoning process without another process. Passions are made by a different process, even when they are caused by beliefs about pleasure or pain without any independent causal assistance from a prior passion. Furthermore, the process of discerning the difference between moral virtue and vice is also a process distinct from reasoning. I argue that this interpretation gives us valid...