Feeling and Fabrication: Rachel Cohon's Hume's Morality

Hume's Morality: Feeling and Fabrication ¹ is a most useful and agreeable book. It contains a wealth of analysis, argument, and insight about many of the most central elements of the moral theory of one of the greatest moral philosophers in human history: David Hume. The book is well-conceived, well-argued, stimulating, informative, clear, precise, thorough, balanced, nuanced, and ingenious, while evincing—especially in its concluding chapter, when considering possible extensions of Hume's theory—a certain subtle but pleasing "warmth in the cause of virtue." As Hume would be the first to recognize, these traits of the book are indications of the personal merit of its author: Rachel Cohon. Indeed, if Cleanthes is the ideal son-in-law, then Cohon is the ideal philosophical colleague: curious (i.e., having "a love of truth"), deep, clever, wise, sensitive, benevolent, cooperative, conscientious, fair-minded, prudent, and fun to be around, with a due degree of pride in her excellent work but also exhibiting a gracious gratitude: among her many acknowledgements, the first is to the Hume Society as a whole. It is an honor to participate in the Hume Society's symposium on Cohon's outstanding and important book.

As Cohon has explained, her book has two parts, corresponding to the two terms of her subtitle: "feeling" and "fabrication." Each of the two parts begins by introducing a triad of propositions that structures much of the subsequent discussion in that part. Although it requires passing over in silence many excellent discussions of other topics, I will organize my comments in what follows around these two important triads of propositions, indicating where I agree with Cohon's interpretation of Hume and where I do not. Happily, I agree more often than not; where I do not (yet) agree, I will aim to pose questions for Cohon's interpretation.

I. Feeling: The Common Reading

The first part of Cohon's book is organized around the three elements of what she calls the "Common Reading" of Hume. These are: (i) "ethical non-cognitivism," the doctrine that moral judgments have no truth-value; (ii) "the logical fact/value gap" (aka "Hume's Law"), the doctrine that evaluative propositions cannot be properly inferred from purely factual propositions; and (iii) "the Motivational Inertia of Belief," the doctrine that belief alone cannot cause (voluntary) actions.

Ethical Non-Cognitivism.

Cohon and I have long agreed in rejecting the interpretation of Hume as an ethical non-cognitivist,² and we generally read the key passages in much the same way, emphasizing the analogy he draws with secondary qualities (as they are conceived by what he calls "the modern philosophy") and recognizing a crucial distinction between feeling moral sentiments and making moral judgments. When it comes to the moral epistemology behind Hume's cognitivism, I share Radcliffe's worry about Cohon's prediction-based explanation of why we adopt the "common [i.e., "general"] point of view" as a standard of moral judgment. I also have a question, however, about Cohon's account of Hume's moral metaphysics—specifically, her description of him as a "moral anti-realist" who regards moral properties as "reaction-dependent" relational properties, so that "the viciousness of an action or character is a property that depends for its existence on human beings' experiencing a feeling of disapproval when they contemplate it" (Cohon, 115).³

Certainly Hume holds that the concept of "vice"—and so also the "attribute," in the eighteenth century sense of "a quality that is attributed"—depends on the existence of human moral sensibility; but I am less confident about his view of the property itself. To be sure, Cohon quotes passages in which Hume says that vice and virtue, like beauty and deformity, and also like various secondary qualities (again "according to the modern philosophy"), are only feelings or perceptions in the mind of an observer (Cohon, 115, 121). But as she acknowledges, these passages do not say that vice and virtue are relational reaction-dependent properties; quite the contrary, the passages describe them as fully intrinsic properties or contents of a mind. So what is...