Natural Obligation and Normative Motivation in Hume's Treatise

Hume Studies Volume XXII, Number 2, November 1996, pp. 231-253 Natural Obligation and Normative Motivation in Hume's Treatise TITO MAGRI My first aim in this paper is to explore the complex relations among motives, rules and obligations that underlie Hume's moral psychology in the Treatise.1 These relations are conspicuous in the artificial virtue of justice, but can also be detected in impartial moral appraisal and in prudential preference and choice.2 These issues are systematically linked. Hume's account of the motivation to justice involves a motivation to appraise actions and characters impartially and to act accordingly. And this involves, in turn, a noninstrumental kind of rationality—a capacity for preferring objects according to their real value and for acting according to these preferences. All this may appear surprising, given the standard interpretation of Hume's theory of motivation and value. But what I want to show, by a careful reading of Hume's texts, is that this interpretation stands in need of a major revision. My second, related aim in this essay is to raise and begin to discuss the general and complex issue of how a concept of normative motivation can be made consistent with a naturalistic, Humean framework. In this connection I suggest that our motivation for a rule-constituted activity can be conceived in terms of what Hume calls natural obligation. A natural obligation is a natural motive for action which is corrected by some general rule and thus motivates action differently from what it would have done on its natural content (the uncorrected ends and means it suggests to an agent). Conflicts between natural obligations and natural motives can arise not because of their different contents but because of the role played in the former by general rules. The Tito Magri is at the Dipartimento di FilosofÃ-a (Lettere), Universita di Bari, 80100 Bari, Italy. Email: t.magri@agora.stm.it 232 Tito Magri relative weight attached to natural obligations and to natural motives does depend on the influence of rules and not on accidental causal circumstances. Natural obligation has thus some distinctive features of normativity. The problem then becomes that of explaining this normative dimension within the general framework of Hume's theory of mind and motivation. In the third section of the paper I attempt to solve this difficult problem (which is equivalent to that of how prudential rationality is possible) for an important class of cases. Normative general rules (or prudential rationality) are implemented in the structure of motivation, through the influence of the position in time of objects on imagination and desire. This gives rise to a complex cognitive and causal pattern of preference and action that accounts for the phenomena of rule-constituted behavior and of prudential rationality. By showing how and to what extent natural obligations and rational rules are consistent with a Humean framework, I hope to outline some aspects of a naturalized conception of normativity and reason. 1. The Natural Obligation to Justice Rules and obligations play a major role in Hume's theory of justice. This is because of a motivational paradox that arises from the contrast between two principles. One is a general motivational constraint on morality: "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). The other is a principle concerning our motives for just conduct: "[W]e have naturally no real or universal motive for observing the laws of equity, but the very equity and merit of that observance" (T 483).3 The two principles seem to be in evident conflict; and this raises a deep motivational riddle concerning justice: "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" (T 483). Hume looks for a way out of this predicament in telling apart justice as an artificial virtue from the body of our moral attitudes (T 483-484). However, I am not interested in his theory of justice as such, which has been studied by many commentators,4 but in the motivational...