Hume's General Point of View

Hume Studies Volume XXIV, Number 2, November 1998, pp. 275-294 Hume's General Point of View WILLIAM DAVIE People can come away from Hume's ethics with two pretty different pictures of the moral life, or of the role of morality in the larger sphere of life; the difference seems to hinge on divergent interpretations of Hume's requirement of a "general point of view," hereafter abbreviated GPV. Both interpretations can be found in the recent literature.1 The first view, which seems to be favored by a majority of Hume's professional readers, represents the GPV as a cognitive achievement typically requiring a conscious effort of reason and imagination. One has to 'adopt' or 'take up' the GPV whenever circumstances demand moral judgments. Let us call this "The Conscious Effort View." On this showing, moral judging is a special, relatively esoteric activity, comparable perhaps to the aesthetic judgments of an art critic, though we must think of moral judging as something ordinary people can do at least from time to time. The alternative reading, which we may term "The Unconscious Habit View," depicts the GPV as largely a matter of habit (or custom). We employ the GPV automatically and ordinarily without noticing or making any particular cognitive effort. We are "insensible" of its operation. We use the GPV whenever we manage to perceive things (hence, speak or think) with a measure of objectivity, which is to say, almost all the time. Here morality appears to be ubiquitous and moral judgment utterly commonplace—comparable to the habitual operations of causal inference without which ordinary life would be sheer unthinkable chaos. William Davie is at the Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, Eugene OR 97403 USA. email: wdavie@darkwing.uoregon.edu 276 William Davie Below we will develop a fuller account of the two views in question, together with some indication of the textual support for each. After each view is presented, we will look for reasons to prefer one over the other. In this reader's opinion, The Unconscious Habit View best represents the main fabric of Hume's moral theory. In the end, though, we have to appreciate that The Conscious Effort View captures a piece of moral life, too, so we must consider where it fits. We may usefully begin with a sketch of some background information about Hume's ethics which is shared by both of the distinct interpretations. I. The Common Background According to Hume we make moral judgments on the basis of certain feelings, on "certain sentiments of pleasure or disgust, which arise upon the contemplation and view of particular qualities or characters."2 That we do respond to the experiences of other people is guaranteed by the inborn mechanism of sympathy; we do not merely perceive, e.g., that some person in our vicinity is writhing in agony, we immediately react with feelings of our own (in this instance, we would probably feel intense distress and a desire to alleviate the other person's pain). But sympathy obviously vacillates more severely, more rapidly, than moral judgments do. Sympathetic reactions fluctuate with our distance, so to speak, from the character we assess, in space, time, and kind of relationship. By contrast, our moral judgments are steady and unchanging. "We give the same approbation to the same moral qualities in China as in England" (T 581). So a further condition is necessary in morals. Our sympathy has to be filtered, one might say, through the screens of another mental device, the GPV. How, exactly, does the GPV do its work? The output is clear—our judgments are stabilized and rendered more uniform. Below we will have to examine the mechanism whereby this result is achieved. First we should emphasize one other essential feature of Hume's moral view, namely, that Hume's is an ethics of character, as contrasted with the more common ethics of action and rules, commandments, or laws which are designed to govern action. When the philosopher's work is done, the Humean morality displays a list or "catalog" of character traits together with reasons why we applaud or deplore those traits. The catalog of virtue and vice does not readily translate...