David Hume: Common-Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 1 13 David Fate Norton, David Hume: Common-Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician. Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1982. pp. xii + 329 . $25.oo. In this erudite book Professor Norton rejects as one-sided any interpretation of Hume as either a destructive sceptic or a constructive naturalist. He argues that Hume responded in quite different ways to a crisepyrrhonienne and to a crisemorale, so that in certain speculative matters Hume is a naturalist becausehe is a sceptic, whilst in morals and politics Hume is not a sceptic at all, but rather a common sense philosopher . For Hume, sentiment has merely de facto authority in a restricted range of speculative matters, but it has de jure authority in practical philosophy. Though common moral sentiment defeats the moral sceptic, Norman Kemp Smith and likeminded scholars err in supposing that Hume subordinates reason to sentiment in all speculative matters too. In short, Hume is a "sceptical metaphysician" but a "common sense moralist." To support this interpretation of Hume's philosophy Norton makes repeated and effective use of a letter which Hume wrote to Gilbert Elliot in 1751. To Elliot's suggestion that sentiment or instinct should determine speculative issues Hume replied : "Your Notion of the correcting Subtility of Sentiment is certainly very just with regard to Morals, which depend upon Sentiment; & in Politics & natural Philosophy, whatever Conclusion is contrary to certain Matter of Fact must certainly be wrong, and there must some Error lie somewhere in the Argument, whether we be able to show it or not. But in Metaphysics of Theology, I cannot see how either of these plain & obvious Standards of Truth can have place. Nothing there can correct bad Reasoning but good Reasoning: and Sophistry must be oppos'd by Syllogism." Similar remarks occur in Hume's post-Treatise publications. For example, after refuting in the second Enquiry Mandeville's thesis that "moral virtures are the political off-spring which flattery begot upon pride," Hume observes "that nothing can be more superficial than this paradox of the sceptics; and it were well, if, in the abstruser studies of logic and metaphysics, we could as easily obviate the cavils of that sect, as in the more practical sciences of politics and morals." And in "Of the Original Contract" Hume observes that "An appeal to general opinion may justly, in the speculative sciences of metaphysics, natural philosophy, or astronomy, be deemed unfair and inconclusive, yet in all questions with regard to morals, as well as criticism, there is really no other standard, by which any controversy can ever be decided." So Norton's general interpretation seems firmly based on Hume's texts. Some of his sub-theses, however, are sure to prove controversial. Most Hume scholars would now agree that in The Philosophy of David Hume (1941) Norman Kemp Smith exaggerated Hume's debt to Francis Hutcheson. But Norton turns the screw and argues that Kemp Smith totally misread Hutcheson as being a non-cognitivist moral theorist. Norton here argues (contra Frankena, Peach, and Raphael ) that Hutcheson subscribed to a cognitivist moral philosophy. But this discussion of Hutcheson's moral theory is less than convincing for several reasons. First, Norton never defines "non-cognitivisrn," and tends to equate it with moral scepticism, and to argue that, since Hutcheson attacked the moral scepticism of Hobbes and Mande- 114 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 23:1 JANUARY 1985 ville, he must necessarily have been a moral cognitivist (see 6off.). More important, Hume himself seems to present Hutcheson as a non-cognitivist in a footnote in the first Enquiry: "That faculty by which we discern truth and falsehood, and that by which we perceive vice and virture, had long been confounded with each other .... But a late philosopher [Francis Hutcheson] has taught us, by the most convincing arguments, that morality is nothing in the abstract nature of things, but is entirely relative to the sentiment or mental taste of each particular being .... Moral perceptions, therefore, ought not to be classed with the operations of the understanding, but with the tastes or sentiments." Finally, Hume and Hutcheson may not be so far apart on the roles of reason and sentiment in morals as Norton believes. Consider...