• Introduction
• His Project
• Theory of Ideas
  • Comparison with Locke
  • Comparison with Berkeley
• Knowledge & Belief
• What do we know
  • Material bodies
  • Causal connections
  • Free Will
  • Mind
  • Immortality
  • Miracles
  • Existence of God
• Religion
• Ethics
• Reactions to David Hume
  • Hume’s Ethics
    • Recap
    • Moral Sense Philosophers
  • Hume’s Epistemology
    • Pragmatism
    • Reject Representational Theory
    • Reject Atomism of the Theory of Ideas
    • Reject Nominalism
    • Reject Empiricism
• Scottish Realism
  • The Theory of Ideas
  • Natural(Common Sense) Belief
  • Freedom and Determinism
  • Ethics

Introduction

Here is what distinguishes the three great British empiricists: Locke, Berkeley and Hume:

Locke	Berkeley	Hume
metaphysical dualist(Mind and Body)	Mentalist (Mind and its Ideas only)	Skeptic (about all metaphysical knowledge, we know no matters of fact beyond present experience)

For Hume, we know nothing about Mind or external world, all we know is experience. Therefore Hume is also a phenomenalist, as to say all we know is the appearances but not reality.

Having said that and put it in this framework of the representational theory you can anticipate what his argument is going to be very much like Berkeley. Hume follows Berkeley’s argument about our knowledge of matter and causal power and he has an analogous argument about our knowledge of mind and God. The causal inferences that are involved are inadequate. That has further implications because the ethic which Locke developed was a kind of ethic which he thought was demonstrable from our knowledge of the nature of the human self. So John Locke’s kind of natural law ethic is also ruled out by Hume. So what is he going to turn to? Not empirically derived knowledge of human nature metaphysically speaking but only experience of our moral sentiments and feelings, so in ethics he becomes what we call an ethical subjectivist. That is to say the basis for our moral judgments is in our moral feelings. In the development of a phenomenalism that makes no metaphysical judgments, you have no metaphysical basis for an ethic, so ethics has got to find a new direction and you notice in Hobbes and Locke they both refer to pleasure and pain has some role in our moral knowledge. So those empirical ingredients of moral experience are picked up and made in effect the total basis for an ethic in Hume. The fact that he claims not to know was skeptic as one who says I don’t know and I don’t know how to find out. He’s not one who denies something but someone who says we don’t know the fact, which still allows him to believe certain things for other reasons. He believes in the existence of matter, Berkeley didn’t. He doesn’t believe that Minds and Souls exist. But on what basis does one believe? Belief is the result not of logical process or empirical evidence but of psychological process. And he turns our attention to the psychology of belief instead of the logic of evidence. So as you read Hume in the first chapter you’ll find he says be a philosopher but amidst all your philosophy be still a man. There’s something about human nature that doesn’t let us away without believing even though there’s something about philosophy that reminds you they don’t have logical proof.

His Project

It was around 50 years from Locke’s “Essay concerning Human Understanding” to Hume’s “Inquiry concerning Human Understanding”. Locke’s rationalistic optimism about the possibility of empirical knowledge, to David Hume’s skepticism about it. There was also an earlier and longer version “Treatise on Human Nature”. In both of the works, his focus is in epistemology. What is the possibility of human knowledge, what sort of reach can human knowledge achieve in the age of reason. In the Treatise, he takes the keys to settling philosophical disputes is the study of human nature. He tries to provide an empirical account of human nature in relation to human belief and human action. His main emphasis is to give a descriptive psychology of human belief and of human nature as it affects ethics. According to Hume, we have to turn from rationalist explanations, we believe proportionally to empirical evidence to account of human psychology. Similarly, we are lead to moral action not by force of reasoning about ethical principles but by psychology of moral feelings. The obscurity of ideas misleads people like Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Berkeley.

In first section of “Inquiry concerning Human Understanding” he talks about abstruse and practical philosophy. He argues for a mix of the two in the long run. Abstruse is the sort of ideas Descartes and John Locke engaged, its value is in logical precision, motivated by intellectual curiosity, but it provides no basis for morality, knowledge of external world or natural theology. It has value only in mathematics. He is proclaiming his rejection of the enlightenment spirit, the rule of reason. In talking about practical philosophy, he talks about what guides action, why we believe, what do you do. So he says be a philosopher and be still a man. Human nature, rather than the artificial demands of reason, is what should characterize philosophy.

Theory of Ideas

Comparison with Locke

We will start with the comparison with Locke. Locke starts by talking about simple and complex ideas, and Hume also talks about them. The difference is Locke thinks clear and distinct simple ideas are original input to the consciousness, Hume inserts the original inputs are impressions, forceful and vivacious. Impression as it arises, arouses the consciousness, as it declines, gives place to idea. Idea is the cognitive state that follows impression that provides you with the copy of the impression. His point is the primacy of causal efficacy in perception. The primacy of the emotive rather than cognitive in human experience. The ideas comes back in memory and leaves its own impression, and that impression leaves idea. Hume use the word perception to refer to this process.

Second departure from Locke, is the association with ideas, if we combine simple ideas into complex ideas then he’s going to become interested in the psychological process by which this goes on. How do we gain ideas of substances, relations, modes of being contingent necessary as the case may be. And he sees that there are three principles of Association: resemblance, contiguity, cause-and-effect. The resemblance develops the idea of the substance with ongoing identity. Likewise for contiguity, if things are adjacent to each other we tend to associate them, and so we get ideas of spatial relationships and temporal relationships therefore of a location in space and a location in time. Also notice that the complex ideas that I get are not ideas of some abstract universals but ideas of particulars. When he comes to the relationship of cause and effect, the principle of cause and effect as a principle of Association that is where the difficulty occurs. Because it turns out as you try to describe empirically what we call cause effect types of relationship, that all we can observe is constant conjunctions and uniform associations, but we never have any observation of the force that is exerted of causal power or causal connections so that the uniformity of nature is an empirical generalization. But that A must cause B is unknown empirically. So inferences from the third to any necessary connections is invalid. Though psychologically yet we come to believe that and this is going to be the key for how we come to certain beliefs. Because we come to believe in cause-effect connections for which there is no empirical evidence and for that matter no a priori knowledge.

That leads him to go one step further than luck and formulate what has since become known as an empiricist criterion of meaning. He’s not talking of a criterion of truth or of justified belief, he’s talking simply of language of what words mean. The criterion of meaning for an empiricist is going to be that the language must refer to some original impressions of an empirical sort. It’s this empiricist criteria of meaning which he uses with such effectiveness. When he talks about idea of necessary connection, there is no impression of necessary connection so the idea has no meaning. The idea of miracle is something unrelated to any impression therefore impossible to ascertain. The idea of anything abstract in the same situation again. This goes even for the concept of mind as a substance as an entity. We have impressions of our own mental states of our wishing and hoping and feeling but where’s the impression of mind substance doesn’t leave any impressions so there is no empirical point of reference that’s involved in talking that way.

Descartes started by saying we don’t have any direct clear and distinct idea of the mind but we have a notion that it’s there. So that when Descartes goes through his I think therefore I exist, a thinking thing, the notion he has is of that. Locke and Berkeley follow that line of thought but not Hume. And he says that all we know about personal identity is through memory. Personal identity for Hume is really concerning consists in this whole stream of ideas and impressions, sensations and reflections that in my memory I trace all the way back along complex streams of ideas and impressions that were mine. He says in the final analysis that the self is like a theater in which ideas appear and pass. Then he adds another sentence by way of qualification, the I is a stream of ideas not the stage on which they stand, just the appearances.

So when it comes to the nature of the self he’s only a phenomenalist. This empiricist criterion of meaning was adopted and updated by 20th century logical empiricism.

Comparison with Berkeley

How does he compare with Berkeley? He agrees with Berkeley’s nominalism If we are going to be strictly empiricists, tracing everything back to impressions, then there are no empirical impressions of abstract entities or of abstract ideas. Our ideas are about particular qualities that are seen or felt, words are only general names by customary usage that uses them indiscriminately between similar particulars.

The attitude of Hume towards abstract ideas comes out in his discussion of space and time. He maintains that we have no empirical idea because no ultimate impression of infinite space or infinite time. There is no abstract idea of space, time, substance, existence. That is going to be important when we are going to talk about Immanuel Kant, when he talks about the ontological argument, that a perfect being such that it must necessarily exist. If existence is not a concept, you cannot predicated of anything it’s not a proper predicate, so there’s no proof there in an ontological proof. Notice that his basic question is not can you prove such-and-such but what in experience are you talking about. The basic question is one of meaningfulness empirical meaning rather than truth.

Knowledge & Belief

Knowledge consists of propositions which affirm something about the relationship between ideas. There are two kinds of propositions, analytic and synthetic. Analytic propositions have to do with the logical relation of ideas, not about what they represent. So if such propositions are true they are called logical truths. The synthetic have to do with matters of fact and so these are called factual truths if they’re true. In Analytic propositions, we only talk about relationship between ideas, the language that is being used and we’re not purporting to talk anything about impressions or external things. His concern is with matter-of-fact statements where the contrary of such a statement is logically possible. The big question and the question where the empirical criterion of meaning comes into play most has to do with knowledge of matters of fact and it’s that which he is going to question. His line of argument for this is what develops in that crucial section four of the inquiry.

In order to make sure we are clear on his theory about knowledge come back to the line of thought that he sets forth in section 4 of The Inquiry, you can outline it in terms of five questions. What is the nature of reasoning about matters of fact and keep in mind that he is distinguishing matters of fact from relations of ideas which are analytic judgments with the logical form of A equals A and they are for things like definitions, tautologies and mathematics. He is concerning reasoning matters of fact and obviously this will be empirical knowledge and his answer is that reasoning about matters of fact is in terms of cause effect relations and that becomes pretty evident once you come back to the representational theory of knowledge which says that we are conscious of ideas and impressions, which represent to us realities of various sorts. Knowledge of matters of fact will be the sort that involve ideas predicated one of the other either by virtue of their logical relationships or by virtue of their factual relationships. He’s asking how we know about factual relationships. His answer to that is that cause-effect relations are involved because if we’re going to know anything about things beyond present experience, that is, the present content of the consciousness, it must be by arguing from the experience as the effect to external things as the cause.

So the second question then what’s the foundation of reasoning about cause and effect and for an empiricist the answer has to be experience. We do not have any immediate awareness of causal connections of the force exerted by the cause in producing an effect. We’re only aware of uniformities, that there’s an antecedent is followed by a consequent with some sort of regularity that he calls constant conjunctions. So two things can be associated in our thinking but we don’t know of any causal connection between them.

Then you get a further rider what’s the foundation of reasoning from experience. To reason beyond experience its cause effect you’ve got a circular argument and the outcome is skepticism about matters of fact beyond present experience. Grant him the representational theory of knowledge, that the immediate object of our awareness is just ideas, it sounds like his skepticism follows, which is why next week we’ll be looking at Scottish realism which rejects that theory of ideas, it rejects the representational view and maintains we have a direct awareness of material bodies of causal force and so forth but his skepticism follows very naturally.

The fourth question is how then do we acquire beliefs because it’s an obvious that we don’t acquire beliefs by giving ascent to a weight of positive evidence. His answer is that it’s a psychological habit, that’s induced by repeated occurrences. We are so conditioned by the regularities of experience that we expect that customary frame of mind is what he calls belief.

But that leads to a fifth question if we come up with such beliefs if they’re not caused by something external, if it’s just a psychological habit. All the there are other things that we come up with imaginatively fictions that our minds fabricate, how do we know that these are not fictional things that we spontaneously come to believe and his answer there goes back to the distinction he drew in relationship to the theory of ideas that all ideas are brought into being as a result of impressions and he maintains that the impression associated with a belief is very different from the impression associated with a fiction. Belief itself is an impression what I’m aware of when I say I believe is a forceful and steady impression, and it’s the force of the impression which distinguishes belief from fiction. You can think of this in terms of Plato’s divided line. Plato had talked of knowledge is distinct from belief. Knowledge by dialectic and knowledge by reasoning. Dialectic leads to intuitive knowledge. You have perceptual beliefs and what Plato speaks of is illusion of what now Hume is talking of as fiction. What Hume is telling us is that we have no intuitive knowledge of matters of fact. We have no demonstrative knowledge of matters of facts but only of logical relationships. So he eliminates the top half of Plato’s divide line in his skepticism and he’s only concern now is to make the distinction between the two levels in the lower half of the divided line namely legitimate belief and fiction. Hume skepticism and his theory of belief becomes the basis for whether we can know anything about reality.

What do we know

Material bodies

The first case is that of material bodies, things in the external physical world and this is not something that can be proven. It’s a matter of belief, Hume himself seems to believe in the existence of material substances simply because the experience is so steady, so consistent coherent in our experience the belief is readily elicited.

Causal connections

In his chapter on necessity he points out that we have no knowledge of any causal connection in the mind-body relationship, no knowledge of it in the relationship between God as creator and this earth this creation nature. He is however inclined to believe that there is causal force but this is simply a concession to mental habit. We rarely assume that it’s there in the material world. He talks a little bit about the occasionalist view that God is the only causal power and so causes everything and regards that as a belief that’s pretty wild, that there is not any habitual experience that induces such a belief. But inasmuch as he refuses to accept the reality of mind as substance he doesn’t have mental causation to talk about and so he is not too inclined to take positively the power of mind over body even though we habitually talk that way.

Free Will

There are two lines of thought that he has here. One that comes through most clearly in the inquiry is the more simple. We don’t know necessary connections or causal necessity, all we know is constant conjunction. So the person who is a necessitarian and says that all human choices and actions are causally determined only talking about constant conjunctions. There may be some constant conjunction between will and action between what you decide and what you do but you don’t know any causal connection. So the necessitarian really is not affirming necessity but only regularity. By the same token the libertarian who asserts freedom of the will. The libertarian is trying to deny that there is causal necessity. But the libertarian is perfectly happy to say that there is regularity and constant conjunction between acts of will and what you do. So what’s the quarrel between the two? The only dispute is whether you call causation necessity or uniformity it’s a semantical debate about the meaning of the word causation.

In the treatise he comes up the question of free will in a little bit different way. The term will refer simply to an impression which I feel when I give rise to some new physical movement or some new mental perception. I’m aware of a certain impression in the chain of conscious events, an impression that moving around is the thing I’m going to do, but it’s merely an impression, a feeling that’s involved in the stream of conscious events and similarly when I stop to think of something I’m initiating a chain of thought, and there is again an impression of start thinking about this, so there is nothing more to will than a kind of impression of starting something going in the mind or in over an action. There’s uniformity enough between that impression of will and the resultant change or action to make us think that it really causes something to happen. We only think that the will is free because we experience no antecedent force. All we actually experience is a spontaneous kind of impression. What we experience normally is a spontaneous initiative and that uniformity of things is what normally incites belief in necessity. In any case the uniformity is of human behavior can appropriately be extended to this aspect of human behavior so there is much more reason to believe in determinism than there is to believe in indeterminism. And he is a soft determinist, all we know is constant conjunctions though it seems a natural outcome of those concert actions that we believe in necessity.

In the treatise he maintains that the will is guided by emotions, not by reason. He believes that reason does not provide moral direction, it does not direct the will, the passion direct the will.

Mind

Mind is just a bundle of perceptions, appearing and disappearing, we have no knowledge of any other basis for a person identity. The traditional view of immortality in his day thanks to Descartes was that the mind, the soul is an immaterial substance that is independent and functions independently of the body there is capable of existing independently of the body. So immortality is logically possible. Hume doesn’t think that way. He has an essay on the immortality of the soul in which he says that by the mere light of Reason it’s difficult to prove the immortality of the soul. He says nothing could set in full alight the infinite obligation which men kind has to divine revelation since we find that no other medium could ascertain this great and important truths, immortality of the soul.

Immortality

The moral argument for immortality namely that moral goodness in this life will of a necessity be rewarded in a life hereafter implies the goodness of God that empirically are unknown. So there is no logical possibility of a moral argument for the existence of God.

Keep in mind that he’s not denying the existence of material bodies and the existence of causal connections. He isn’t denying freedom of the will either, he’s simply saying that all of that we have empirically conspires to induce belief rather in causal necessity. He’s not denying the existence of mind, he just doesn’t see any way to know it and doesn’t see any reason, any psychological process by which we could believe it. He’s not denying immortality, he sees psychological basis for belief in immortality but we can’t prove it rationally. All these beliefs are based on impressions on a psychology of belief rather than on the logic of evidence.

Miracles

Hume’s definition of a miracle is significant, a miracle is a violation of natural law. If you understand natural law in terms of mechanistic science that vast causal machine of the cosmos in which everything is determined by uniformly operating forces that can be mathematically followed, then to speak of a miracle as a violation of natural law begins to make sense.

I think that he’s speaking of miracle as a violation of natural law in the sense of a violation of uniformity and that is how the argument in this section goes. Of course uniformity is tend to induce belief in necessity and he’s inclined to believe in necessity, so he’ll have a predisposition against miracles. But he cannot say that a miracle is logically impossible. The problem is not whether a miracle is logically possible in a world of uniforms but whether it’s believable so the view of natural law as a matter of causal necessity.

His concern is with the believability of miracles for the simple reason that no evidence can be sufficiently steady and forceful to produce the habit and have it is only induced by repeated uniformities. If a miracle is an exception, it doesn’t come with uniformly so how can the exception induce belief.

Existence of God

In addition to the section in the inquiry on divine providence he has two other works of great sign and the other is natural history of religion.

The first dialog deals with the logic, with attempts at demonstrative knowledge of the existence of God, the second deals not with the logic but with the psychology. He points out that the empirical arguments, cosmological, teleological seem to depend on analogies and so they try to say that the cause must be like the effect.

If he’s saying that natural religion without some historical act of God is not going to elicit belief which is of course what some Calvinists say anyway the belief in God without the coming of Christ isn’t logically possible. And he was raised in a Scottish Presbyterian background in the natural history of religion, on the other hand he argues that there is a gradual historical development of belief from an early parlor theism.

Religion

We will start by Hume’s two major works dealing with religious matters, his dialogs concerning natural religion and natural history of religion. The dialogs are about natural theology, the viability of the arguments about the existence of God, ontological, cosmological and teleological. This is a full scale critique of the claims of natural theology, a critique of the arguments such as there’s no theological objections to the theology to doing it that way. The objection is that the arguments don’t work and the premises don’t logically produce the conclusions. From Hume’s day until this I think it’s fair to say that there is been mainstream in philosophy of religion which is agreed with that assertion that the arguments are not sufficiently complete enough to prove the existence of a first cause, a rational designer supremely good and so forth. The dialogs are concerned with the logic of belief but the natural history of religion is concerned with the psychology of belief. You can see the relationship between those two as established in the first section of the inquiry concerning human understanding where he distinguishes between abstruse philosophy with its attempt at logical proofs and practical philosophy the sort of things people live by. In the first section of the inquiry he says that what we need really is some combination of the two so he seems to be saying with regards to matters of religion.

He has the view monotheism developed historically out of an earlier polytheism because he finds polytheism easier to explain in terms of some natural psychological development. Polytheism is a natural psychological development, however when the rational, the contemplative comes into play and reflecting on many gods seems to give rise to some unanswered questions. Because contemplatively we recognize that nature has something of an ordered unity, contemplatively we recognize this and so we come to think of one being behind the ordered unity. His point is religious belief is produced by things that happen in human experience historically and in every body’s experience that arouse emotions, impressions that give rise to ideas about the cause of what’s happening. So a psychological account of religious beliefs in the process of all of that what Hume has done for the history of thought, of the religion has been working with for the last 200 years, namely the concern to reconstruct theistic arguments that are indeed valid. Discussion as to what sort of a God does natural theology point towards.

Ethics

Two books to keep in mind are book three of a treatise on human nature which is his early work when he was in his twenties and inquiry concerning the principles of morals. Let me point out the same issue about the relationship between reason and feeling comes up in ethics as in religion and every other area of Hume’s thinking. In fact that is the way in which he introduces the subject in the inquiry concerning the principles of morals. Is morality founded on reason or on feeling? When he says feeling or passion or sentiment or that we seem to have a kind of moral sense, what he is referring to is impressions related to reflection. All ideas are really arising as copies or imaginative productions suggested by original impressions, so that these ideas which are copies or which are result of memory perhaps imagination are known by reflection on their own mental states.

Moral sentiments are impressions of reflections resulting from earliest sense impressions and ideas of what is happening or might happen. Sentiments can be calm or violent and he develops that distinction in book two of the treatise which is entirely on the passions. Violent impressions may be a direct response to ideas and impressions which are occurring, like to experiences of pleasure and pain or may be indirect responses, a feeling of pride that is mixed with the experience of what somebody has just said about you. Then in raising this question as to whether morality is based on reason or passion is drawing on his theory of the impressions, because passions, emotions, sentiments, feelings are impressions.

The question whether morality is founded on reason or sentiment was the hot issue in discussion of ethics in his day, the Enlightenment tradition had tended to say that ethics is founded on reason. John Locke had said moral knowledge is demonstrative knowledge just like mathematics. Moral knowledge is simply relations of ideas knowledge, demonstrative knowledge according to John Locke. Hume heartily disagrees because he doesn’t think that anybody in the state of nature so-called has a right to property. Hume rejects natural law ethics, he says that idea of the state of nature is a myth, a fiction not only does it historically not exist but you can’t even imagine it the way Locke talk about.

As far as Hume is concerned, morality and aesthetics are all subjective and those critics of Hume like Thomas Reid point out what has happened historically is something like this once the theory of ideas was introduced. Primary qualities became subjective now. So it’s traced to the influence of the theory of ideas, subjectivising what previously had been regarded as objective all the way down the line the Scottish realists hold that primary qualities and secondary qualities are both objective that aesthetic and moral values are both objective that belief is a rational intuition not just a psychological response. So the issue is pretty well defined in that way and Hume is trying to formulate his view now. Hume is a man of moderation, he refuses to buy the idea that reason is the basis of morals, he refuses to buy the idea that sentiment or feeling alone is the basis of morals. Just as it was with the abstruse and the practical, the logical and the psychological, he wants a combination of the two, he tried to pull that off in religion, he pull it off in ethics and that’s what he tries to do.

Then what is the role of reason? Reason for Hume can produce two kinds of judgments: judgments about the relations of ideas and the judgments about the matters of fact. The role of reason in ethics is about relations of ideas, definitions of moral terms. Second thing has to do with matters of fact, reason can describe the circumstances in which we have to act, provide factual knowledge about situations that we face, factual understanding of the possible consequences of actions. What thing can reason not do? Reason cannot justify appealing to consequences and utility. It can’t really justify appeals to utility, it cannot motivate you to do something, and it cannot approve or disapprove an action. It can just describe consequences. If reason cannot approve or disapprove in action, you can’t make moral judgments. Feelings are not true or false, only propositions and judgments are true or false, in as much as feelings are not true or false, so feelings make no moral judgments. So there are no moral judgments, there are moral sentiments, there are moral feelings that give rise to utilitarian statements.

What’s the role of sentiment? The common ground is utility and you can see how reason hitches on the utility, how the sentiment hitch on utility. Utility is based on the feeling of benevolence. But why are we that way inclined in our feelings towards others? Hobbs had said we’re not, we’re all like ravenous beasts and Hume argues against egoism. Hobbs have been accused of a radical egoism and in Humes day the term Hobbism, that there is not a shred of friendliness or anything else in a human being naturally. Hume argues against that, he is arguing that there is a natural benevolence in all human beings, a natural altruism in all human beings. It develops out of a feeling of sympathy which involves as I feel sympathy either pleasure for you or pain with you. But why would I feel sympathy? I feel sympathy because reason tells me of factual similarities between you and me, your experience and mine. And remember one of the principles of Association: resemblance. So when there are resemblances between your experience and mine, the complex ideas that develop in my mind involve both of us and because they involved both of us I feel not just for me but for you. And there is a natural benevolence in all human beings.

This theory is labeled as an ethical subjectivism and it’s an ethical naturalism. Ethical subjectivism is the view that there are no objective moral qualities and there are no objective truths of an ethical sort about objective states of affairs, but rather when I say something is wrong or something is good I’m talking about my own feelings, my own sentiments. So when I say it is too bad for you to go through that, what I’m talking about is I’m suffering when I think of what you’re going through. I’m not saying that it’s wrong that you have to go through it, I’m saying it’s painful to you and it’s painful to me. So wrongness and rightness just have to do with the subjective feelings of those who experience it. Subjectivism is only one kind of naturalism, there are Objectivist kinds of naturalism. Ethical naturalism is the view that morality is grounded in nature and because it’s grounded in the nature of our emotional psychology, Hume is a an ethical naturalist and he talks about laws of nature. They’re not laws of nature in some metaphysical sense like Aristotle or innate as in the Platonists, they’re not laws of nature in the sense of being there already when we come into the world, he’s very plain that these laws of nature are artifacts but they are laws of nature in the sense that they arise naturally in the course of nature because of the nature of our psychological development in relationship to other people. So he has an ethic based on a natural developmental psychology, the nature of psychological development the nature of emotional development is what gives rise to ethics. And this is universally the same for all human beings because of the way in which God made us to function. So he’s not an ethical relativist, the laws of nature he sees as three, one having to do with property the stability of possession, one having to do with transferring it by consent, another having to do with keeping promises.

And he even talks about the laws of the nations which is the phrase used in natural law theory from the Romans and Aquinas onwards. Laws of nations are laws pertaining in all nations, so did these three that he spells out because without the security of possession there would be constant war of all against all, without transferring by consent there would be no commerce and without keeping of promises there would be no alliances or treaties. These laws of nature are but just utilitarian things, justice is a utilitarian notion.

Reactions to David Hume

Hume’s Ethics

Recap

The matters of fact can tell you what is the situation you are facing, but how do you get from “is” to “ought”? Hume is the first one who point out the question. Previously it’s been assumed that there are objective intellectually accessible moral truths which carry an “ought” of their own or else represent the ought that God has laid on them if the truths are about God’s commands.

But Hume, without that religious basis for an ethic, is committed as an empiricist to deriving ethical obligation, from nothing more than the empirical. How do you get an “ought” from an “is” and this is the problem that haunts empirically oriented ethical Theory from Hume’s day until well past mid 20th century. It seems to me that the problem is related to the fact that the empiricism which Hume is talking about is essentially the method of empirical science he sees it as Newton’s method. So the problem is that the 18th century concept of scientific method is that scientific thinking is value-neutral, or if you like that the world which science is investigating, the Newtonian universe is a value free world, the world of value free facts and indeed if all that you have is, in the Newtonian picture, the particles of matter and blind forces at work then there is no inherent purpose to the natural world. Now the theists among them like Locke and Descartes earlier see God’s purpose is involved in the way in which the mechanisms of nature work, but if all you’ve got is the mechanisms of nature, you have a world devoid of any moral significance in and of itself.

And I think it follows that if that’s the case, the only way in which values arise is because of their instrumental worth as a means to something else, hence the utilitarian as a means to some end that you assert or postulate, but you still got the question of how do you get the ought. Now it’s in regards to the source of moral obligation as well as moral knowledge of what is good that he has to appeal to sentiment, so while reason does contribute in those matters and particularly in terms of knowing something about the usefulness of alternatives, it’s the sentiment that he has to turn in order to get at any kind of moral obligation. They’re the the picture that we were talking about what kinds of sentiments or feelings initially. The appeal is to benevolent, literally wanting what is good for others, this is in contrast to the sheer egoism of somebody like Hobbes. There’s a natural benevolence, but why natural benevolence? It involves feelings of pleasure or pain about what is happening to other people which we describe in talking of the sentiment of sympathy, sympathy which we feel because of the factual similarity that’s empirically observable between us and other people who are going through tough times so that underlying the sympathy there is a significant dose of self interest. So even though benevolence is not by itself reducible to self-interest, it’s related to self-interest. There’s some combination of egoism and altruism now, these are all feelings moral sentence, impressions of reflections. It’s out of this there arises the sense of ought, so that the ought means simply that I feel, I ought, I want them to have good and so forth. So that in a nutshell is Hume’s ethic. And you’ll see of rising from that justice is utilitarian in its intent.

Moral Sense Philosophers

Like David Hume, they are rooting ethics in human psychology, it seems to have arisen in opposition to Thomas Hobbes egoism and in that regard it sort of picked up the baton from the Cambridge Platonists of the 17th century, the Cambridge Platonist with their innate ideas and their opposition to the mechanistic view of nature, broad church people in the Anglican tradition, but with their beliefs in real universals therefore objectively real ethical ideals. The Cambridge Platonists were opposed to Thomas Hobbes and also to the strong Calvinism that had flourished during the Cromwellian Commonwealth. This is true of the moral sense philosophers as well in the 18th century, opposed to that strong Calvinism with a pessimistic view of human nature, that maintained that there is no natural beneficence in human beings that were all completely egoistic, there you see the issue facing up egoism versus altruism.

But the moral sense philosophers anticipating that a talking of a natural kind of benevolence that is inherent in our moral sensitivity. We are benevolent because of this moral sense which enables us to perceive the right from the wrong, the moral faculty in indeed has three functions (1), it’ll enable us to perceive the moral quality of an action or situation (2), it enables us to approve or disapprove of that action or situation (3), it motivates us to do what is good in regards to that situation. So it involves moral perception knowing the right, the good, moral approbation, making moral judgments and moral motivation.

On this account beneficence is not reducible to things like pleasure or self-interest. It doesn’t rule it out but it’s not reducible just to that, it wasn’t for Hume either. The moral sense is distinctive, it’s not reducible to any other human faculty, it’s simply a part of how God made us to function. While you still have the ethical subjectivism like Hume, there is a theistic basis for it which makes the motivation and approbation much more weighty than would have been otherwise.

While that’s the overall picture for these moral sense people, there is still a major question which divided them, the question is whether this moral sense is basically cognitive or emotive, is it a matter of reason or is it a matter of emotion, the same question as David Hume was dealing with. And on that issue the ones who said it’s basically non-cognitive, a matter of taste, or a matter of sentiment, no universal, were Shaftesbury and Hutchison, Adam Smith as well though not as fully. At least there are writers like Thomas Reid, the Scottish realist to accuse him of having this ethic of feeling rather than of knowledge. On the other hand Butler and Thomas Reid in Scottish realism who is very similar to this on ethics, Butter and Reid both say that this sense is a cognitive faculty that it is a kind of knowing not a kind of feeling, it involves clear ideas rather than just some feelings of pleasure or pain.

Of these people you might find Joseph Butler particularly interesting. He was Bishop in the Church of England and for some people he’s of interest because he uses the word conscience to name the moral sense. And he goes to great lengths in developing of this and you can see how it parallels the kind of thing which Hume and the others are up to. Conscience for Butler is simply one of a whole variety of what he calls mental propensities of the mind, in other words we were made with certain tendencies, which as they function provide this moral sense. There are four kinds of propensity, (1). Particular passions where he seems to be speaking particularly of desires. (2). Propensity for self-love, that’s the self interest (3). Propensity for benevolence, loving others and (4). the propensity that he calls conscience. Self love and benevolence provide a rational checks on our passions, that of benevolence you’ll bridle in your anger. Conscience on the other hand is the propensity to balance self love and benevolence. If you’ve got two principles self love and benevolence trying to guide the passions, how do you know self love isn’t going to be dominant and you’re going to turn out as a thoroughly selfish kind of animal? That’s where conscience maintains the balance in choosing ends and means to pursue to those ends, conscience is both cognitive in the sense that it helps us to perceive what the right balance is, but it’s also authoritative in that it approves of disapproves. It’s out of that conscience prick that the ought comes.

This is very similar to Hume’s moral psychology with perhaps two differences, one is its emphasis is on the rational dimension, the cognitive dimension of the moral sense called conscience. And the second is the fact that the propensity are intended by God to function in a certain way. So the virtuous person is one in whom they function in that best way possible, a proper functioning human being is the virtuous human being. I think one of the things which they do is to help us see that an ethical subjectivism, an ethic grounded on moral psychology can be providing universal as against relative ethic.

Hume’s Epistemology

One of the questions which may have been lurking in the back of your mind last week is how to avoid David Hume’s skepticism, granted the skeptical conclusion that he draws from the theory of ideas, the representational theory of knowledge. Is skepticism the inevitable result logically and is Hume’s psychology of beliefs the only way to avoid that being the ultimate conclusion? Let me mention five attempts the develop in post Hume thinking to handle this epistemological issue.

Pragmatism

One of them undoubtedly is Hume’s, a psychology of belief that has a pragmatic basis for belief. Insofar as the passions take their usual course, it would be the most natural thing in the world of beliefs and so following this psychology of belief of what emerges is a kind of pragmatism. The most obvious case is William James, the American pragmatist. Some of you may have run into his essay called “The Will to Believe”, in which he simply argues that if on a given issue there is no clear weight of evidence or argument on one side or the other, you turn to passional grounds for beliefs, passional in the Hume’s sense, that is the non-cognitive grounds and so belief then becomes simply an outcome of one’s own psychological makeup, it’s not at all clear whether for James he intends that to be a universal or a relative psychological makeup but at least belief is a function of psychological makeup, the pragmatic route. An earlier kind of psychology of belief than William James which is less pragmatic is John Henry Newman in the 19th century at Oxford who wrote a book called “A Grammar in Aid of Assent”. What he does really is to make a distinction between two kinds of certainty that he called certainty and certitude, where certainty has to do with logical certainty, demonstrative certainty and certitude has to do with psychology. That’s one route somewhat pragmatic, the view that there are some beliefs which psychologically unavoidable. You’ll find that something of that route runs through a lot of later realists in addition to the Scottish realists. You’ll find them saying for instance that if somebody doesn’t believe in the reality of the external world, material things, you offer them a glass of arsenic and see what they do. Obviously their disbelief is not a disbelief they live with.

Reject Representational Theory

A second obvious alternative is to reject the representational theory, the view that we found in Descartes and Locke and following that the object of our thought are simply ideas and we want to refer to anything extra mental we have to have proofs that they exist. Now that notion that ideas keep us distanced from realities, would be the representational theory. And the alternative is to reject that, to maintain in other words a kind of direct awareness, a direct realism, and that is precisely what these Scottish realists do. They reject the representational theory, the theory of ideas explicitly, and try to argue for a direct realism.

Reject Atomism of the Theory of Ideas

A third alternative is to reject the atomism of the theory of ideas. Locke and Hume both maintain that simple ideas come to us discretely one after another, and to combine ideas is something else, we don’t immediately perceive complex ideas, we do the combining, according to Hume by principles of Association that we can’t justify, like cause-and-effect. Obviously one alternative is to reject that atomism of discrete ideas and to maintain that experience comes to us more as a gestalt, than as a series of discrete behavioral stimuli. That is to say a structured whole. So you have to argue in that way that we have a direct awareness of wholes, not just at the atomistic ingredients, the direct awareness of relations there, like causal relation, and that is precisely what the Scottish realists are doing.

Reject Nominalism

A fourth very is to reject nominalism, the nominalism of Hume and Berkeley, and to go back at least to a conceptualism like Locke had that we can and do indeed entertain abstract ideas such as the idea of substance, the idea of space, the idea of time so on and so forth. And in that way to develop a overall conceptual scheme which as an overall scheme may have empirical reference even though some of the ingredients concepts may not have immediate reference. I think you find something of that in the Scottish realists though not as overtly as in later thinkers. There’s a touch of that in David, Emanuel Kant and certainly in Hegel.

Reject Empiricism

Then the the final alternative is to reject empiricism itself, the claim that our only factual knowledge comes from experience, which would involve introducing a-priori principles like Aristotle did, structural principles, categories like Plato did, innate ideas well Kant goes that route, Kant introduces a-priori principles in addition to empirical input and of course. What remains to be seen as we get into Kant is whether his way of introducing a-priori principals gets you any further than Hume and I guess it depends on what you’re talking about in Kant, if you’re talking about his ethics perhaps it does, if you’re talking about knowledge of the space time world it doesn’t, but obviously that’s another alternative.

Scottish Realism

Scottish Realists were a group of thinkers in the Scottish Enlightenment, in late 18th century, whose influence persisted in the 20th century. It’s not clear that Thomas Reid interprets David Hume right, he seems to understand Hume to say that there is no basis for believing in anything, as if the skepticism is his last word rather than belief and that reading of Hume seems to be the one that persisted. There are four topics which Reid addresses, the first is basic theory of ideas, the representational theory of ideas, Reid says that this theory is a fiction created by philosophers. He feels that common sense is much closer to the truth of things than the philosophical traditions from Descartes and Locke. By common sense he is referring to the beliefs hold by every man in an unphilosophical way. That is to say, common sense is closer to the truth than the theory of ideas. His point is that ideas do not have secondary qualities. He is arguing for a presentational view of perception rather than representational view, that is to say, we have a direct awareness of the physical object. It’s called direct realism, sometimes labeled as epistemological monism, rather than the dualism of the representational view, which has both ideas and objects.

The Theory of Ideas

The term realism stands in contrast to phenomenalism. It’s realism in two senses: 1. The independent existence of material object and their equalities 2. A true knowledge of that independent reality. What does he do then with ideas? In epistemology, it is the existence of ideas we that refer to when we talk of entertaining what is not true. How can I have illusion or misconception if there are no ideas. So you got to have ideas in addition to direct awareness. Reid’s point about idea is when we talk about having an idea we still refer to direct awareness, it may be direct awareness of something that exists, or direct awareness of an idea we made up.

Natural(Common Sense) Belief

The phase common sense has at least two meanings, the sense that coordinated the other sense, that’s not Reid’s usage of the term. His usage means the natural assumptions that is common to many people. The problem with appealing to common sense is that what is common for certain culture might not be common for another culture. Therefore, natural belief might be a more appropriate term, the use of nature goes back to Aristotle. What Reid is doing is appealing to intrinsic nature of things. Compared to the post modern view, where we create our own values, meanings and beliefs. Hume’s psychology of belief enables him affirm that certain beliefs and natural beliefs that arise in the course of nature.

The difference between Scottish realists and Hume is not that Scottish realists affirm that human nature universally produce certain beliefs, Hume believes that, but Reid’s emphasis is on the fact that God made us in such a way that we would in the course of nature come into certain beliefs. The fact is we have natural proclivities towards natural belief. It’s same sort of theistic undergirding for epistemology that we had in Descartes and Locke but an updated view of role and limitations of rational demonstration.

Having said that, Reid is still a foundationalist, one who believes from certain truth from which we can deduce a whole lot more. But the foundational truth are not rationally certain, they are natural beliefs, and from these natural beliefs we make our deductions. Among these natural beliefs that Reid has are beliefs about laws of logic, axioms of mathematics, the existence of nature of material things, necessary causal connections. The crucial question as Hume pointed out for matter of fact beyond present experience is casual connections. Hume says no, but we come to believe them. Reid says knowing is simply having true beliefs and we have natural belief. Kant tries to find some other source for the idea of causal connection. We also have natural beliefs about memory, human freedom, moral principle, these are rooted in human institution, in the proclivities in the human nature.

Hume says the self is a bundle of mutually independent and isolated perceptions with no underlying mind or soul substance, yet paradoxically he also says human natural tendencies that persuade us. For Reid, these are psychologically necessary beliefs which is different from what is logically necessary. Natural beliefs are spontaneous interpretations of experience so when you have a physical sensation, it’s a sign to you that there is some material objects around and so belief in the things signified is a spontaneous reaction. It’s due to human constitution as a whole, common to all human beings, not a result of reasoning processes that we have these natural beliefs.

There is a parallel statement in John Calvin. The manifold agility of the soul which enables it to take a survey of heaven and earth, to join past to present, to retain the memory of things heard long ago, to conceive of whatever it chooses by the help of imagination and its ingenuity in the invention of such admirable arts are certain proofs of divinity in man. While Calvin takes this as the proof for existence of God, Reid dealing with epistemology taking the existence of God as a given and find the justification for natural beliefs.

Freedom and Determinism

Recall from Hume that while we have no knowledge of necessary connection, the constant conjunctions of same pair of things leads us to believe in causal connection. As much as those kind of regularities occur in human experience and admitted by the advocate of human liberty, human free will and the advocate of determinism, there is nothing to choose between the two. Reid disagrees, he says that there is a causal power involved in human action which is distinctive, he calls it the human agency. We distinguishes between agency causation and physical causation. Agency causation involves human agent. What Reid is maintaining is our own causal agency is kind of causal power of which we have direct awareness. We know we have power to make something happen. This direct awareness of having the power and exercising the power is one of these natural beliefs that’s unavoidable. The question is whether the exercise of the power is itself free or determined. Hume says we have the freedom of act but not the freedom of choice because the constant conjunction between the motives and actions leads us to think that actions are determined by motives and it’s here Reid disagrees. Freedom is the freedom to choose, to cause or not cause something to happen, that freedom is not just an act of reasoning. Our reasonings may be determined by antecedent ideas and beliefs, so freedom is not an act of reasoning or result of it, it’s not just motivation, because motives may be determined. The choice we have is between alternative reasonings and alternative motives, sometimes we choose without appealing to stronger reasons. Our reasonings and motives may or may not be determined. As we directly aware of the freedom in choosing alternatives, i.e. the introspective argument, there arises the natural belief in freedom which he affirms.

He faces three counter arguments. 1. There has to be sufficient cause to explain everything to which Reid’s response is agency is sufficient reason. 2. If there are no causes, it’s capricious and dangerous, to which he says agency is not an uncaused act. 3. Free choice is possessed only by God who causes everything, so the objection is if God has all the power, how could we have power, to which Reid’s response is that foreknowledge does not force it occur, that is to say there are secondary causes that’s involves in producing things.

Ethics

Reid is a foundationalist so that all reasoning starts with first principles, and that’s the way as it is in ethics. Ethics like any science has its first principles. He says first principles are self evident principles to everyone who has conscience. He talks of the intention of nature, that there are axioms that lead to social virtue and good government. Conscience is the law of God written on the heart, which he cannot disobey without acting naturally contrary the nature. Moral judgments and conscience grow to maturity from an imperceptible seed planted in us by the Creator. He says by an impulse of nature we venture to judge for ourselves. His appeal is to natural proclivities. The first principle of ethics is somethings merit approval and others merit blame. We ought to use the best mens we can to be informed of our duty. In the light of those we make judgments of particular cases. In that context, he criticizes Hume, he says Hume’s theory of ideas led from the subjectivity of secondary and primary qualities to the subjectivity of beauty and of right and wrong. His own view sounds remarkably like Hume, he says feeling and judgment are inseparable in making moral judgments, that is what Hume said. One is not reducible to the other. The difference is judgment is not just about the fact of the case as it is for Hume with his empirical approach to consequences, what reason does is to go beyond fact, to exploring of relationship between ideas, agreement or disagreement is what’s involved in a judgment. So when on the basis of a principle like we should prefer a greater good to a less, I judge that there is greater good to one alternative than the other, it logically follows that I should prefer that one with the greater good. Accordingly the moral judgments based on intuitive principles.

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