HUME'S ETHICS

 

Although ethics may not be the most interesting part of David Hume’s philosophical legacy, still merely to mention its principal points may be important for forming a fuller picture of him as a comprehensive thinker. Moreover, Hume’s own opinion of his legacy is evident on this account. He calls his revised 1751 ethical treatise An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals “incomparably the best” of all his works. Even if we may not agree with him, we might at least treat his opinion with some respect. His attitude to ethics is further shown by the composition of his chief philosophical undertaking, the 1734-1737 Treatise of Human Nature. (Later in life, he kept returning to this masterpiece again and again, revising its three parts and publishing them under slightly different names.) The Treatise consists of three books: one, on Understanding. (Which is the cornerstone of his epistemology, whereas the other two, on Passions and Morals, clearly address ethics. Thus, ethics in the Treatise trounces epistemology by two to one!)

Having already become acquainted with Hume’s epistemology, and with its main conclusions, needless to say, we should expect some consistency from him in his ethics, and we do get it.

Putting serious limitations on reasoning in his epistemology, Hume pushes reason out of morality virtually altogether. There are two dominant sources of our morality, according to him: custom and our passions. In his 1748 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, he explicitly states:

Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. (Section 5 #1) Considering that morality is the foundation of any human life (in the sense that our life is determined either by ethics, or by the absence thereof), custom, being imbued with cultural ethics, propels the ethical component to guide our life. I am surprised that this aspect of Hume’s ethics usually escapes the attention of his commentators, who prefer to focus on Hume’s other source of morality, which is our passions. The role of custom in Hume’s ethics, in my opinion, must never be diminished or neglected.

Concerning the other source of our morality, which motivates our actions, Hume finds it not in our reason, but in our passions:

Morals excite passions and produce or prevent actions. Reason itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.

There is an interesting conclusion, concerning Hume’s repudiation of rationality (not just in epistemology or ethics, but in all philosophy, across the board!) near the end of Bertrand Russell’s Hume chapter in The History of Western Philosophy, from which great work we have been quoting on numerous occasions: “It was inevitable that such a self-refutation of rationality should be followed by a great outburst of irrational faith. The quarrel between Hume and Rousseau is symbolic: Rousseau was mad, but influential, Hume was sane, but had no followers (on this subject see my Rousseau series, which follows next). Subsequent British empiricists rejected his skepticism---without refuting it; Rousseau and his followers agreed with Hume that no belief is based on reason, but thought heart superior to reason and allowed it to lead them to convictions very different from those which Hume retained in practice. German philosophers, from Kant to Hegel, had not assimilated Hume’s arguments. I say this deliberately, in spite of the belief, which many philosophers share with Kant, that his Critique of Pure Reason answered Hume. In fact, Kant and Hegel represent a pre-Humian type of rationalism, and can be refuted by Hume’s arguments. Those philosophers who cannot be so refuted are those who do not pretend to be rational, such as Rousseau, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The growth of unreason throughout the nineteenth century, and through what has passed of the twentieth (written around 1943) is a natural sequel to Hume’s destruction of empiricism.

This Russell’s conclusion is an extremely valuable perspective, which puts Hume’s legacy into the context of the world-historical development of Western philosophy. While it would be very silly to reproach Hume for “poisoning the stream” of rationalistic thought, his seminal importance for the course of philosophical development of Western Civilization is thereby duly acknowledged.