The Pursuit of Certainty. Shirley Robin Letwin

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СКАЧАТЬ and vice could or should be confounded. He ranked those who “denied the reality of moral distinctions” among “disingenuous disputants.”¹ Although he appreciated Mandeville’s “spirit of satire,”² and felt considerable sympathy with his attack on the hypocritical enemies of joy and pleasure, who asked men to forswear wants that supported society, Hume could not be so irreverent. He would not for a moment, even in jest, argue that all moral distinctions arise from education, as Mandeville said, and were “at first, invented, and afterwards encouraged by the art of politics in order to render man tractable.”³ Morality is certain, and there is a clear distinction between virtue and vice, Hume affirmed; he denied only that it was absolute.

      He managed to preserve the certainty of morals without letting it become absolute by founding it on sentiment. Virtue and vice were not matters of fact whose existence could be discovered by reason. In wilful murder, for instance, no one can observe anything that could be called vice. The only fact in the case that makes us call it vicious is a feeling in some person: “In whichever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions, and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object.”⁴ Vice and virtue are not then qualities in objects, not anything outside human beings, but perceptions within them:

      When you pronounce any Action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing but that from the particular Constitution of your nature, you have a Feeling or Sentiment of Blame from the Contemplation of it. Vice and Virtue, therefore may be compar’d to sounds, colours, heat and cold, which, according to modern Philosophy are not Qualitys in Objects but Perceptions in the Mind.⁵

      That his moral theory was a great advance in speculative science, Hume readily claimed. But he denied that it had any radical consequences for practice.¹ Prudence alone perhaps required him to say so at a time when the arbiters of morality cried down any modification of their theories as a challenge to all established notions of good and bad. And in one sense, it was perfectly true that Hume’s theory left practice unaffected. It did not sanction murder or incest, or deny the value of honesty and gratitude. It did, however, radically change the manner in which these standards were to be applied.

      This was inevitable once Hume traced virtue to a basic principle that made it impossible to think of morality in the old way as a divine command. Instead, Hume showed that virtuous behaviour is simply useful to mankind, that it conforms to, rather than violates, what is natural to men. The utility of an action or character, he explained, arouses a natural sentiment of approval. Because of the sympathy between men, this approval becomes general, that is, attached to other things and men and to whatever contributes to the happiness of society. All men can feel a sympathy with the possessor of a useful quality. So men come to approve what benefits not only themselves but also others. And what is useful to men generally is called a virtue.

      Virtue does not then require men either to discern super-human purposes, or to deny their human needs and wants. Quite the contrary, it shows how best to satisfy them. To be virtuous, men need not struggle with or repress their natural inclinations—“all morality depends on the natural course of our passions and actions.”² The virtuous man is drawn to his duty “without an effort or endeavour.” Virtue therefore is congenial to men and only superstition is “odious and burthensome.”³ Moral conflict is not a combat between divine reason and brute passion, but a purely human balancing of the calm against the violent passions. Thus Hume removed the dismal dress with which divines and philosophers had disguised virtue, and demonstrated that a happy life spent in festivals, mirth, philosophizing, and singing was, as the ancient Strabo had taught, the best way for man to imitate divine perfection.

      Although a large part of traditional morality was unaffected by Hume’s denial of super-human perfection, his account of virtue did imply some important changes. He did not, for instance, accept the Christian view of suicide. Since man is not unique but an intimate part of the natural order, whatever he wishes to do with his life, Hume argued, cannot be contrary to nature or God. The life of man “is of no greater importance to the universe than the life of an oyster,”¹ and therefore suicide is no more impious than agriculture. When life becomes a burden, when we can do but small good to society at the expense of great suffering to ourselves, there is no obligation to go on living. On the contrary, by committing suicide, we may be doing society a service; and certainly no man would have recourse to such a remedy frivolously.

      In much the same spirit, Hume insisted that pride is not a vice but a virtue. All heroic virtue, he pointed out, all that we admire as greatness of mind—courage, intrepidity, ambition, love of glory, magnanimity—“is either nothing but a steady and well establish’d pride and self-esteem or partakes largely of that passion.”² The pagans never decried pride, and those who are anxious to improve life in this world invariably esteem it. They believe that “a genuine and hearty pride, or self-esteem, if well conceal’d and well founded, is essential to the character of a man of honour, and that there is no quality of the mind, which is more indispensably requisite to procure the esteem and approbation of mankind.”³ Only the “religious declaimers” make pride a vice; they denounce it as “purely pagan and natural and represent to us the excellency of the Christian religion, which places humility in the rank of virtues and corrects the judgement of the world, and even of philosophers who so generally admire all the efforts of pride and ambition….”⁴ But humility, beyond what good breeding and decency require of us, is merely one of that “whole train of monkish virtues” which men of sense reject because they “neither advance a man’s fortune in the world, nor render him a valuable member of society; neither qualify him for the entertainment of company nor increase his power of self-enjoyment. ”.”⁵

      Nevertheless, in some other ways Hume insisted on an obligation to depart from nature, and submit to reason. For he found in reason the source of general rules without which social relations were impossible. Even good breeding depended, he pointed out, on neglecting natural sentiments in favour of certain established forms. The rule that we must never praise ourselves but should rather underrate our true qualities, for instance, had become established because men tend to be conceited and cannot judge when they have given too free expression to their exaggerated self-esteem. As such conceit annoys others and destroys easy relations, it seems best to observe a general rule forbidding any self-praise, for thus we are assured that neither our own conceit, nor that of others, will disrupt conversation and conviviality.

      The rules of justice are of the same character. Without them, each case would be decided on its own merits, as each man judged them. We would grant a friend the property he claimed from our enemy; the tall boy who had only a short coat would appropriate the long coat from the short boy. We would conduct ourselves entirely by particular judgements that considered only the characters and circumstances of the moment. However much this might accord with our natural sentiments, Hume reminds us, “ ’tis easy to observe that this would produce an infinite convulsion in human society, and that the avidity and partiality of men would quickly bring disorder into the world. …”¹ In order to bring peace and stability into social life, men set up general and inflexible rules, which ensure that they will always view certain issues from the same standpoint, regardless of the particular situation. They agree to judge some matters not as the different circumstances surrounding each dictate, but from a common standpoint accepted by all.

      The rules of justice are as a result both natural and artificial. They are natural because the need for them is inseparable from the nature of the human species; they do not arise from humour and caprice, and could not one day be dispensed with as if they were a mere matter of fashion:

      The interest on which justice is founded is the greatest imaginable, and extends to all times and places. It cannot possibly be serv’d by any other invention. It is obvious and discovers itself on the very formation of society. All these causes render the rules of justice stedfast and immutable; at least as immutable as human nature.²

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