As our society grows larger, we may cease to see our own property violations as a threat to the continued existence of a stable economic community, and this reduces our incentive to conform. But when we consider violations by others, we partake by sympathy in the uneasiness these violations cause to their victims and all of society.
Such disinterested uneasiness, and the concomitant pleasure we feel on contemplating the public benefits of adherence, are instances of moral disapproval and approval. We extend these feelings to our own behavior as a result of general rules. Private education assists in this further artifice. Thus material honesty becomes a virtue. Does this account resolve the circularity problem? Is there any non-moral motive of honest action?
Some interpreters say yes, it is greed redirected, which removes the circle. But this presents two difficulties: first, our greed is not in fact best satisfied by just action in every case, and second, Hume denies that this motive is approved. Some interpret Hume as coping with the first difficulty by supposing that politicians and parents deceive us into thinking, falsely, that every individual just act advances the interests of the agent; or they claim that Hume himself mistakenly thought so, at least in the Treatise see Baron, Haakonssen, and Gauthier.
Others claim that Hume identifies a non-moral motive of honest action albeit an artificial one other than redirected greed, such as a disposition to treat the rules of justice as themselves reason-giving Darwall or having a policy of conforming to the rules of justice as a system Garrett. Still others say there is no non-moral motive of honest action, and Hume escapes from the circle by relaxing this ostensibly universal requirement on virtuous types of behavior, limiting it to the naturally virtuous kinds.
These interpreters either claim that there is no particular motive needed to evoke approval for conformity to the rules of property — mere behavior is enough Mackie — or that we approve of a motivating form of the moral sentiment itself, the sense of duty Cohon. Fidelity is the virtue of being disposed to fulfill promises and contracts. While he identifies the same circularity puzzle about the approved motive of fidelity that he tackles at length in connection with honesty, in the case of fidelity he concentrates on a different conundrum that arises with the misguided attempt to analyze fidelity as a non-conventional natural virtue.
Suppose the practice of giving and receiving promises did not depend on a socially-defined convention. In that case, what could we mean by the utterances we use to make them, and what would be the origin of our obligation to fulfill them?
The requisite mental act or mental state, though, could not be one of mere desire or resolution to act, since it does not follow from our desiring or resolving to act that we are morally obligated to do so; nor could it be the volition to act, since that does not come into being ahead of time when we promise, but only when the time comes to act.
And of course, one can promise successfully incur obligation by promising even though one has no intention to perform; so the mental act requisite to obligation is not the intention to perform. The only likely act of mind that might be expressed in a promise is a mental act of willing to be obligated to perform the promised action, as this conforms to our common view that we bind ourselves by choosing to be bound.
But, Hume argues, it is absurd to think that one can actually bring an obligation into existence by willing to be obligated. What makes an action obligatory is that its omission is disapproved by unbiased observers. But no act of will within an agent can directly change a previously neutral act into one that provokes moral disapproval in observers even in the agent herself.
Sentiments are not subject to such voluntary control. Thus, there is no such act of the mind. Since the necessary condition for a natural obligation of promises cannot be fulfilled, we may conclude that this obligation is instead the product of group invention to serve the interests of society. Promises are invented in order to build upon the advantages afforded by property. The invention of mere ownership suffices to make possession stable. The introduction of transfer by consent permits some trade, but so far only simultaneous swapping of visible commodities.
Great advantages could be gained by all if people could be counted on to provide goods or services later for benefits given now, or exchange goods that are distant or described generically. But for people without the capacity to obligate themselves to future action, such exchanges would depend upon the party who performs second doing so out of gratitude alone; and that motive cannot generally be relied on in self-interested transactions.
First, people can easily recognize that additional kinds of mutual exchanges would serve their interests. They need only express this interest to one another in order to encourage everyone to invent and to keep such agreements. They devise a form of words to mark these new sorts of exchanges and distinguish them from the generous reciprocal acts of friendship and gratitude.
But Hume says the sentiment of morals comes to play the same role in promise-keeping that it does in the development of honesty with respect to property T 3. This may provide a moral motive for promise-keeping even in anonymous transactions. A small society can maintain a subsistence-level economy without any dominion of some people over others, relying entirely on voluntary compliance with conventions of ownership, transfer of goods, and keeping of agreements, and relying on exclusion as the sole means of enforcement.
Though people are aware that injustice is destructive of social cooperation and so ultimately detrimental to their own interests, this knowledge will not enable them to resist such strong temptation, because of an inherent human weakness: we are more powerfully drawn to a near-term good even when we know we will pay for it with the loss of a greater long-term good. This is the reason for the invention of government. Once in power, rulers can also make legitimate use of their authority to resolve disputes over just what the rules of justice require in particular cases, and to carry out projects for the common good such as building roads and dredging harbors.
Hume thinks it unnecessary to prove that allegiance to government is the product of convention and not mere nature, since governments are obviously social creations. But he does need to explain the creation of governments and how they solve the problem he describes. He speculates that people who are unaccustomed to subordination in daily life might draw the idea for government from their experience of wars with other societies, when they must appoint a temporary commander.
This cannot be done with respect to all the people, but it can be done for a few. Perhaps more directly, they stand to lose their favored status if they are found by the people not to enforce the rules of justice.
It is possible for the people to agree to appoint magistrates in spite of the incurable human attraction to the proximal good even when smaller than a remote good, because this predilection only takes effect when the lesser good is immediately at hand. When considering two future goods, people always prefer the greater, and make decisions accordingly.
So looking to the future, people can decide now to empower magistrates to force them to conform to the rules of justice in the time to come so as to preserve society. When the time comes to obey and individuals are tempted to violate the rules, the long-range threat this poses to society may not move them to desist, but the immediate threat of punishment by the magistrates will. We initially obey our magistrates from self-interest. But once government is instituted, we come to have a moral obligation to obey our governors; this is another artificial duty that needs to be explained.
Governors merely insure that the rules of justice are generally obeyed in the sort of society where purely voluntary conventions would otherwise break down. As in the case of fidelity to promises, the character trait of allegiance to our governors generates sympathy with its beneficiaries throughout society, making us approve the trait as a virtue. Rulers thus need not be chosen by the people in order to be legitimate. Consequently, who is the ruler will often be a matter of salience and imaginative association; and it will be no ground for legitimate rebellion that a ruler was selected arbitrarily.
Rulers identified by long possession of authority, present possession, conquest, succession, or positive law will be suitably salient and so legitimate, provided their rule tends to the common good. Although governments exist to serve the interests of their people, changing magistrates and forms of government for the sake of small advantages to the public would yield disorder and upheaval, defeating the purpose of government; so our duty of allegiance forbids this.
A government that maintains conditions preferable to what they would be without it retains its legitimacy and may not rightly be overthrown. But rebellion against a cruel tyranny is no violation of our duty of allegiance, and may rightly be undertaken. Hume does advocate some forms of government as being preferable to others, particularly in his Essays.
He defends his preferences by arguing that certain forms of government are less prone to corruption, faction with the concomitant threat of civil war , and oppressive treatment of the people than others; that is, they are more likely to enforce the rules of justice, adjudicate fairly, and encourage peace and prosperity. Hume famously criticizes the social contract theory of political obligation. According to his own theory, our duty to obey our governors is not reducible to an instance of our duty to fulfill promises, but arises separately though in a way parallel to the genesis of that duty.
Hume denies that any native citizen or subject in his own day has made even a tacit promise to obey the government, given that citizens do not think they did any such thing, but rather think they are born to obey it. Even a tacit contract requires that the will be engaged, and we have no memory of this; nor do governments refrain from punishing disloyalty in citizens who have given no tacit promise. The mechanism of sympathy ultimately accounts for this approval and the corresponding disapproval of the natural vices.
Sympathy also explains our approval of the artificial virtues; the difference is that we approve of those as a result of sympathy with the cumulative effects produced by the general practice of the artificial virtues on the whole of society individual acts of justice not always producing pleasure for anyone ; whereas we approve each individual exercise of such natural virtues as gratitude and friendship because we sympathize with those who are affected by each such action when we consider it from the common point of view.
As we saw, he argues that the traits of which we approve fall into four groups: traits immediately agreeable to their possessor or to others, and traits advantageous to their possessor or to others. In these four groups of approved traits, our approval arises as the result of sympathy bringing into our minds the pleasure that the trait produces for its possessor or for others with one minor exception.
This is especially clear with such self-regarding virtues as prudence and industry, which we approve even when they occur in individuals who provide no benefit to us observers; this can only be explained by our sympathy with the benefits that prudence and industry bring to their possessors. According to Hume, different levels and manifestations of the passions of pride and humility make for virtue or for vice.
Thus the professed preference of Christians for humility over self-esteem does not accord with the judgments of most observers. Although excessive pride is a natural vice and self-esteem a natural virtue, human beings in society create the artificial virtue of good breeding adherence to customs of slightly exaggerated mutual deference in accordance with social rank to enable us each to conceal our own pride easily so that it does not shock the pride of others.
Courage and military heroism are also forms of pride. By adopting the common point of view we correct for the distortions of sympathy by entering into the feelings of those close to the person being evaluated even if they are remote from us. Although natural abilities of the mind are not traditionally classified as moral virtues and vices, the difference between these types of traits is unimportant, Hume argues. Intelligence, good judgment, application, eloquence, and wit are also mental qualities that bring individuals the approbation of others, and their absence is disapproved.
As is the case with many of the traditionally-recognized virtues, the various natural abilities are approved either because they are useful to their possessor or because they are immediately agreeable to others. It is sometimes argued that moral virtues are unlike natural abilities in that the latter are involuntary, but Hume argues that many traditional moral virtues are involuntary as well. The sole difference is that the prospect of reward or punishment can induce people to act as the morally virtuous would as justice requires, for example , but cannot induce them to act as if they had the natural abilities.
Late in his life Hume deemed the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals his best work, and in style it is a model of elegance and subtlety. The conclusions largely coincide with those of the Treatise. We use reason extensively to learn the effects of various traits and to identify the useful and pernicious ones. But utility and disutility are merely means; were we indifferent to the weal and woe of mankind, we would feel equally indifferent to the traits that promote those ends.
Therefore there must be some sentiment that makes us favor the one over the other. This argument presupposes that the moral evaluations we make are themselves the expression of sentiment rather than reason alone. The alternative position would be that while of course we do feel approval and disapproval for vice and virtue, the judgment as to which is which is itself the deliverance of reason.
So Hume appends some arguments directed against the hypothesis of moral rationalism. One of these is an enriched version of the argument of Treatise 3. He adds that while in our reasonings we start from the knowledge of relations or facts and infer some previously-unknown relation or fact, moral evaluation cannot proceed until all the relevant facts and relations are already known. At that point, there is nothing further for reason to do; therefore moral evaluation is not the work of reason alone but of another faculty.
He bolsters this line of argument by expanding his Treatise analogy between moral and aesthetic judgment, arguing that just as our appreciation of beauty awaits full information about the object but requires the further contribution of taste, so in moral evaluation our assessment of merit or villainy awaits full knowledge of the person and situation but requires the further contribution of approbation or disapprobation.
In the moral Enquiry Hume omits all arguments to show that reason alone does not move us to act; so the Representation Argument about the irrelevance of reason to passions and actions is absent. Without it he has no support for his direct argument that moral goodness and evil are not identical with reasonableness and unreasonableness, which relies on it for its key premise; and that too is absent from EPM.
On the whole in EPM Hume does not appeal to the thesis that reason cannot produce motives in order to show that morals are not derived from reason alone, but limits himself to the epistemic and descriptive arguments showing that reason alone cannot discern virtue and vice in order to reject ethical rationalism in favor of sentimentalism.
However, at Appendix I. Why did Hume omit the more fundamental arguments for the motivational inertia of reason? He may have reconsidered and rejected them. For example, he may have given up his undefended claim that passions have no representative character, a premise of the Representation Argument on which, as we saw, some of his fundamental anti-rationalist arguments depend.
Or he may have retained these views but opted not to appeal to anything so arcane in a work aimed at a broader audience and intended to be as accessible as possible. The moral Enquiry makes no use of ideas and impressions, and so no arguments that depend on that distinction can be offered there, including the Representation Argument.
Apparently Hume thought he could show that reason and sentiment rule different domains without using those arguments. Thus, not surprisingly, the causal analysis of sympathy as a mechanism of vivacity-transferal from the impression of the self to the ideas of the sentiments of others is entirely omitted from the moral Enquiry.
Hume still appeals to sympathy there to explain the origin of all moral approval and disapproval, but he explains our sympathy with others simply as a manifestation of the sentiment of humanity, which is given more prominence. He is still concerned about the objection that sympathetically-acquired sentiments vary with spatial and temporal distance from the object of evaluation while moral assessments do not; so he addresses it in the moral Enquiry as well, and resolves it by appealing once again to the common point of view.
In the Enquiry he places more emphasis on sympathy with the interests of the whole of society, in part achieved by conversation using shared moral vocabulary, as a way to correct our initial sentiments to make them genuinely moral Taylor He also attends more explicitly to the role of reason and reflection in moral evaluation.
Some interpreters see him as offering an account of how to arrive at reliable moral judgment superior to that in the Treatise Taylor While any explanation of this shift and these omissions is merely speculative, here it seems that Hume does not change his mind about the arguments of the Treatise but chooses to lead the reader to the same conclusions by more subtle and indirect means while avoiding provocative claims.
In the moral Enquiry Hume is more explicit about what he takes to be the errors of Christian or, more cautiously, Roman Catholic moralists. The Passions and the Will 3. The Influencing Motives of the Will 4. Ethical Anti-rationalism 5. Is and Ought 6.
The Nature of Moral Judgment 7. Sympathy, and the Nature and Origin of the Moral Sentiments 8. The Common Point of View 9. Artificial and Natural Virtues Honesty with Respect to Property Fidelity to Promises Allegiance to Government The Natural Virtues The Influencing Motives of the Will According to Hume, intentional actions are the immediate product of passions, in particular the direct passions, including the instincts.
The motivating passions, in their turn, are produced in the mind by specific causes, as we see early in the Treatise where he first explains the distinction between impressions of sensation and impressions of reflection: An impression first strikes upon the senses, and makes us perceive heat or cold, thirst or hunger, pleasure or pain, of some kind or other.
Of this impression there is a copy taken by the mind, which remains after the impression ceases; and this we call an idea. This idea of pleasure or pain, when it returns upon the soul, produces the new impressions of desire and aversion, hope and fear, which may properly be called impressions of reflection, because derived from it. Empiricists tried to get around this difficulty in a variety of ways.
They were anxious not to create any excuses for a return to the unscientific guesswork of previous eras, but were forced to acknowledge a limited role for reasoning that was not simply a response to experience.
Though it would be interesting to look at the details of their efforts, this would take us too far afield. For our purposes it will be enough to sum up the empiricist agenda as follows: all opinions should be rejected unless backed up with evidence that is grounded either in experience or in one of some small number of permitted principles of abstract reasoning e. Hume was empiricism's most eloquent advocate, as these uncompromising closing words of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding show:.
When we run over libraries, persuaded of these [empiricist] principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume, of divinity or school metaphysics for instance, let us ask: Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?
Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
The reference to flames, here, is almost certainly just a dramatic device. Enlightenment thinkers were or ought to have been hostile to censorship of opinion. For one thing, they held that reason and not force should be what determines public opinion. For another, most of them had themselves suffered censorship or repercussions for having published unpopular ideas.
In actual fact, Hume did on at least one occasion seek to suppress material he found objectionable: in he tried and failed to prevent the publication of a mocking review of a friend's book by Voltaire Mossner, , p. But whether he really wanted to burn library books for failing to pass his test is not relevant to our concerns. What is relevant is just that, in Hume's view, such books are entirely without value.
The empiricists' uncompromising attitude had risks as well as benefits. The benefits were evident in the explosive growth in scientific knowledge of the world about us and increasingly of ourselves.
The main risk was that, by setting such high standards on what can permissibly count as a reasonable belief, empiricists would end up having to abandon many dearly held beliefs. Opinions on topics that weren't susceptible to empirical i. Hume claimed that such scepticism is really just realism about our predicament.
On a wide number of topics — whether the sun will rise tomorrow, whether we have souls, whether these souls survive the death of our bodies, whether the external world exists — he insisted that, though we are unable to stop ourselves holding opinions, these opinions are not ones to which we are properly entitled. Hume's philosophy was a high water mark for classical empiricism. Rightly or wrongly, most of those who came after him were not prepared to embrace his resulting scepticism.
They began instead to search for and defend alternative sources of evidence — alternative to the evidence of the senses, that is.
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Read our guide on Where to take your learning next for more information. Not ready for formal University study? Then browse over free courses on OpenLearn and sign up to our newsletter to hear about new free courses as they are released. The so-called primary quality of motion is also relative to the perceiver. Imagine, for example, that a leaf is falling from a tree directly in front of a humming bird, a human, and a sloth.
To the human it would appear to be moving at a normal pace. To the sloth it might appear exceedingly rapid. According to Berkeley, speed and time are measured by the succession of ideas in our minds, which varies in different perceivers. Everything we need to perceive sensible qualities is accounted for more efficiently through idealism: God directly feeds us sensory information without creating the material world as a useless middleman.
If therefore it were possible for bodies to exist without the mind, yet to hold they do so, must needs be a very precarious opinion; since it is to suppose, without any reason at all, that God has created innumerable beings that are entirely useless, and serve to no manner of purpose. In theory, we might think that God could have created the material world as a middleman if he wanted to, sort of as an instrument to accomplish the task.
Instruments are used only when there is a need. However, God, who has infinite powers, has no needs and thus has no use of any instrument that might help him accomplish some task.
Berkeley writes:. We indeed, who are beings of finite powers, are forced to make use of instruments. Whence it seems a clear consequence, that the supreme unlimited agent uses no tool or instrument at all. Thus, God is perfectly capable of feeding us sensory information directly without the need for him to create the material world as a crutch.
Why would an all good God permit the enormous amount of suffering that we see in the world around us? First, he enabled the controversy by mediating the sensory information of the dialogue. When things became heated, he could have just cut off the flow of perceptions.
Third, God is directly responsible for whatever continued incapacity I have as a quadriplegic. While I and my friends are certainly morally responsible for our respective roles, God is nevertheless an active participant and conspirator in how I am affected. Berkeley has two responses to this criticism. First, he argues that the problem with God and evil is no more severe with his idealist theory than it is for those who believe in the existence of matter.
In both cases, God is actively involved in sustaining a world that includes immorality and suffering.
In case therefore you suppose God to act by the mediation of an instrument or occasion, called matter, you as truly make Him the author of sin as I, who think Him the immediate agent in all those operations vulgarly ascribed to Nature. According to Berkeley, evil does not consist of outward actions, but inward attitudes:.
I farther observe that sin or moral turpitude does not consist in the outward physical action or motion, but in the internal deviation of the will from the laws of reason and religion. This is plain, in that the killing an enemy in a battle, or putting a criminal legally to death, is not thought sinful; though the outward act be the very same with that in the case of murder.
Since, therefore, sin does not consist in the physical action, the making God an immediate cause of all such actions is not making Him the Author of sin. Thus, when God feeds us sensory information that involves immorality or is painful, his motives are pure.
It is as though he is performing the role of a messenger or delivery service; sometimes the information is good, sometimes not so good.
Ultimately the fault rests with the person who initially sent the message, not delivered it. With the present example, the fault rests solely with me and my friends. The last of the great British empiricists was David Hume , who pushed empiricism to its skeptical conclusions.
In his early twenties he wrote the manuscript of his most important work, A Treatise of Human Nature With a steady flow of publications, branching out into history as well as philosophy, by his mid forties he became one of the most famous—and controversial—authors in Europe.
His wealth grew with his fame. In spite of the skeptical tone of his writings, Hume was a cheerful person and enjoyed socializing with people at all levels of society. Rousseau had mental problems, though, and, turning on his generous host, he publicly accused Hume of trying to sabotage his reputation. The event turned into an international scandal, and the two never reconciled.
Hume died at age 65 from a digestive disorder that lingered for a year and left him emaciated. On his deathbed, crowds of people gathered around his Edinburgh home, curious to know whether he would repent of his irreligion. He held firm in his disbelief, and, in fact, one of his final acts was to plan for the posthumous publication of his most anti-religious writing, which he felt was too controversial to appear in print while he was alive.
In his own day, as now, Hume had a notorious reputation as a skeptical philosopher, and in many ways he carried on the skeptical tradition forged in ancient Greece. There are two main building blocks upon which his empiricist philosophy is founded.
The first of these concerns the origin of ideas. Thoughts and ideas flow through our minds endlessly — ideas of people, houses, music concerts, scientific discoveries, God, on and on. Where do they all come from? For example, the idea I have of the color red ultimately came from some outward sensory experience that I had of the color red that was stored in my memory. The idea I have of fear similarly came from an inward feeling of fear that I experienced in the past.
When we think of a golden mountain, we only join two consistent ideas, gold , and mountain , with which we were formerly acquainted. In short, all the materials of thinking are derived either from our outward or inward sentiment: The mixture and composition of these belongs alone to the mind and will.
Or, to express myself in philosophical language, all our ideas or more feeble perceptions are copies of our impressions or more lively ones. Hume offers two proofs for his position that all ideas are copied from impressions.
Second, he says that, if you go your entire life without having a particular type of sensation, then you would lack the corresponding idea of that sensation. What Hume does with this, though, is quite radical insofar as he transforms it into a theory of meaning. An idea is meaningless, then, if I cannot trace it back to any impression. When we entertain, therefore, any suspicion that a philosophical term is employed without any meaning or idea as is but too frequent , we need but enquire, from what impression is that supposed idea derived?
And if it be impossible to assign any, this will serve to confirm our suspicion. By bringing ideas into so clear a light we may reasonably hope to remove all dispute, which may arise, concerning their nature and reality. It is this theory of meaning that leads Hume down the path of skepticism as he explores one philosophical theory after another. In fact, he believes that much of traditional philosophy and religion can be dismissed as meaningless since it fails this test.
Suppose that I sit down on a couch and let my mind wander where it will. I think about the President, then Japan, then my car, then a telephone pole, then a railroad track, then an old apartment I lived in.
It is tempting to think that I am conjuring up these ideas spontaneously without any organization behind them. Not so, Hume argues. Our flow of ideas is connected together by three principles of association.
First is resemblance , where one thought leads to another because of resembling features that they have. Second is contiguity , that is, one thing being in close proximity to another. For example, if someone says something about a store in a shopping mall, I might then think about the store located next to it. Third is cause and effect. For example, if I look at a scar on my arm, I immediately start thinking about the accident I had that caused me to get the scar.
These three principles alone, according to Hume, are responsible for all mental association that our minds make in the normal flow of ideas. In both of these cases his skeptical conclusions arise from applying the theory of meaning described above.
If the traditional ideas of causality and personal identity are to be meaningful, then we must be able to trace those ideas back to some impression. In each case, though, there are problems locating an impression that is suitable for forming these ideas. The traditional notion of personal identity held by Descartes and other philosophers is that it is a single, unified substance that continues through time. On this view, I am a single conscious entity, and, even though my specific thoughts change, my identity remains intact throughout time, and perhaps even into the afterlife.
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.
The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different. Thus, the inward impression that I have of my identity is that of an ever-shifting bundle of perceptions, and this is the impression that must form the basis of my true notion of personal identity. The traditional notion of causality is that there is an external power or force that causes ball A to strike and move ball B, independently of what you or I might perceive when we watch the balls move.
Think of it like an invisible explosion that occurs when A strikes B and forces it to move. That is, there is an objective necessary connection between the cause and effect. One possibility is that we perceive an outward impression through our five senses that forms the idea of an objective necessary connection.
But do we? Suppose that when ball A struck ball B, it produced a flash of light and a loud boom, and, in fact, that every causal connection we saw was similarly accompanied by a light flash and a boom. If that was the case, then, yes, we would have a very strong outward impression that would give us the idea of an objective necessary connection.
When we look about us towards external objects, and consider the operation of causes, we are never able, in a single instance, to discover any power or necessary connection; any quality, which binds the effect to the cause, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other.
We only find, that the one does actually, in fact, follow the other. The impulse of one billiard- ball is attended with motion in the second. This is the whole that appears to the outward senses. He next considers whether there is any inward impression that forms the idea of necessary connection.
Locke had suggested one possibility: we experience a feeling of causal power when we willfully move parts of our bodies, such as when I raise my arm. Here we have a causal sequence where the cause is my mental decision and the effect is the raising of my arm. Since the causal sequence is taking place within my own mind, I am thus capable of directly experiencing a feeling of causal power or necessary connection when I willfully raise my arm.
In the absence of an appropriate outward or inward impression, we must then reject the traditional notion of necessary connection as an objective force or invisible explosion. He suggests an alternative, though. There is a more moderate notion of necessary connection that comes from an inward feeling of expectation that occurs when we repeatedly see A followed by B.
Consider again the example of billiard balls: it is only after repeatedly seeing ball A move B that our minds feel a transition from the cause to the effect.
The first time a man saw the communication of motion by impulse, as by the shock of two billiard balls, he could not pronounce that the one event was connected : But only that it was conjoined with the other. After he has observed several instances of this nature, he then pronounces them to be connected. What alteration has happened to give rise to this new idea of connection?
Nothing but that he now feels these events to be connected in his imagination, and can readily foretell the existence of one from the appearance of the other. In the end, Hume does not completely reject the idea of necessary connection and causality. But he does reject the traditional idea of it being something like a primary quality within objects themselves. Instead, he suggests that necessary connection is like a secondary quality that we spectators impose onto A-B sequences when we repeatedly see A and B conjoined.
To properly understand exactly what Hume is criticizing, three things need to be clarified. Rather, it must break some law of nature, such as if my arm gets chopped off and a new one instantly appears. Second, Hume focuses specifically on reports of miracles—stories about miracles that we hear about from other people or read about in books such as the Bible.
He does not consider miracles that we might directly witness ourselves. Third, Hume focuses on whether it is reasonable for us to believe reports of miracles, not whether the miraculous event actually took place.
It is impossible for us to go back in time and prove with absolute certainty whether any reported miracle was genuine. The best we can do is consider whether the evidence in support of a miracle report is compelling enough for us to believe the report. Hume offers a series of arguments against belief in miracles, but his main one is this: it is never reasonable to believe in reports of miracles since those reports will always be outweighed by stronger evidence for consistent laws of nature.
Suppose, for example, that the Mayor and all the city officials say that they witnessed a genuine miracle. As they report, a car rammed into city hall, causing the wall to collapse, but seconds later all the smashed pieces of the wall floated into the air, and reassembled themselves just as they were before. Should we believe their report? According to Hume, our first step is to weigh the evidence for and against this miracle, sort of like we were placing the evidence in the pans of a balance scale.
On the one side, the evidence that we have in favor of the miracle is the credibility of the witnesses. On the other side, the evidence against the miracle consists of the accumulated experience that we have in favor of uniform laws of nature. The natural world behaves in an orderly way based to natural laws. We count on this every moment of the day as when, for example, I open a door and expect it to swing on a hinge, rather than do something like transform into a bird and fly away.
According to Hume, the evidence that we have in favor of consistent laws of nature is overwhelming, and will always outweigh even the best evidence in favor of a reported miraculous violation of a law of nature.
A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined. There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation [i. And as a uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof from the nature of the fact against the existence of any miracle.
For Hume, since miracles are defined as violations of laws of nature, any alleged miracle report is instantly outweighed by overwhelming evidence that we have of consistent laws of nature. The wise thing to do, Hume says, is to proportion our belief to the evidence. With the above City Hall example, we should thus disbelieve the report that the wall miraculously reassembled itself since the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of consistent laws of nature.
In addition to this main argument against belief in miracles, Hume offers four additional criticisms. First, he says, the witnesses who report miracles typically lack credibility. Sometimes they lack sufficient education and good sense, which makes them gullible. Other times they are consciously deceptive. Even in the above example of the City Hall miracle, our first reaction would be to suspect that the Mayor and the city officials concocted the story to hide something politically sensitive.
Second, Hume argues that human beings are predisposed to enjoy hearing sensational stories, and this creates an instant audience for accounts of miraculous events. In recent times, we see this in the success of tabloid publications such as the National Enquirer that specialize in stories about alien abductions, monsters such as Bigfoot, and every possible type of miracle. This vulnerability within human nature itself casts doubt on the truth of such sensational claims.
Third, Hume states that reports of miracles typically come from pre-scientific and primitive countries whose cultures are obsessed with the supernatural. The most ordinary natural events are ascribed to supernatural causes, and reliance on omens and oracles is the norm. The very location of such miracle reports counts against their credibility. Fourth, Hume argues that reports of miracles support rival religious systems, and thus nullify each other. There are reports of miracles within virtually every religious tradition around the world.
Christian miracles support the Christian plan of salvation. Muslim miracles support the Muslim plan of salvation, and so on. Taken as a whole, then, rival miracle reports are mutually undermining. Hume recognizes that the Christian religious tradition not only contains reports of miracles, but is in fact founded on miraculous circumstances in the lives of the Biblical characters.
Nevertheless, Hume argues, the reasonable thing to do even here is to disbelieve these reports. Throughout the history of philosophy, the traditional conception of morality was that it consists of objective universal truths that can be discovered through human reason. For Plato, moral standards such as justice and goodness exist independently of human society in the higher spirit-realm of the forms. And, for Plato, it takes a mental act of reason to grasp moral truths, in much the way it takes an act of reason to grasp mathematical truths which also reside in the realm of the forms.
Hume rejects this view: morality is not grounded in an objective feature of the external world, but rather on internal mental feelings of pleasure and pain. All that we will find is a feeling of pleasure or pain in reaction to the action. Take any action allowed to be vicious; willful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice.
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. You never can find it, till you turn your reflection into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this action.
Here is a matter of fact; but it is the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the object. So that when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation of it. Thus, morality does not involve making a rational judgment about some objective moral facts. Instead, moral assessments are just emotional reactions.
If I see someone robbing a bank and determine that action to be morally wrong, I am not making a rational judgment about some objective moral truth or fact; rather, I am experiencing a feeling of emotional pain, and that feeling constitutes my negative assessment of the robber. As obvious as this all seems to Hume, he notes that most moral theories insist on linking moral assessments with some factual judgment of reason.
He makes this point here:. In every system of morality which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not.
Rather, the obligation comes from feeling, not from deduction of facts. Thus, statements of moral obligation are introduced through an emotional reaction, not through a rational deduction.
He began with a theory of meaning that ruthlessly dismembers any concept that is not grounded in an outward or inward impression, and the first victims were traditional notions of personal identity and causality. He questioned the legitimacy of belief in miracles and, in essence, called into doubt anything supernatural.
Finally, he attacked the traditional notion of rationally perceived moral truths, and reduced moral assessments to emotional reactions.
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