terms ‘affection for self-good’ and ‘affection for public good’ were
not such as allowed of a consistent opposition between them. They can
only be so opposed if, on the one hand, self-good is identified with
pleasure; and on the other, affection for public good is carefully
distinguished from desire for that sort of pleasure of which the
gratification of others is a condition. But with Shaftesbury,
affections for self-good do not represent merely those desires for
pleasure determined by self-consciousness--for pleasure presented as
one’s personal good--which can alone be properly reckoned sources
of moral evil. They include equally mere natural appetites--hunger,
the sexual impulse, &c.--which are morally neutral, and they do not
clearly exclude any desire for an object which a man has so ‘made
his own’ as to find his happiness--‘self-enjoyment’ or ‘self-good,’
according to Shaftesbury’s language--in attaining it, though it
be as remote from imagined pleasure as possible. [1] On the other
hand, ‘affections for public good,’ as he describes them, are not
restricted to such desires for the good of others as are irrespective
of pleasure to self. They include not only such natural instincts as
‘parental kindness and concern for the nurture and propagation of
the young,’ which, morally, at any rate, are not to be distinguished
from the appetites reckoned as affections for self-good, but also
desires for sympathetic pleasure--the pleasure to oneself which
arises on consciousness that another is pleased. Shaftesbury’s
special antipathy, indeed, is the doctrine that benevolent affections
are interested in the sense of having for their object a pleasure
to oneself, apart from and beyond the pleasure of the person whom
they move us to please; but unless he regards them as desires for
the pleasure which the subject of them experiences in the pleasure
of another, there is no purpose in enlarging, as he does with much
unction, on the special pleasantness of the pleasures which they
produce. With such vagueness in his notions of what he meant by
affections for ‘self-good’ and for ‘public good,’ it is not strange
that he should have failed to give any tenable account of the
selfishness in which he conceived moral evil to consist. He could not
apply such a term of reproach to the ‘self-affections’ in general,
without condemning as selfish the man who ‘finds his own happiness
in doing good,’ and who is in truth indistinguishable from one to
whom ‘affection for public good’ has become, as we say, the law of
his being. Nor could he identify selfishness, as he should have
done, with all living for pleasure without a more complete rupture
than he was capable of with the received doctrine of his time and
without bringing affection for public good, in the form in which it
was most generally conceived, and which was, at any rate, one of the
forms under which he presented it to himself--as desire, namely, for
sympathetic pleasure--into the same condemnation. His way out of the
difficulty is, as we have seen, in violation of his own principle
to find the characteristic of selfishness not in the motive of any
affection but in its result; not in the fact that a man’s desire
has his own good for its object, which is true of one to whom his
neighbour’s good is as his own, nor in the fact that it has pleasure
for its object, which Shaftesbury, as the child of his age, could
scarcely help thinking was the case with every desire, but in the
fact that it is stronger than is ‘consistent with the interest of the
species or public.’
[1] Book II., part 2, sec. 2.
What have Butler and Hutcheson to say about it? Chiefly that
affections terminate upon their objects. But this does not exclude
the view that all desire is for pleasure.
24. Neither Butler nor Hutcheson [1] can claim to have carried the
ethical controversy much beyond the point at which Shaftesbury left
it. Each took for granted that the object of the ‘self-affection’ was
necessarily one’s own happiness, and neither made any distinction
between living for happiness and living for pleasure. They could
not then identify selfishness with the living for pleasure without
condemning the self-affection, and with, it the best man’s pursuit
of his own highest good in the service of others, altogether as
evil. Nor in the absence of any better theory of the object of
the self-affection could the social affections, which, according
to Butler, are subject in the developed man to the direction of
self-love, escape the suggestion that they are one mode of the
general desire for pleasure. Butler and Hutcheson, indeed, are quite
clear that they are ‘disinterested’ in the sense of ‘terminating upon
their objects.’ [2] This means, what is sufficiently obvious when
once pointed out, _(a)_ that a benevolent desire is not a desire
for that particular pleasure, or rather ‘removal of uneasiness,’
which shall ensue when it is satisfied, and _(b)_ that it cannot
originally arise from the general desire for happiness, since
this creates no pleasures but merely directs us to the pursuit of
objects found pleasant independently of it, and thus, if it directs
us to benevolent acts, presupposes a pleasure previously found in
them. This, however, as Butler points out, is equally true of all
particular desires whatever--of those styled self-regarding, no less
than of the social--and if it is not incompatible with the former
being desires for pleasure, no more is it with the latter being so.
Much confusion on the matter, it may be truly said, arises from the
loose way in which the words ‘affection’ and ‘passion’ are used by
Butler and his contemporaries, not excluding Hume himself, alike
for appetite, desire, and emotion. In every case a pleasure other
than satisfaction of desire must have been experienced before desire
can be excited by the imagination of it. A pleasure incidental to
the satisfaction of _appetite_ must have been experienced before
imagination of it could excite the _desire_ of the glutton. In like
manner, social affection, as _desire_, cannot be first excited by the
pleasure which shall arise when it is satisfied; it must previously
exist as the condition of that pleasure being experienced; but it
does not follow that it is other than a desire for an imagined
pleasure, for that sympathetic pleasure in the pleasure of another
in which the social affection as _emotion_ consists. Now though
Butler and Hutcheson sufficiently showed that it is no other pleasure
than this which is the original object of benevolent desires, they
did not attempt to show that it is not this; and failing such an
attempt, the received doctrine that the object of all desire, social
and self-regarding alike, is pleasure of one sort or another, would
naturally be taken to stand. This admitted, there can be nothing in
the fact that a certain pleasure depends on the pleasure of another,
and that a certain other does not, to entitle an action moved by
desire for the former sort of pleasure to be called unselfish in the
way of praise, and one moved by desire for the latter sort selfish
in the way of reproach. The motive--desire for his own pleasure--is
the same to the doer in both cases. The distinction between the acts
can only lie in that which Shaftesbury had said could not constitute
moral good or ill--in the consequences by which society judges of
them, but which do not form the motive of the agent. In other words,
it will be a distinction fixed by that law of opinion or reputation,
in which Locke had found the common measure of virtue and vice,
though he had not entered on the question of the considerations by
which that law is formed.
[1] The works of Hutcheson, published before Hume’s treatise was
written, and which strongly affected it, were the ‘Enquiry into the
Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue’ (1725), and the ‘Essay
on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections’ (1728). In
what follows I wrote with direct reference to his posthumous work,
not published till after Hume’s treatise, but which only reproduces
more systematically his earlier views.
[2] See in Preface to Butler’s Sermons, the part relating to Sermon
XI., ‘Besides, the only idea of an interested pursuit’ &c.; also the
early part of Sermon XI., ‘Every man hath a general desire,’ &c.
Of moral goodness Butler’s account circular: Hutcheson’s inconsistent
with his doctrine that reason gives no end.
25. Such a conclusion would lie ready to hand for such a reader of
Butler and Hutcheson as we may suppose Hume to have been, but it
is needless to say that it is not that at which they themselves
arrive. Butler, indeed, distinctly refuses to identify moral good
and evil respectively with disinterested and interested action, [1]
but neither does he admit that desire for pleasure or aversion from
pain is the uniform motive of action in such a way as to compel the
conclusion that moral good and ill represent a distinction, not of
motives, but of consequences of action contemplated by the onlooker.
An act is morally good, according to him, when it is approved by the
‘reflex faculty of approbation,’ bad when it is disapproved, but
what it is that this ‘faculty’ approves he never distinctly tells
us. The good is what ‘conscience’ approves, and conscience is what
approves the good--that is the circle out of which he never escapes.
If we insist on extracting from him any more satisfactory conclusion
as to the object of moral approbation, it must be that it is the
object which ‘self-love’ pursues, _i.e._, the greatest happiness
of the individual, a conclusion which in some places he certainly
adopts. [2] Hutcheson, on the other hand, gives a plain definition of
the object which this faculty approves. It consists in ‘affections
tending to the happiness of others and the moral perfection of the
mind possessing them.’ If in this definition by ‘tending to’ may be
understood ‘of which the motive is’--an interpretation which the
general tenor of Hutcheson’s view would justify--it implies in effect
that the morally good lies in desires of which the object is not
pleasure. That desire for moral perfection, if there is such a thing,
is not desire for pleasure is obvious enough; nor could desire for
the happiness of others be taken to be so except through confusion
between determination by the conception of another’s good, to which
his apparent pleasure is rightly or wrongly taken as a guide, and
by the imagination of a pleasure to be experienced by oneself in
sympathy with the pleasure of another. Nor is it doubtful that
Hutcheson himself, though he might have hesitated to identify moral
evil, as selfishness, with the living for pleasure, yet understood
by the morally good the living for objects wholly different from
pleasure. The question is whether the recognition of such motives is
logically compatible with his doctrine that reason gives no ends,
but is only a ‘subservient power’ of calculating means. If feeling,
undetermined by thought or reason, can alone supply motives, and
of feeling, thus undetermined, nothing can be said but that it is
pleasant or painful, what motive can there be but imagination of
one’s own pleasure or pain--_one’s own_, for if imagination is
merely the return of feeling in fainter form, no one can imagine any
feeling, any more than he can originally feel it, except as his own?
[1] See preface to Sermons (about four pages from the end in most
editions):-‘The goodness or badness of actions does not arise hence,’
&c. The conclusion he there arrives at is that a good action is one
which ‘becomes such creatures as we are’; and this, read in the
light of the second sermon, must be understood to mean an action
‘suitable to our whole nature,’ as containing a principle of ‘reflex
approbation.’ In other words, the good action is so because approved
by conscience.
[2] See a passage towards the end of Sermon III., ‘Reasonable
self-love and conscience are the chief,’ &c. &c.; also a passage
towards the end of Sermon XI., ‘Let it be allowed though virtue,’ &c.
&c.
Source of the moral judgment: Received notion of reason incompatible
with true view. Shaftesbury’s doctrine of rational affection; spoilt
by doctrine of ‘moral sense’
26. The work of reason in constituting the moral judgment (‘I
ought’), as well as the moral motive (‘I must, because I ought’),
could not find due recognition in an age which took its notion of
reason from Locke. The only theory then known which found the source
of moral distinctions in reason was Clarke’s, and Clarke’s notion
of reason was essentially the same as that which appears in Locke’s
account of demonstrative knowledge. [1] It was in truth derived from
the procedure of mathematics, and only applicable to the comparison
of quantities. Clarke talks loftily about the Eternal Reason of
things, but by this he means nothing definite except the laws of
proportion, and when he finds the virtue of an act to consist in
conformity to this Eternal Reason, the inevitable rejoinder is the
question--Between what quantities is this virtue a proportion? [2]
In Shaftesbury first appears a doctrine of moral sense. Over and
above the social and self-regarding affections proper to a ‘sensible’
creature, the characteristic of man is a ‘rational affection’ for
goodness as consisting in the proper adjustment of the two orders
of ‘sensible’ affection. This rational affection is not only a
possible motive to action--it is the only motive that can make that
character good of which human action is the expression; for with
Shaftesbury, though a balance of the social and self-affections
constitutes the goodness of those affections, yet the man is only
good as actuated by affection for this goodness, and ‘should the
_sensible_ affections stand ever so much amiss, yet if they prevail
not because of those other rational affections spoken of, the person
is esteemed virtuous.’ [3] Such a notion, it is clear, if it had
met with a psychology answering it, had only to be worked out in
order to become Kant’s doctrine of the rational will as determined
by reverence for law; but Shaftesbury had no such psychology, nor,
with his aristocratic indifference to completeness of system, does
he seem ever to have felt the want of it. He never asked himself
what precisely was the theory of reason implied in the admission of
an affection ‘rational’ in the sense, not that reason calculates the
means to its satisfaction, but that it is determined by an object
only possible for a rational as distinct from a ‘sensible’ creature;
and just because he did not do so, he slipped into adaptations to the
current view of the good as pleasure and of desire as determined by
the pleasure incidental to its own satisfaction. Thus, to a disciple,
who wished to extract from Shaftesbury a more definite system than
Shaftesbury had himself formed, the ‘rational affection’ would become
desire for a specific feeling of pleasure supposed to arise on the
view of good actions as exhibiting a proper balance between social
and self-regarding affections. This pleasure is the ‘moral sense,’
[4] with which Shaftesbury’s name has become specially associated,
while the doctrine of rational affection, with which he certainly
himself connected it, but which it essentially vitiates, has been
forgotten.
[1] See Clarke’s Boyle Lectures, Vol. II., proposition 1. The germ
of Clarke’s doctrine of morals is to be found in Locke’s occasional
assimilation of moral to mathematical truth and certainty. (Cf.
Essay, Book IV, ch. 4, sec. 7, and ch. 12, sec. 8).
[2] Cf. Hume, Vol. II., p. 238. [Book III., part I., sec. I.]
[3] ‘Inq. concerning Virtue,’ Book I., pt. 2. sec. 4. Cf. Sec. 3 sub
init.
[4] In using the term ‘moral sense,’ Shaftesbury himself, no doubt,
meant to convey the notion that the moral faculty was one of
‘intuition,’ in Locke’s sense of the word, as opposed to reason, the
faculty of demonstration, rather than that it was a susceptibility of
pleasure and pain.
Consequences of the latter.
27. That doctrine is of value as maintaining that those actions only
are morally good of which the rational affection is the motive, in
the sense that they spring from a character which this affection has
fashioned. But if the rational affection is desire for the pleasure
of moral sense, we find ourselves in the contradiction of supposing
that the only motive which can produce good acts is one that cannot
operate till after the good acts have been done. It is desire for a
pleasure which yet can only have been experienced as a consequence of
the previous existence of the desire. Shaftesbury himself, indeed,
treats the moral sense of pleasure in the contemplation of good
actions as a pleasure in the view of the right adjustment between the
social and self-affections. If, however, on the strength of this, we
suppose that certain actions are first done, not from the rational
affection, but yet good, and that then remembrance of the pleasure
found in the view of their goodness, exciting desire, becomes motive
to another set of acts which are thus done from rational affection,
we contradict his statement that only the rational affection forms
the goodness of man, and are none the nearer to an account of what
does form it. To say that it is the ‘right adjustment’ of the two
orders of affection tells us nothing. Except as suggesting an analogy
from the world of art, really inapplicable, but by which Shaftesbury
was much influenced, this expression means no more than that goodness
is a good state of the affections. From such a circle the outlet
most consistent with the spirit of that philosophy, which had led
Shaftesbury himself to bring down the rational affection to the level
of a desire for pleasure, would lie in the notion that a state of the
affections is good in proportion as it is productive of pleasure;
which again would suggest the question whether the specific pleasure
of moral sense itself, the supposed object of rational affection, is
more than pleasure in that indefinite anticipation of pleasure which
the view of affections so ordered tends to raise in us.
Is an act done for ‘virtue’s sake’ done for pleasure of moral sense?
28. Here, again, neither Butler nor Hutcheson, while they avoid the
most obvious inconsistency of Shaftesbury’s doctrine, do much for its
positive development. With each the ‘moral faculty,’ though it is
said to approve and disapprove, is still a ‘sense’ or ‘sentiment,’ a
specific susceptibility of pleasure in the contemplation of goodness;
and each again recognises a ‘reflex affection’ for--a desire to
have--the goodness of which the view conveys this pleasure. But they
neither have the merit of stating so explicitly as Shaftesbury does
that this rational affection alone constitutes the goodness of man,
as man; nor, on the other hand, do they lapse, as he does, into the
representation of it as a desire for the pleasure which the view of
goodness causes. Butler, indeed, having no account to give of the
goodness which is approved or morally pleasing, but the fact that it
is so pleasing, could logically have nothing to say against the view
that this reflex affection is merely a desire for this particular
sort of pleasure; but by representing it as equivalent in its highest
form to the love of God, to the longing of the soul after Him as the
perfectly good, he in effect gives it a wholly different character.
Hutcheson, by his definition of the object of moral approbation, [1]
which is also a definition of the object of the reflex affection, is
fairly entitled to exclude, as he does, along with the notion that
the goodness which we morally approve is the quality of exciting the
pleasure of such approval, the notion that ‘affection for goodness’
means desire for this or any other pleasure. But, in spite of his
express rejection of this view, the question will still return, how
either a faculty of consciousness of which we only know that it is ‘a
kind of taste or relish,’ or a desire from the determination of which
reason is expressly excluded, can have any other object than pleasure
or pain.
[1] See above, sec. 25.
Hume excludes every object of desire but pleasure.
29. In contrast with these well-meant efforts to derive that
distinction between the selfish and unselfish, between the pleasant
and the morally good, which the Christian conscience requires, from
principles that do not admit of it, Hume’s system has the merit
of relative consistency. He sees that the two sides of Locke’s
doctrine--one that thought originates nothing, but takes its objects
as given in feeling, the other that the good which is object of
desire is pleasant feeling--are inseparable. Hence he decisively
rejects every notion of rational or unselfish affections, which
would imply that they are other than desires for pleasure; of
virtue, which would imply that it antecedently determines, rather
than is constituted by, the specific pleasure of moral sense; and
of this pleasure itself, which would imply that anything but the
view of tendencies to produce pleasure can excite it. But here
his consistency stops. The principle which forbade him to admit
any object of desire but pleasure is practically forgotten in his
account of the sources of pleasure, and its being so forgotten is
the condition of the desire for pleasure being made plausibly to
serve as a foundation for morals. It is the assumption of pleasures
determined by objects only possible for reason, made in the treatise
on the Passions, that prepares the way for the rejection of reason,
as supplying either moral motive or moral standard, in the treatise
on Morals.
His account of ‘direct passions’: All desire is for pleasure.
30. ‘The passions’ is Hume’s generic term for ‘impressions of
reflection’--appetites, desires, and emotions alike. He divides them
into two main orders, ‘direct and indirect,’ both ‘founded on pain
and pleasure.’ The _direct_ passions are enumerated as ‘desire and
aversion, grief and joy, hope and fear, along with volition’ or will.
These ‘arise from good and evil’ (which are the same as pleasure and
pain) ‘most naturally and with least preparation.’ ‘Desire arises
from good, aversion from evil, considered simply.’ They become will
or volition, ‘when the good may be attained or evil avoided by
any action of the mind or body’--will being simply ‘the internal
impression we feel and are conscious of when we knowingly give rise
to any new motion of our body or new perception of our mind.’ ‘When
good is certain or probable it produces joy’ (which is described
also as a pleasure produced by pleasure or by the imagination of
pleasure); ‘when it is uncertain, it gives rise to hope.’ To these
the corresponding opposites are grief and fear. We must suppose
them to be distinguished from desire and aversion as being what
he elsewhere calls ‘pure emotions’; such as do not, like desires,
‘immediately excite us to action.’ Given such an immediate impression
of pleasure or pain as excites a ‘distinct passion’ of one or other
of these kinds, and supposing it to ‘arise from an object related to
ourselves or others,’ it excites mediately, through this relation,
the new impressions of pride or humility, love or hatred--pride when
the object is related to oneself, love when it is related to another
person. These are _indirect_ passions. They do not tend to displace
the immediate impression which is the condition of their excitement,
but being themselves agreeable give it additional force. ‘Thus a
suit of fine clothes produces pleasure from their beauty; and this
pleasure produces the direct passions, or the impressions of volition
and desire. Again, when these clothes are considered as belonging to
oneself, the double relation conveys to us the sentiment of pride,
which is an indirect passion; and the pleasure which attends that
passion returns back to the direct affections, and gives new force to
our desire or volition, joy or hope.’ [1]
[1] Vol. II., pp. 214, 215. Cf. pp. 76, 90, 153 and 203. [Book II.,
part III., sec. IX.; part 1, sec. I; part I., sec. VI.; part II.,
sec. VI.; part III., sec. VI.]
Yet he admits ‘passions’ which produce pleasure, but proceed not from
it
31. Alongside of the unqualified statement that ‘the passions, both
direct and indirect, are founded on pain and pleasure,’ and the
consequent theory of them, we find the curiously cool admission that
‘beside pain and pleasure, the direct passions frequently arise from
a natural impulse or instinct, which is perfectly unaccountable.
Of this kind is the desire of punishment to our enemies, and of
happiness to our friends; hunger and lust, and a few other bodily
appetites. These passions, properly speaking, produce good and
evil, and proceed not from them like the other affections.’ [1] In
this casual way appears the recognition of that difference of the
desire for imagined pleasure from appetite proper on the one side,
and on the other from desire determined by reason, which it is the
point of Hume’s system to ignore. The question is, how many of the
pleasures in which he finds the springs of human conduct are other
than products of a desire which is not itself moved by pleasure, or
emotions excited by objects which reason constitutes.
[1] P. 215. [Book II., part III., sec. IX.] The passage in the
‘Dissertation on the Passions’ (Vol. IV., ‘Dissertation on the
Passions,’ sub init.), which corresponds to the one here quoted,
throws light on the relation in which Hume’s later redaction of his
theory stands to the earlier, as occasionally disguising, but never
removing, its inconsistencies. ‘Some objects, by being naturally
conformable or contrary to passion, excite an agreeable or painful
sensation, and are thence called _good_ or _evil_. The punishment
of an adversary, by gratifying revenge, is good: the sickness of a
companion, by affecting friendship, is evil.’ Here he avoids the
inconsistency of admitting in so many words a ‘desire’ which is not
for a pleasure. But the inconsistency really remains. What is the
passion, the ‘conformability’ to which of an object in the supposed
cases constitutes pleasure? Since it is neither an appetite (such
as hunger), nor an emotion (such as pride), it remains that it is a
desire, and a desire which, though the ‘gratification’ of it is a
pleasure, cannot be a desire for that or any other pleasure.
Desire for objects, as he understands it, excluded by his theory of
impressions and ideas.