‘interest’ remains, by contrast with which the latter may be defined?
It has been explained above (§7) that since pleasure as such, or
as a feeling, does not admit of generality, ‘pleasure in general’
is an impossible object. When the motive of an action is said to
be ‘pleasure in general,’ what is really meant is that the action
is determined by the conception of pleasure, or, more properly,
of self as a subject to be pleased. Such determination, again, is
distinguished by opposition to two other kinds--_(a)_ to that sort
of determination which is not by conception, but either by animal
want, or by the animal _imagination_ of pleasure, and _(b)_ to
determination by the conception of other objects than pleasure.
By an author, however, who expressly excluded the latter sort of
determination, and who did not recognise any distinction between the
thinking and the animal subject, the motive in question could not
thus be defined. Hence the difficulty of extracting from Hume himself
any clear and consistent account of that which he variously describes
as the ‘general appetite for good, considered merely as such,’ as
‘interest,’ and as ‘self-love.’ To say that he understood by it a
desire for pleasure which is yet not a desire for any pleasure in
particular, may seem a strange interpretation to put on one who
regarded himself as a great liberator from abstractions, but there
is no other which his statements, taken together, would justify.
This desire for nothing, however, he converts into a desire for
something by identifying it on occasion, (1) with any desire for a
pleasure of which the attainment is regarded as sufficiently remote
to allow of calmness in the desire, and (2) with desire for the means
of having all pleasures indifferently at command. It is in one or
other of these senses--either as desire for some particular pleasure
distinguished only by its calmness, or as desire for power--that he
always understands ‘interest’ or ‘self-love,’ except where he gains
a more precise meaning for it by the admission of desires, not for
pleasure at all, to which it may be opposed. Now taken in the former
sense, its difference from the desires for the several pleasures of
‘sense,’ ‘pride,’ and ‘sympathy,’ of which Hume’s account has already
been examined, cannot lie in the object, but--as he himself says of
the distinction, which he regarded as an equivalent one, between
‘reasonable and unreasonable’ desires--in our situation with regard
to it. If then the object of each of these desires, as we have shown
to be implied in Hume’s account of them, is one which only reason,
as self-consciousness, can constitute, it cannot be less so when the
desire is calm enough to be called self-love. Still more plainly is
the desire in question determined by reason--by the conception of
self as a permanent susceptibility of pleasure--if it is understood
to be desire for power.
Thus Hume, having degraded morality for the sake of consistency,
after all is not consistent.
48. Having now before us a complete view of the possible motives to
human action which Hume admits, we find that while he has carried to
its furthest limit, and with the least verbal inconsistency possible,
the effort to make thought deny its own originativeness in action,
he has yet not succeeded. He has made abstraction of everything in
the objects of human interest but their relation to our nervous
irritability--he has left nothing of the beautiful in nature or art
but that which it has in common with a sweetmeat, nothing of that
which is lovely and of good report to the saint or statesman but
what they share with the dandy or diner-out--yet he cannot present
even this poor residuum of an object, by which all action is to be
explained, except under the character it derives from the thinking
soul, which looks before and after, and determines everything by
relation to itself. Thus if, as he says, the distinction between
reasonable and unreasonable desires does not lie in the object,
this will not be because reason has never anything to do with the
constitution of the object, but because it has always so much to
do with it as renders selfishness--the self-conscious pursuit of
pleasure--possible. Sensuality then will have been vindicated, the
distinction between the ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ modes of life will have
been erased, and after all the theoretic consistency--for the sake
of which, and not, of course, to gratify any sinister interest, Hume
made his philosophic venture--will not have been attained. Man will
still not be ultimately passive, nor human action natural. Reason
may be the ‘slave of the passions,’ but it will be a self-imposed
subjection.
If all good is pleasure, what is _moral_ good? Ambiguity in Locke’s
view.
49. We have still, however, to explain how Hume himself completes the
assimilation of the moral to the natural; how, on the supposition
that the ‘good’ can only mean the ‘pleasant,’ he accounts for the
apparent distinction between moral and other good, for the intrusion
of the ‘ought and ought not’ of ethical propositions upon the
‘is and is not’ of truth concerning nature. [1] Here again he is
faithful to his _rôle_ as the expander and expurgator of Locke. With
Locke, it will be remembered, the distinction of _moral_ good lay
in the channel through which the pleasure, that constitutes it, is
derived. It was pleasure accruing through the intervention of law,
as opposed to the operation of nature: and from the pleasure thus
accruing the term ‘morally good’ was transferred to the act which, as
‘conformable to some law,’ occasions it. [2] This view Hume retains,
merely remedying Locke’s omissions and inconsistencies. Locke, as we
saw, not only neglected to derive the existence of the laws, whose
intervention he counted necessary to constitute the morally good,
from the operation of that desire for pleasure which he pronounced
the only motive of man; in speaking of moral goodness as consisting
in conformity to law, he might, if taken at his word, be held to
admit something quite different from pleasure alike as the standard
and the motive of morality. Hume then had, in the first place, to
account for the laws in question, and so account for them as to
remove that absolute opposition between them and the operation of
nature which Locke had taken for granted; secondly, to exhibit that
conformity to law, in which the moral goodness of an act was held
to consist, as itself a mode of pleasure--pleasure, namely, to the
contemplator of the act; and thirdly, to show that not the moral
goodness of the act, even thus understood, but pleasure to himself
was the motive to the doer of it. [3]
[1] Vol. II, p. 245. [Book III., part I., sec. I.]
[2] Above, secs. 16-18.
[3] Of the three problems here specified, Hume’s treatment of the
_second_ is discussed in the following secs. 50-54; of the _first_ in
secs. 55-58; of the _third_ in secs. 60 to the end.
Development of it by Clarke, which breaks down for want of true view
of reason.
50. It was a necessary incident of this process that Locke’s notion
of a Law of God, conformity to which rendered actions ‘in their own
nature right and wrong,’ should disappear. The existence of such
a law cannot be explained as a result of any desire for pleasure,
nor conformity to it as a mode of pleasure. Locke, indeed, tries
to bring the goodness, consisting in such conformity, under his
general definition by treating it as equivalent to the production of
pleasure in another world. This, however, is to seek refuge from the
contradictory in the unmeaning. The question--Is it the pleasure it
produces, or its conformity to law, that constitutes the goodness of
an act?--remains unanswered, while the further one is suggested--What
meaning has pleasure except as the pleasure we experience? [1]
Between pleasure, then, and a ‘conformity’ irreducible to pleasure,
as the moral standard, the reader of Locke had to choose. Clarke,
supported by Locke’s occasional assimilation of moral to mathematical
truth, had elaborated the notion of conformity. To him an action
was ‘in its own nature right’ when it conformed to the ‘reason of
things’--_i.e._ to certain ‘eternal proportions,’ by which God, ‘qui
omnia numero, ordine, mensurâ posuit,’ obliges Himself to govern
the world, and of which reason in us is ‘the appearance.’ [2] Thus
reason, as an eternal ‘agreement or disagreement of ideas,’ was the
standard to which action ought to conform, and, as our consciousness
of such agreement, at once the judge of and motive to conformity.
To this Hume’s reply is in effect the challenge to instance any
act, of which the morality consists either in any of those four
relations, ‘depending on the nature of the ideas related,’ which he
regarded as alone admitting of demonstration, or in any other of
those relations (contiguity, identity, and cause and effect) which,
as ‘matters of fact,’ can be ‘discovered by the understanding.’ [3]
Such a challenge admits of no reply, and no other function but the
perception of such relations being allowed to reason or understanding
in the school of Locke, it follows that it is not this faculty which
either constitutes, or gives the consciousness of, the morally good.
Reason excluded, feeling remains. No action, then, can be called
‘right in its own nature,’ if that is taken to imply (as ‘conformity
to divine law’ must be), relation to something else than our feeling.
It could only be so called with propriety in the sense of exciting
some pleasure _immediately_, as distinct from an act which may be a
condition of the attainment of pleasure, but does not directly convey
it.
[1] Above, sec. 14.
[2] Boyle Lectures, Vol. II, prop. 1. secs. 1-4.
[3] Book III. part 1, sec. 1. (Cf. Book I part 3, sec. 1, and
Introduction to Vol. I, secs. 283 and ff.) It will be observed
that throughout the polemic against Clarke and his congeners Hume
writes as if there were a difference between objects of reason and
feeling, which he could not consistently admit. He begins by putting
the question thus (page 234), ‘whether ‘tis by means of our ideas
or impressions we distinguish betwixt vice and virtue:’ but if, as
he tells us, ‘the idea is merely the weaker impression, and the
impression the stronger idea,’ such a question has no meaning. In
like manner he concludes by saying (page 245) that ‘vice and virtue
may be compared to sounds, colours, heat and cold, which are not
qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind.’ But, since the
whole drift of Book I. is to show that all ‘objective relations’ are
such ‘perceptions’ or their succession, this still leaves us without
any distinction between science and morality that shall be tenable
according to his own doctrine.
With Hume, moral good is pleasure excited in a particular way, viz.:
in the _spectator_ of the ‘good’ act and by the view of its tendency
to produce pleasure.
51. So far, however, there is nothing to distinguish the moral
act either from any ‘inanimate object,’ which may equally excite
immediate pleasure, or from actions which have no character, as
virtuous or vicious, at all. Some further limitation, then, must
be found for the immediate pleasure which constitutes the goodness
called ‘moral,’ and of which praise is the expression. This Hume
finds in the exciting object which must be _(a)_ ‘considered in
general and without reference to our particular interest,’ and _(b)_
an object so ‘related’ (in the sense above [1] explained) to oneself
or to another as that the pleasure which it excites shall cause the
further pleasure either of pride or love. [2] The precise effect of
such limitation he does not explain in detail. A man’s pictures,
gardens, and clothes, we have been told, tend to excite pride in
himself and love in others. If then we can ‘consider them in general
and without reference to our particular interest,’ and in such ‘mere
survey’ find pleasure, this pleasure, according to Hume’s showing,
will constitute them morally good. [3] He usually takes for granted,
however, a further limitation of the pleasure in question, as excited
only by ‘actions, sentiments, and characters,’ and thus finds virtue
to consist in the ‘satisfaction produced to the spectator of an
act or character by the mere view of it.’ [4] Virtues and vices
then mean, as Locke well said, the usual likes and dislikes of
society. If we choose with him to call that virtue of an act, which
really consists in the pleasure experienced by the spectator of it,
‘conformity to the law of their opinion,’ we may do so, provided we
do not suppose that there is some other law, which this imperfectly
reflects, and that the virtue is something other than the pleasure,
but to be inferred from it. ‘We do not infer a character to be
virtuous, because it pleases; but in feeling that it pleases after
such a particular manner, we in effect feel that it is virtuous.’ [5]
[1] Sec. 33.
[2] Vol. II. pp. 247 and 248. [Book III., part I., sec. II.]
[3] Hume treats them as such in Book III. part 3, sec. 5.
[4] Vol. II. p. 251. Cf. p. 225. [Book III., part I., sec. II.; Book
II., part III., sec. X.]
[5] Vol. II. p. 247. [Book III., part I., sec. II.]
52. Some further explanation, however, of the ‘particular manner’
of this pleasure was clearly needed in order at once to adjust it
to the doctrine previously given of the passions (of which this, as
a pleasant emotion, must be one), and to account for our speaking
of the actions which excite it--at least of some of them--as
actions which we _ought_ to do. If we revert to the account of the
passions, we can have no difficulty in fixing on that of which this
peculiar pleasure, excited by the ‘mere survey’ of an action without
reference to the spectator’s ‘particular interest,’ must be a mode.
It must be a kind of sympathy--pleasure felt by the spectator in
the pleasure of another, as distinct from what might be felt in the
prospect of pleasure to himself. [1] On the other hand, there seem
to be certain discrepancies between pleasure and moral sentiment.
We sympathise where we neither approve nor disapprove; and,
conversely, we express approbation where it would seem there was no
pleasure to sympathise with, _e.g._, in regard to an act of simple
justice, or where the person experiencing it was one with whom we
could have no fellow-feeling--an enemy, a stranger, a character in
history--or where the experience, being one not of pleasure but of
pain (say, that of a martyr at the stake), should excite the reverse
of approbation in the spectator, if approbation means pleasure
sympathised with. Our sympathies, moreover, are highly variable, but
our moral sentiments on the whole constant. How must ‘sympathy’ be
qualified, in order that, when we identify moral sentiment with it,
these objections may be avoided?
[1] Vol. II. pp. 335-337. [Book III., part III., sec. I.]
Moral sense is thus sympathy with pleasure qualified by consideration
of general tendencies.
53. Hume’s answer, in brief, is that the sympathy, which constitutes
moral sentiment, is sympathy qualified by the consideration of
‘general tendencies.’ Thus we sympathise with the pleasure arising
from any casual action, but the sympathy does not become moral
approbation unless the act is regarded as a sign of some quality
or character, generally permanently agreeable or useful (_sc._ and
productive of pleasure directly or indirectly) to the agent or
others. An act of justice may not be productive of any immediate
pleasure with which we can sympathise; nay, taken singly, it may
cause pain both in itself and in its results, as when a judge ‘takes
from the poor to give to the rich, or bestows on the dissolute the
labour of the industrious; ‘but we sympathise with the general
satisfaction resulting to society from ‘the whole scheme of law
and justice,’ to which the act in question belongs, and approve it
accordingly. The constancy which leads to a dungeon is a painful
commodity to its possessor, but sympathy with his pain need not
incapacitate a spectator for that other sympathy with the general
pleasure caused by such a character to others, which constitutes it
virtuous. Again, though remote situation or the state of one’s temper
may at any time modify or suppress sympathy with the pleasure caused
by the good qualities of any particular person, we may still apply to
him terms expressive of our liking. ‘External beauty is determined
merely by pleasure; and ‘tis evident a beautiful countenance cannot
give so much pleasure, when seen at a distance of twenty paces, as
when it is brought nearer to us. We say not, however, that it appears
to us less beautiful; because we know what effect it will have in
such a position, and by that reflection we correct its momentary
appearance.’ As with the beautiful, so with the morally good. ‘In
order to correct the continual contradictions’ in our judgment of
it, that would arise from changes in personal temper or situation,
‘we fix on some steady and general points of view, and always in
our thoughts place ourselves in them, whatever may be our present
situation.’ Such a point of view is furnished by the consideration
of ‘the interest or pleasure of the person himself whose character
is examined, and of the persons who have a connection with him,’ as
distinct from the spectator’s own. The imagination in time learns to
‘adhere to these general views, and distinguishes the feelings they
produce from those which arise from our particular and momentary
situation.’ Thus a certain constancy is introduced into sentiments of
blame and praise, and the variations, to which they continue subject,
do not appear in language, which ‘experience teaches us to correct,
even where our sentiments are more stubborn and unalterable.’ [1]
[1] Book III. Vol. II. part 3, sec. 1. Specially pp. 339, 342, 346,
349.
In order to account for the facts it has to become sympathy with
unfelt feelings.
54. It thus appears that though the virtue of an act means the
pleasure which it causes to a spectator, and though this again arises
from sympathy with imagined pleasure of the doer or others, yet
the former may be a pleasure which no particular spectator at any
given time does actually feel--he need only know that under other
conditions on his part he would feel it--and the latter pleasure
may be one either not felt at all by any existing person, or only
felt as the opposite of the uneasiness with which society witnesses
a departure from its general rules. Of the essential distinction
between a feeling of pleasure or pain and a knowledge of the
conditions under which a pleasure or pain is generally felt, Hume
shows no suspicion; nor, while he admits that without substitution
of the knowledge for the feeling there could be no general standard
of praise or blame, does he ask himself what the quest for such a
standard implies. As little does he trouble himself to explain how
there can be such sympathy with an unfelt feeling--with a pleasure
which no one actually feels but which is possible for posterity--as
will explain our approval of the virtue which defies the world,
and which is only assumed, for the credit of a theory, to bring
pleasure to its possessor, because it certainly brings pleasure
to no one else. For the ‘artificial’ virtue, however, of acts
done in conformity with the ‘general scheme of justice,’ or other
social conventions, he accounts at length in part II. of his Second
Book--that entitled ‘Of Justice and Injustice.’
Can the distinction between the ‘moral’ and ‘natural’ be maintained
by Hume? What is ‘artificial virtue’?
55. To a generation which has sufficiently freed itself from all
‘mystical’ views of law--which is aware that ‘natural right,’ if it
means a right that existed in a ‘state of nature,’ is a contradiction
in terms; that, since contracts could not be made, or property
exist apart from social convention, any question about a primitive
obligation to respect them is unmeaning--the negative side of this
part of the treatise can have little interest. That all rights and
obligations are in some sense ‘artificial,’ we are as much agreed as
that without experience there can be no knowledge. The question is,
how the artifice, which constitutes them, is to be understood, and
what are its conditions. If we ask what Hume understood by it, we can
get no other answer than that the artificial is the opposite of the
natural. If we go on to ask for the meaning of the natural, we only
learn that we must distinguish the senses in which it is opposed to
the miraculous and to the unusual from that in which it is opposed
to the artificial, [1] but not what the latter sense is. The truth
is that, if the first book of Hume’s treatise has fulfilled its
purpose, the only conception of the natural, which can give meaning
to the doctrine that the obligation to observe contracts and respect
property is artificial, must disappear. There are, we shall find,
two different negations which in different contexts this doctrine
conveys. Sometimes it means that such an obligation did not exist
for man in a ‘state of nature,’ _i.e._, as man was to begin with.
But in that sense the law of cause and effect, without which there
would be no nature at all, is, according to Hume, not natural, for
it--not merely our recognition of it, but the law itself--is a habit
of imagination, gradually formed. Sometimes it conveys an opposition
to Clarke’s doctrine of obligation as constituted by certain ‘eternal
relations and proportions,’ which also form the order of nature, and
are other than, though regulative of, the succession of our feelings.
Nature, however, having been reduced by Hume to the succession of
our feelings, the ‘artifice,’ by which he supposes obligations to
be formed, cannot be determined by opposition to it, unless the
operation of motives, which explains the artifice, is something else
than a succession of feelings. But that it is nothing else is just
what it is one great object of the moral part of his treatise to show.
[1] Book II. part 1, sec. 2.
No ground for such distinction in relation between motive and act.