Ep. 367: Hume on the Foundations of Ethics (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 367 is something like what is morality and how can we know it? And we read David Hume's An Inquiry concerning the Principles of morals from 1751. More information about the text in the podcast, please see partiallyexaminelife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, assiduously avoiding stepping on people's gouty toes in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:35 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, eternally and deeply questioning his utility in Austin, Texas.

0:41 Wes: This is Wes Alwan trading virtues for gewgaws in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:46 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, sentimentally connected to my virtues in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:51 Wes: I really thought someone else would. It's in the reading.

0:54 Dylan: I did not.

0:56 Wes: Baubles, trinkets.

0:57 Mark: Oh, okay.

0:58 Wes: It's in the very last paragraph, I think. But nevertheless, I thought that would be a very attractive target.

1:05 Mark: Well, all right. So we are returning to Hume morality as an extension. At least my curiosity was piqued because of our recent stuff on sympathy empathy. Well, Hume was the. Not the original, but was somebody that these folks were reacting to, a sentimentalist that. Yes, actually morality is based on the fact that we do react when things happen, not just to ourselves, but to other people. So Hume was arguing against people who thought everything must be motivated by self love and. Or that morality has to come from a divine source. No, morality is just something we build based on our sentiments which are given to us by human nature.

Even though. Yes, they can vary according to circumstance, according to what culture you're in, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, we did this on episode 45, but not exactly this text. This is the more developed, more polished version. We had read some of the treatise on human nature, the work that was not appreciated at the time. This one was his favorite book that he wrote.

2:09 Wes: Yeah. Even though the treatise, which he wrote in his 20s is an absolute work of genius. You know, just revisiting some of that. It's astonishing that he wrote that in his 20s, but. And he had a life, apparently. I'm like, this guy did a little research. This guy couldn't have had a life.

2:25 Seth: Yeah, he had a.

2:26 Wes: Well, he never got married, but it looks like he probably dated a lot. So he lived up to his endorsement of sociability, which you see a lot of in this reading. But the way he starts this out is he starts by, you would think, this treatise, or, sorry, this inquiry is going to be about the quote unquote, reality of moral distinctions. So he starts out with a little swipe at what we would call, I guess, error theorists today, or nihilists, people who don't really believe there is such a thing as morality, skeptical about it. And he thinks this is very disingenuous.

We all make these distinctions between good and bad character, right? Normative language is just. Our discourse is infused with it. And so he calls it disingenuous, which in a way is a disingenuous beginning to this book. Because he, of course, would be the very first person to be accused of being a nihilist. Because what he's going to claim here is that we cannot derive morals from reason in a way that the rationalist people, he's responding to thought that, you know, you can derive moral truths from relationships between human beings the same way you can derive the Pythagorean theorem from the relations of the sides of a right triangle.

He's going to claim that that sort of approach does not work. We can't objectively derive moral truths. And what, what he wants to do to replace that with is this naturalistic process where we quote, unquote, derive in a different sense our moral behavior from our psychology, and yet that is supposed to somehow do the trick of not turning us into nihilists. We'll have to see if that can really do the trick.

4:13 Seth: What if we want to be nihilistic?

4:15 Dylan: No one's a nihilist. It doesn't exist.

4:17 Wes: You want to be a sensible knave, Seth, who gets away with lying occasionally when it's expedient, Right?

4:24 Mark: He's arguing against nihilism as not having any values at all. Of course we have values. You know, you're. Again, you're being disingenuous if you pretend that you don't have values. The question you seem to be asking Wes is, are moral principles actually obligatory on us? Is true normativity exist?

4:43 Wes: By nihilism, I don't mean whether you have values, right? So the. A nihilist could have premoral values all they want. It's just my values. They're my selfish values for me. I want to dominate you, subordinate you to me. That's my values. I'm not a nihilist in that. In that sense. But I'm using nihilism to mean. Yeah, we don't have any universal obligations that are grounded in some mind independent truth, Right? So there are different questions here. One is of how we know, and they do get kind of equivocated and combined by Hume in an unhelpful way in the beginning, unfortunately.

But one is how we can know moral truths. Can we derive them rationally? The second is how we justify them. Or are they. Can they be justified? Can we demonstrate them again using reason from first principles? And the third is how we can derive a moral psychology, how we can explain human normative talk and behavior in terms of the human psyche. So the third one, which is what he focuses on, is the most doable, of course, of all of those. But it's not the same thing as telling us why we are obligated to do. One might think we're obligated to do.

It's not the same thing as saying, okay, there are these moral facts out there.

6:01 Dylan: Isn't that really what the character. Character of that obligation is like? We'd have a. We'll have to have a separate discussion on what obligation means.

6:10 Wes: Yeah. If it's wrong to kill, is it because God says so? Is it because it's objectively written into some metaphysical foundation of human relations? Or can it just not be justified in the same way that we might justify the Pythagorean theorem or some empirical.

6:29 Mark: The other option I gave that he was arguing against is just. Is all action motivated by selfishness. So you could, if you're Ayn Rand, you could say this action is justified because it is in my interest to do so. And Hume just wants to say that's not where our sentiments solely lie. We have just as raw sentiments for other people as we do for ourselves. And we had a whole episode with Pat Churchland who ran with that and tried to give us the evolutionary basis of that, you know, drawing explicitly on Hume.

7:01 Seth: I'm getting a little hung up on the. I think Wes is this is actually a good way to start it because without the context, it's not clear exactly what he set out to do. You know, there's a lot of assumed that the secondary literature helped with kind of like the background against which he's arguing. But I just would reframe the question about obligation more of what is it that motivates us? So it's one thing to know what the right thing is. Then there's justifying it, as Wes said. Right. And then there's also the question of being motivated to do it. And I would say obligation is one explanation for motivation and what Hume wants to talk about that aspect of to it. So there's. I think there's even further nuances and questions here than just the way Wes laid it out.

7:47 Wes: We can give A perfectly naturalistic account of motivation. We can say, look, how we evolved in a certain way to engage in normative behavior. But that doesn't settle any question about whether we can derive norms objectively as objective from certain mind independent. Not that I don't want to bog us down in this because he gets off this subject real quick and we're going to do that in our next recording. We'll have going to have more data on that from his other work on this.

8:18 Dylan: Let me just try formulating it a slightly different way. So if I start talking about obligations, I focus on talking about the direction of my actions. That's not the word that I'm looking for.

8:29 Wes: Let me give you another example. Is it truth evaluable that you should not kill innocent people? Can that you should not kill innocent people? Is that a proposition that's capable of being true or false?

8:40 Mark: Right. Hume says it is not. It's a matter of taste. It's just a matter of universal taste. And if somebody doesn't share that, in some ways you just can't argue with them. They're a defective person. So he's actually prefiguring Nietzsche about this that if you. You might think I'm really angry. I just want to murder this person, you know, I just want to murder somebody. I feel so good. I want to break somebody's heart tonight. No, sit down, contemplate this coolly. Think about what you really want. And you will see that you in fact do not want that.

And it is ultimately a social enterprise. He doesn't go the whole Richard Rorty route and make this the foundation. He seems to think that your individual sentiments. But you know, your individual sentiments check each other. Because of course, if it was just like, you know, what mood you're in, are you feeling open to appreciating other people's suffering in that moment or not? Like we need to cool down and let our other sentiments that might take us away from morality, not interfere. So we have strong desires. Right. So it is definitely a contemplative enterprise, even though it's a sentimental one.

9:48 Dylan: It comes out of who we are as human beings. Right. It's part of our. Similar to, I guess, prefiguring the Scheler and the Stein that we were reading. It's in the same vein as this is part of our endowment as human beings and the way we're constituted. That we are both sensitive to such things and have sentiments of these sorts of. That's part of what drives our agency. That was the word I was Looking for our agency to go in any particular direction and act in any particular way, you know, that's going to be explained by the sentiments. The question about the obligation seems to come to whether that agency is intrinsically directed towards a particular thing or ought to be.

Unless you're formulating it well, are these moral obligations then derivable like the Pythagorean theorem? And the thing that comes to my mind immediately is just the challenge with the fact that of having an obligation that has anything like the force of any kind of physical law or mathematical law, because in that case, you're making an account, a rational account of something that is true and can't be any other way. But as soon as you put in the notion of choosing that the obligation is not a requirement that you have to act in a certain way.

It's a requirement you have to have to act in a certain way if you want to align with us. And thus. And thus, and thus. But the Pythagorean theorem, that's an account for something that is the way it is. The way it is, Right?

11:25 Wes: Right. So this is a big problem with moral necessity, which is that we can violate that necessity in the way that we can't violate mathematical laws or natural law law. So the question here is whether we can still say morality is categorical, right? To use the Kantian term. The categorical is the opposite of this idea. Well, we can say it's the right thing to do if you want to be happy or this or that. That's the hypothetical reasoning. But I. So again, he really sets us up for that type of argument that. But then he moves away from it. And what he.

What we get at the end of this section is he wants to say that our moral. And this is important because we're going to talk a lot about sentiment, but he wants to say that in a way it's both. Morality is going to be a mixture of reason and sentiment. We can't do without sentiment. We need some kind of quote, internal sense or feeling which is universal in us, but in the same way that we need reasoning, right. To be sensitive, you know, good at interpreting art and being sensitive to art, to give us proper discernment of the object and make nice distinctions or fine distinctions.

We need that with, with morality as well. Reason can actually help us if we add reasoning to sentiments, but it's not going to get us there by itself.

12:47 Mark: All right, you're just making me want to go into the appendix to discuss these further. So I guess we should get to

12:53 Seth: the text, page 13.

12:56 Wes: Yeah. I thought we're not discussing the appendix today.

12:58 Mark: Right. But if you're talking about how much reason is whether it's a moral sense or reason, the function of reason, as he's going to tell us in the body. So what we read today was the body of a book. We're going to have a second discussion that covers the appendices and some of a treatise of human nature that has distinctly different points and more, you know, the reason it was dismissed. Or it's just a much longer book and it gets into a lot of. It's not very user friendly. This was created for popular consumption. And so he creates these appendices to put the more technical discussions at the end.

And one of those is just how reason versus interacts with sentiment. And as we're going to get into when we analyze, when we try to generalize from sentiment. Right, because the worst kind of sentimentalism is just there's just some things we like and some things we don't like and people have different tastes. And so no moral system is actually possible because we can't even generalize what people in general like and don't like. But that's not going to be the case that we're all very consistent. And it comes to. A lot of. It comes down to utility.

We like things that are useful not just to us, but to anyone. And so it ends up. You need reason to figure out like when you're making a law, what actually is going to be useful. You might trace the future consequences, trace all the possible. He gives examples like it might seem like a good idea to assassinate a bad leader, but we found through historical, through trying this many times that no, actually in the long run you destabilize things and even if you are accomplishing some immediate good, it's going to be bad. He also talks about charity in this respect that you might think that a king who just gives things to all the citizens and makes sure all their needs are.

I mean that sounds very nice. Beneficence is good, but this will bring about laziness and indolence. And it's better to teach a man to fish than give him a fish, that kind of thing. So these are things that we use reason to systematize and improve. And I was saying before, not just comparing my particular what I want right now versus what I really want over time, but yeah, talk to other people about it. It should be a social enterprise. See where we disagree and use reason to argue which is the best, which actually is the thing that best represents our shared sentiments.

15:26 Wes: All right. He also gives us the method at the end of this first section. And this is where he. I think he thinks this inquiry is an improvement on his previous work because he's going to go into some painstaking detail, which I think Seth loved. Give lots and lots of examples in a way proceed inductively. So he says he's going to consider every attribute of mind that is causes approval or disapproval for others in others, every habit, every sentiment, every faculty, and then imagine, okay, well, do we want to be characterized that way? Would we like to possess that right virtue or that vice?

And ultimately the point is to use reason to discover what are the common properties of the things that we call virtues and vices. It's just apparent from language and common experience what we're going to choose to call virtue and what we're going to choose to call vice. But then we want to look to what those things have in common and what universal or general principles fall out of that. So we come up with a lot of examples and look for commonalities.

16:38 Mark: Yes, he's going to get into quote very freely Greek and Roman writers as we get further into it as to examples of people that we appreciate or do not we esteem.

16:55 Seth: Yeah. I'm wondering whether we've said what needs to be said about the setup or if it would make sense to just quote a couple of things from say more.

17:05 Mark: Because once we disappear into talking about individual virtues, I feel like we've. I know you, you expressed frustration when you were reading this. Like, you know, I spent detailed book, I spent all this time on it. But then like, once you read the secondary literature, like, oh, that's what it is. You could have said that whole thing in two paragraphs and like, yes, for the set up maybe, but for the detail, I don't mind at this point, like, let's talk about chastity. What's useful about chastity?

17:33 Seth: Yeah.

17:33 Mark: What does he say is about. But that's a different kind of argument than we normally have on this podcast.

17:38 Seth: Yeah. Okay. So, you know, he says on page 13, the problem statement is there's a controversy of late whether the general foundation of morals can be derived from reason or from sentiment. Okay. So he says, I'm going to talk about sentiment. But I'm, you know, he's, he sets it up by saying, look, we have words, we have ways. We talk about people. We call them sociable, good natured, humane, merciful, grateful. Right. And he said all languages have this and it's universally Expressed the highest merit which human nature is capable of attaining. Okay, so he's sort of saying, look, prima facie we have this whole vocabulary. Everybody, every human being in whatever language and whatever culture they live in has a vocabulary to. Of merit, we'll call it about the way we describe what's blameworthy and praiseworthy that people do.

18:31 Dylan: Moral distinctions.

18:32 Seth: Moral distinctions. And he says, okay. So he says, you know, but we want to talk, you know, we want to get into. I don't want to just state that and say that's it. Let's actually kind of take a look at this a little more closely and talk about what it is about moral distinctions. What are we talking about when we're talking about moral distinctions? And on page 18 he says, as these topics of praise never fail to be employed, and with success, where we would inspire esteem for anyone, may it not thence be concluded that utility resulting from the social virtues forms at least a part of their merit and is one source of that approbation and regard so universally paid to them.

So we're essentially going to say, instead of saying that these things, statements of morality are facts which can be true or false, he's going to say moral distinctions are, you know, have a sentiment, you know, that allows us to, that makes us naturally react to them in a positive or a negative way. And that has to do at least in part with the concept of utility. And what he means here, and he's going to get into a lot of detail now, is something like when you do something that has value to somebody else, that has utility for somebody else, it's beneficial to them, we generally speaking consider that to be good.

Right. And if you do something that's counter. Although he's going to start off talking about the way people act with respect to their own individual utility. Right. Like if I do something that's good for me, you know, like work out or eat healthy, then yay, yay me, I'm acting morally appropriate way or morally approval worthy way.

20:11 Wes: Yeah, utility just means, right? It's related to some end that we have. Yeah, it's a means to an end.

20:17 Dylan: Yes. And if we put to the side for a second the yay me comment, we would start with the notion that we make distinctions. In this case, they're moral distinctions that aren't any different from the other kinds of distinctions we make in the world with respect to things that we can put into groups and categories. So within this grouping of things regarding our behavior, the way in which we ourselves behave and other people behave, we can Group all those things into different categories of stuff. That's all. Putting aside the question of whether or not there's any particular obligation or any particular force about needing to act in any particular way.

21:01 Seth: Can I just ask you to repeat or clarify that? So we make moral judgment. We react to moral actions.

21:13 Dylan: Most human beings are sensitive to certain wavelengths of color. And so we can categorize things in the world according to different kinds of color. And to me, he's doing the same thing. He's not going any further about morals than. Other than saying we have the. By our sentiments, have the ability to make moral distinctions. We just do this. We make moral distinctions as ways of categorizing our actions and activities. And that is as a class of things, we put them into buckets. And I'm just saying that that's a completely different. That that is sort of prima facie true. Just in the way he's talking about it.

21:55 Wes: The.

21:56 Dylan: We've already sort of said that one of the most important questions that we have is. Isn't even really brought up here or analyzed here in a satisfactory way about whether what kind of obligation do we have that would rule our actions? That's a. That's distinct from the fact that our actions go into categories.

22:18 Wes: Right?

22:18 Mark: He saves that for the conclusion. The part two of the conclusion.

22:22 Dylan: Yes.

22:22 Mark: And. And he thinks it's kind of obvious that just like, look at these things I described as being the things we approve of. Don't you want to do them? Don't you want to be pleasant to other people? Wouldn't you rather. But he acknowledges, like, yeah, we all want there to be justice. So in general, we want there to be property relations, because that's just something that having that is of utility to us, to society. But we'd also individually like to be able to break those. And he doesn't really have a good response to those other than like, you know, if you accept such pernicious. I'm going to be the exception to the rule. Like, I don't know what to say to you. Like, it's like you don't understand what game we've been playing this whole time.

23:04 Wes: Well, he says that, but he also has some more convincing arguments that he adds to that. One of them is that knaves often get sunk by their own maxims. You have to believe, by the way, that Kant completely is so influenced by Hume in this. He's just completely like. The fact that he thinks he can produce maxims out of reason is just a pivot from Hume's talk of maxims here and even, even this specific case, the whole idea of getting hung by one's own maxims, that's the whole point of the categorical imperative, is that we get hung rationally by it, but not necessarily in this world practically.

But for Hume, many times we do get hung by our maxims because if we're untrustworthy and we get caught, we ruin our reputation for trustworthiness and it has all types of practical consequences. But then his final argument is a stoic argument, which is that biggest thing that we lose is the pleasure of good conscience and being able to write. There's something about virtue itself which is inherently pleasurable and an end in itself. And if we are going to be knaves on the sly, we lose that. And that's better than all the gewgaws that one might trade it away for.

24:22 Dylan: Yeah. And so that's going to be the argument that's worth spending some time thinking about how pervasive that is or whether, you know, is that intrinsic to, simply intrinsic to human beings or is that in some important way part of the interaction we have with our culture? And also what are the preconditions for that being the case about our physical or mental capacities and states.

24:50 Wes: Right. And he brings this up in this first section. One of the controversy is not just whether morals are derived from reason and sentiment, but how we know them. And then the third thing is whether they apply to us qua rational or if they're founded in our the particular fabric and constitution of the human species. Right. So qua rational could be any rational being who's not human and doesn't have any sentiments. But he's going to specifically say, contra the rationalists and Kant who, you know, come after him, it's, it's not founded in rationality. A perfectly rational being without sentiment sense would not necessarily be a being that felt bound to morality. So we have to have this constitution that includes the sentiment side.

25:38 Mark: I feel like while we're talking about metaethics here, we should just sort of get at is he a utilitarian? That apparently Utilitarianism.

25:46 Wes: Right.

25:47 Mark: Bentham's after this. But Hutcheson is Hume's biggest influence and he kind of came up with the idea of the utility principle. It's just the way that you could as a strict utilitarian, you could be a rationalist. You could say it is self evident that what virtue is is the greatest good for the greatest number. And then all of ethics just becomes a matter of rationally calculating which actions fall into that category. I mean, I know Hume. Like part of what we find admirable about people for Hume is their motives. So it's not just he's not a consequentialist but, but he also does say like.

But we also admire somebody who is like we don't admire impotence, we don't admire people who are too foolish to accomplish anything. Like we do actually care about results or about you being the kind of person. So our sentiments. He's not a consequentialist in that he doesn't start by let's just see what the best consequences are. He's about character, he's about motives, he's about all the different things. And he says that, you know, the ultimate foundation has to be in sentiment, which I'm not sure if all utilitarians are committed to.

27:01 Dylan: One of the things I loved about his using the word utility is the way he uses it is so much more expansive than utilitarianism. I mean to me it made utilitarianism being a kind of shrunken version of what he's talking about. Because when you say the greatest good for the greatest number of people, it's a particular metric of utility. In his case, utility is just a way of describing the conditions under which we activate our agency and make our choices.

27:32 Wes: And social utility is just one kind of utility. Yeah.

27:35 Dylan: And just one of them. Yeah. And so in fact it's left open what would be the metrics of that? Like if you did something, if you did Rorty and said well what we really want to do is we want to minimize cruelty. That would be utilitarian. You would choose from Hume's argument is you'd have a. The whole question what the principle is that you are activating utility to get to is open.

27:58 Wes: I mean he is going to argue in the long run that social utility is what we're talking about when we talk about morality and that it's just sort of baked into us. It's part of our constitution to be sensitive to the well being of others and it can't be reduced to selfishness. We can't give some sort of egoistic, philosophically egoistic explanation and say, well it really just comes down to our own gratification. And no, it's just basic. And this sort of remind us of Scheler on empathy a little bit. There's just a basic interest in the non reducible interest in the well being

28:33 Seth: of others and ourselves.

28:36 Wes: Right. But the argument on a whole. Right. We have these selfish passions. He calls Them there's a lot of self interest. And in a way, those passions are stronger on a phenomenological basis. We're often driven by them more. But on balance, our behavior, in a way, is more a product of the moral sentiments. We are very constrained by them. Right. Otherwise I would have murdered three different people today.

29:02 Seth: Actually, the reason that you haven't murdered three other people today, Wesley, is that there is not a perfect abundance of everything in the world where you don't have to. And so you have a. You've been conditioned.

29:18 Wes: Isn't that a perfect abundance of people to murder?

29:22 Seth: Well, no. It's interesting because he does get this thing off the ground with a kind of state of nature. He's not using it the same way that Hobbes is or anything like that. In fact, he criticizes. Hobbes is. But, you know, he essentially says it's his way of saying, like, look, if there was no need for us to have any social interaction, then there would be no such thing as morality. Like, if you could just walk around and pick up enough food and shelter and whatever you needed, you know, you wouldn't need to cooperate or share or any of those sorts of things.

And it's actually, he kind of. In my mind, he was kind of making a little bit of fun of the whole notion of the state of nature. But, you know, he says you can. We are naturally. There's a. There's a kind of genetic coding to this type of disposition that just starts by virtue of, you know, you're born. You're not just born ex nihilo. You're. You're. You're born to someone, to a couple of someones at least. And you have a relationship. And that relationship already is bidirectional conditioning the way that you see other people and the conditioning the way that parents, your parents see you.

And, you know, you can start expanding that notion to our extended family, to tribe, to multiple tribes and so on and so forth. And it's kind of like it's an argument of some sort, but it's really just putting out and saying, like a very traditional philosophical point that we're just. We're social animals. And it really wouldn't even be possible for us to be what we are as social animals if there wasn't this sense of call it obligation, call it responsibility, call it awareness, at least of how you fit into that social structure and the types of actions that you should or shouldn't take with respect to other people.

And it just gets more complicated the more people you Involve.

31:15 Wes: Yeah. And we should keep in mind that the larger argument here, the reason why he's doing this with justice, is he wants to show us that there would be no such thing as moral sentiments if they weren't useful, that we cannot get around describing them except in terms of their utility, in this case especially their social utility. Of course, there are going to be other things that he calls virtues that have utility. Right. Which are a selfish kind of utility as well. And that's really, really important to him. His whole project depends on showing that morality, ultimately, including justice as he starts with, is relative to the concept of public utility, as he calls it.

31:59 Mark: I didn't like the way you said that just in. We wouldn't have the sentiments unless they were useful. So that sounds like the sort of Cartesian or, you know, we are well designed creatures. We wouldn't have these sentiments unless they provided utility. No, it's just we have the sentiments. We don't know why we have the sentiments. If we want to characterize what the sentiments tell us, they tell us that utility.

32:23 Wes: We wouldn't make moral judgments if we didn't have this sentiment directed towards public utility or social utility. Yep, yep. So that. And if circumstances, as Seth was saying, you know, summarizing this justice part, if we were in a society in which there were no use for justice because we had a perfect abundance and there's no need to divide up goods, there's no need to designate property, it would just never occur to us. And so we wouldn't need the norms. We would never have to, you know. Right. So another example is just suppose everyone were just entirely disposed to do nothing but good things.

Suppose it had never occurred to anyone to do anything bad, anything that violated a norm, then it would never occur to us to make a moral judgment. In that perfect utopian world, no one would have ever have come up with a moral judgment. Oh, what you did is bad because it just. It wouldn't exist and it would never have occurred to anyone.

33:18 Seth: This is essentially counterfactual thought experiment to say you don't derive these principles or these ideas through pure reason. Or. I think he actually says it's not a priori, it's a posteriori. And I think there's some merit to that. I mean, it's. I don't want to say it's like a slam dunk, but it certainly would. Somebody who wanted to argue the opposite would have to account for that. Like really the notion that, you know, he uses the term utility, but it's, It's Almost like saying there's a contingent practical aspect to morality that without practical engagement and interaction, it just wouldn't even make any sense. You wouldn't be able to come up with it.

34:05 Mark: So I feel like we're maybe mixing together sections two and three a little bit. So section two is of benevolence, which is why do we admire people? Why do we praise when someone is beneficent, they're sociable, they're gracious, et cetera. Right. We just do. And utility is the thing that sort of comes out of this that it's not. I mean, he ends up arguing it doesn't have to be direct. Utility doesn't. Like a consequentialist will just like, well, did it actually achieve a change in the world? And he does acknowledge that, like, the more powerful you are, the more change you can make, the more we praise you.

Because having a good disposition, if you're just a private individual, it can only do so much. But having, yeah, being able to produce more in the world does make you more impressive. But there is something different. There's something more natural about that than that's baked into human nature. We would always appreciate that no matter what kind of being, what kind of situation we are. Whereas justice. You started talking about Wes, he says specifically, like, this is something we made up. This is something based purely on utility. We don't know whether we appreciate happy people.

We might never. We just hear about somebody who's nice and we like I've never. Somebody who maybe who's long dead are eventually the kind of arguments he gives. And we still praise them even though they're of no utility to us or anybody we know. It's just like, we just like utility in general. But justice, like, has to serve us now in this situation or it's bullsh.

35:41 Wes: Well, I'm not so sure about that. But I think your point on the whole bears reinforcing because the phenomenology of this is not. We don't do this in our heads where we say, oh, so and so. You know, this murderer did an outrageous thing. When we feel that indignation towards the murderer, we're not saying, well, this is bad for you. Social utility. The society is worse off. Now. We just, at a phenomenological level, we respond viscerally and we're responding primarily, Hume says, not to the act but to the character it illustrates. So. Right. So this is another interesting thing about this work.

You don't hear him talking about moral judgments of particular actions a lot like the way we would. In a lot of contemporary ethical theory, moral judgments are directed primarily at character and character traits. And if we're worried about acts, it's because they're illustrative of certain traits that we disapprove of. But that disapproval, even though it's relative, we can see that it's relative to utility. We can work to social utility. We can work that out. But that's not. We're not doing that consciously at a phenomenological level, when we have those moral sentiments, they're just visceral.

It's disgusting to us that so and so did something terrible, that they were tyrant. And it's disgusting even if it happened 300 BC, when it doesn't affect me in particular or my private interests or even the social interests of this existing society. It's that general.

37:12 Dylan: It's why versus hearing a story or having a tragedy and having a cathartic reaction to it would depend upon this ability to have sentiment in the way you're describing.

37:23 Mark: I always want to know if the characters. If the characters I'm seeing in my shows, how they relate to my stock portfolio, so I know whether to feel

37:31 Seth: bad for them or not.

37:32 Wes: It's a lot like doing evolutionary theory and saying, okay, we can relate this to. We understand why we have these disorders, dispositions and sentiments, and they're related at some level to social utility. But it's so hardwired into us at such a deep level. It doesn't involve consciously working out that. That relationship.

37:50 Dylan: Yeah, and you're also making me want to point back to what Hume said. And you also pointed out, Wes, at the beginning, that it's a relation between reason and sentiment. So you're emphasizing right now the characteristic of our moral reactions as being hardwired into us. But it's not as if those are solely and fundamentally driving our actions, even our agency. It's still, in the end, there's also an interaction with reason about this. And this is, to me, one of the things that makes Hume a lot more satisfying than some people on this is that.

But he's immediately working with the complicated character of this, that we are sensitive to and make moral distinctions, that we even have things that we recognize in those moral distinctions, things that are more pleasing and less pleasing, more utility or less utility, so that we would have preferences and things that we are either disgusted by or drawn to, but also that our reason interacts with that regarding how we evaluate and folds into how we make those choices, that we're not robots of our sentiments any more. Than we are calculators of our actions by reason.

39:13 Wes: Well, the other important factor there is we have to disentangle our moral sentiments from our private, personal sentiments. Right. So when someone gets in my way and pisses me off, or is my enemy, as he'll later on say in the book, if I react to that and hate that person, that's not a moral sentiment. But often I'll take that hate and say, well, that person is an asshole. They're a bad person. My hatred is because they're bad. We have a very difficult time as human beings disentangling what is a moral sentiment from what is just social conflict, Essentially, when we disapprove of people. Right. Is it a moral disapproval or is it just, hey, I have a conflict with this person?

39:54 Dylan: Yeah. So that conflict that you have with someone steps in front of you in line and you want to just take an elbow and, like, bash them across the head because they piss you off so much, that might be you and not them.

40:06 Wes: This is Larry David curb your enthusiasm territory. Because it involves manners.

40:10 Mark: Right.

40:11 Dylan: It involves manners.

40:12 Wes: Another gray area of the world of manners where it seems a little bit arbitrary. But is it arbitrary? And should he have to not use the handicap stall in the bathroom? Is that a fair rule and all that stuff? Perfectly motivated, of course, by his selfishness.

40:27 Dylan: Yes.

40:28 Mark: He uses the word spectator a lot. I don't see, like, impartial spectator. That specific formulation, which maybe that was Adam Smith, but I think that it is implied.

40:40 Wes: Well, he does use a variation on that.

40:43 Mark: Yeah.

40:43 Wes: So you have to look at it from a general point of view. Are private. Yeah.

40:48 Mark: When we are judging things, we are not saying, as, you know, how does it relate to my specific interests or even how does it relate to my society insofar as I'm a member of it? Because we can make these projections over time or into fiction or whatnot.

41:04 Wes: Yeah.

41:05 Seth: In fact.

41:05 Wes: So the way this works is that when we make a moral judgment, our empathy is aroused. But it's empathy for some hypothetical John or Jane Doe who might be affected by the character trait that we're judging. Right. So we see someone who's got a vicious character trait. They're greedy or they're stingy or whatever. The moral sentiment is not. Well, I don't like that person because that makes me feel bad. That's not a moral sentiment. Nor are you feeling bad on behalf of his victims, necessarily, the people who are immediately affected by his greediness. You might feel that, but that's not a specifically moral sentiment. The Moral sentiment is just for the hypothetical. Any person X, the variable who might be the victim of this person's bad character traits. So it's that general. It's a weird idea because it's empathy for this generic, abstract person.

42:01 Dylan: Well. But it does describe moral indignation. Right. You can be utterly indignant about the behavior of your government or another person or whatever, and you're in no way harmed by it at all. You could be absolutely, in fact, murderously furious, actually.

42:17 Wes: Tell me about it. Fantasies that might get you arrested if you told anyone about them.

42:24 Mark: Yeah. He kind of wraps up the whole book before the conclusion with these chapters on that layout, this quadrant system of qualities useful to others, qualities useful to the person who's doing the acting, qualities immediately agreeable to the people that this person is interacting with, or the ones that are immediately agreeable to the person themselves. And these are all things that we can morally respect, that these all just complement each other, which obviously they all have very different relations to the spectator. Right. What business is it of yours if somebody is forceful of mind or something like that, or tranquil, has achieved philosophical magnificence?

Like, it's not just like whether they write a book that you will be inspired by or whether they even help other people. Just the fact that we think we just admire some of these traits. And he wants to say morally, even if they don't help anybody else.

43:24 Dylan: So.

43:25 Mark: Interesting wrinkle there.

43:26 Wes: Yeah. Some of it sounds like contagion in Scheler's sense. Right. He'll say our imagination. This is on page 61, enters into his feelings and dispositions. But again, these are just very visceral responses to certain qualities in people. So it's important, even though he emphasizes social utility, he wants to give us all these cases in which social utility is not a factor. And in many cases it's. Right. The same trait will have social utility, but it'll also be immediately agreeable in some way either to the person with the trait or the person observing the trait or to both. So it could really be all three. So you have this over determination of these positive traits.

44:10 Mark: Yeah, the contagion. I don't know if that's the right way to put it, but it was one of the things that Schiller was objecting to of. I only have sympathy for other people because I'm somehow putting myself in their place. And so it's really just a form of egoism. Clearly, Hume is against that as well, but he does sometimes talk as if, like, I'm putting Myself, as you were just saying, I'm putting myself in the place of the person that might be affected by this. It just. It doesn't require anything particularly vivid like, in fact, his. His main examples of empathy are just hearing that somebody did villainous things, not like witnessing somebody in pain right in front of you.

He is not so concerned about that kind of thing. And I'm looking in. There's a quote that I thought was great in chapter five, why Utility Pleases. It is but a weak subterfuge when pressed by these facts and arguments to say that we transport ourselves by the force of imagination into distant Asian countries and consider the advantage which we should have reaped from these characters had we been contemporaries or had any commerce with the person. It is not conceivable how a real sentiment or passion can ever rise from a known imaginary interest, especially when our real interest is still kept in view, is often acknowledged to be entirely distinct from the imaginary and sometimes opposite to it.

45:27 Wes: Right. So there he's arguing against philosophical egoism.

45:30 Mark: Yes, and that form of empathy as a form of imaginative identification, especially over history.

45:37 Wes: I think a good case in point here is courage on page 64, where he says, this is something, right? And so there you have a classic Aristotelian virtue. It's obviously useful to the person who has it. It's obviously useful to society. But it also has a quote, unquote peculiar luster that goes beyond this and derives wholly from itself. And he associates this with sublimity. So some people are just cool. And it even can, you know, it can go to the point where something like courage can override humane sentiments for other more useful virtues. So, for instance, the Scythians, making human leather towels out of their enemies, they prize these very martial virtues, including courage, at the expense of their humanity, at the expense of social utility.

So he doesn't give us a lot of information on what this means. This idea of being so impressed with courage, right. It's so immediately agreeable that it can even and impressive and sublime that it overrides utility.

46:44 Dylan: Well, I mean, the last paragraph in that section, you know, he associates with uncultivated nations who have not as yet had a full experience of the advantages attending beneficence, justice and the social virtues. Courage is the predominant excellence. What is most celebrated by poets and recommended by parents and instructors. It makes you think of in Plutarch, you know, the character of Sparta is in their martial culture. Is they. On the one hand, they would cultivate the virtue of being sneaky and so, you know, the kids were encouraged to do things like steal things, but if they got caught, they'd get the shit beat out of them. And so he told the story of, you know, a kid who had stolen like a puppy or something like that, or dog, and he didn't want to get caught, so ate his guts out.

47:35 Wes: All right.

47:35 Mark: On these delightful images of eating guts and skin. Let's end part one here and we'll get into more of this political stuff and how we see other cultures in other times and how they're moral, you know, where moral relativism might come into view. You can get part two in your supporter feed if you already support us through our website or through patreon.com partiallyexaminedlife you can learn about all the options for doing this@privially xamlite.com support otherwise, just wait till next week and you'll see it. It'll just arise before you.

48:07 Seth: Thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks.