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

0:07 Mark: This is the Partially Examined Life, episode 367 part 2. We've been discussing David Hume's Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. I think we are going to get into the details, but should we start with this of justice and then political stuff? Get into the why is justice unique or at least a good place to categorically different kind of thing than say, benevolence?

0:31 Wes: Well, he wants to show that public utility is the sole origin of justice, which we've already discussed in part one. But the point of starting with this is to show that there's something that, that we might think is sort of written in abstract principles in the sky, but that we would never have needed to invent if it weren't for certain circumstances.

0:54 Mark: But what is justice? Is it just giving to that the each to what is. I feel like we should clearly he

1:01 Wes: read the Republic hurting my enemies and helping my friends.

1:05 Dylan: It's the will of the stronger.

1:07 Mark: He's just talking about property and how Locke and some other folks said property is a very natural thing. Like, no, no, property is not a natural thing. It's like, oh, that's just naturally mine. I mean, your hand is naturally yours, that's attached to you. But any physical object, anything alienable, is not naturally yours. But it is very useful for us to have that concept of what a great invention private property was. So it's utility that grounds laws about property, even though they can seem pretty damn arbitrary when you get down to it of like, oh, I'm allowed to live in this house because I signed this piece of paper and I wasn't allowed before. And where exactly is the property line? Like it? There's a lot of stuff that, you know, he talks about picky legalisms coming in here, but that's just. It comes with the territory. A thing that is basically for our interest.

1:58 Seth: Yeah, I made a little note about that section. I was like, oh, so he's all in on the Locke definition of property. If you mix your labor with something, what could be more natural than that it should be yours for all and forever time and you should be able to pass it down to your children and whatever else. I'm not sure how that accords with the notion of utility and justice that he's laying out here.

2:24 Wes: He wants to say that property is actually conventional. It's a. That's a social construct. It's an artificial construction that can only be made sense of in terms of utility to society. This is on page 28. So. Right, right. The whole concept of possession, mine, yours, makes no sense metaphysically. It only makes sense from a utilitarian point of view. There's no natural property of mine or yours.

2:49 Mark: The result ends up being the same. Right. Is that right? Because he does end up saying, passing down to your children, getting the fruits of your labor, like, these are all things that.

2:57 Wes: He justifies that based on its use to society. Because if you don't get the fruits of your labor, you're not going to work hard.

3:04 Seth: Yes, that's the claim. If you labor or expend your active positive energies to try to create something and there are no protections for it in the form of laws about property, then you'll just stop working. So the utility is basically that people will just become idle or they won't if their property isn't protected. Right. My point was just that that's very in line with the Lockean conception because he, you know, he's basically like, you mix your labor with something, it's yours.

3:35 Wes: Yeah.

3:36 Seth: Locke might say it's a natural right.

3:38 Wes: Not for some metaphysical reason and not because God says that's the way it is, or it's a natural right in some abstract sense. He's completely against that. He just says, you know, it's. We do that. It's completely conventional and we're doing it because it encourages useful habits, it encourages people to be ambitious and to try to do things. And it. Even. Its conventionality is so strong that it's hard to distinguish from superstition. He says, right. It looks like laws look a lot like dietary prohibitions. You said, I can put my house on this side of the county line, but not on that side.

Well, it's just an imaginary line, as Trump says about the border between United States and Canada. It's just completely imaginary. Someone drew it, someone made it up. It's as if it's superstition. What that person or Trump does not understand is that those conventions exist for a reason. To have a civilized, non chaotic society.

4:35 Dylan: Yeah, and just after where you're referring to, he's talking about the dilemma of society and understanding what society is founded on. Justice, as justice evidently tends to promote public utility and to support civil society. The sentiment of justice is either derived from our reflecting on that tendency or like hunger, thirst and other appetites, resentment, love of life, attachment to offspring and other passions, arises from a simple original instinct in the human breast which nature has implanted for like, salutary purposes. If the latter be the case, it follows that property, which is the object of justice is also distinguished by. By a simple original instinct and is not ascertained by any argument or reflection. But who is there that's ever heard of such an instinct? Or is this the subject in which new discoveries can be made?

5:28 Wes: Yeah, he wants to argue that the principles have to be. And the instincts, the sentiments have to be quite general because then we could have an instinct for every right and legal clause. Every clause in the contract has an instinct to associate it with it, but we have to stop somewhere.

5:43 Mark: So I'm just a caveman, but I know that.

5:48 Seth: Statute 44.4.

5:49 Mark: Yeah. So this is the, this whole section is right. If we want to say justice is just for utility purposes, then this is where he gives those alternate histories. Or, you know, if you're depending on the state of society, you might not need justice or you might need something quite different. If there is a state of abundance. Right. That we don't have ownership laws around air or water in his day, but if you were in an absolute scarcity, even those things might get laws around them. Or if the laws would be so intolerable that, you know, if you could work all day and not be able to support yourself because that's the way that the property laws are laid out, then. Then there is no justice in that. So he seems to put limits on right. If this system of property is no longer working for us.

6:37 Dylan: Right.

6:37 Mark: Because maybe the 1% own everything and leave the rest of us to starve, then it's illegitimate.

6:44 Wes: There's a good science fiction story to be written about a society where air is a scarce commodity and some people get a lot more there's extreme air inequality.

6:54 Mark: Yeah, it was. I'm trying to remember the name of the sci fi show, but yes, there's a lot of space stations in which that is.

7:01 Wes: Oh, really? Okay.

7:02 Seth: It's been written.

7:04 Wes: That's not surprising.

7:06 Dylan: I was thinking of the Water Knife, which was a novel I read a while ago about scarcity of water in the west and leading to the complete dissolution of the United States of America into a bunch of conglomerates and stuff.

7:21 Wes: Yeah, Chinatown. Great story. Based on the idea of water scarcity and corrupt government intervention in that it's so powerful because it is the type of thing that we would normally think of as infinitely abundant. And then to kind of twist that into a scarcity situation, I think has this deep, emotionally resonant effect. Yeah.

7:41 Dylan: And what you just described is sort of the foundation of a tremendous amount of effectively ecological arguments and regulation of industry, regulation of the fisheries and stuff like that. The tragedy of the commons would be another.

7:54 Wes: Yeah.

7:54 Dylan: Mark, when you were just bringing up examples of the case of justice, you made me think of a characteristic of the way he talks about these virtues and these moral distinctions we make that I couldn't always decide if he was presenting an argument that he thought was good for why we make that distinction versus that he was presenting the way in which that distinction is made. So you say, okay, well, if you were. How much? It was a hypothetical, like, okay, so the following virtue is it has utility. And you can see that has utility because of this and this and this and this.

I mean, and the example that comes to mind was when he talks about Chastity on 54, where he's going through, and he talks about the difference in the way in which chastity affects men and women and how men, you know, could affect. And in fact, there's no recourse with respect to their behavior. So a woman, basically, it's all or nothing about the virtue of her chastity. And if she gives it up, it's basically there's no way for her to repair that. Whereas a man with cowardice, you can reinstate your character. And there's no possibility for that in the case of women.

And when I read through that, because he ends with, but by what action can a woman whose behaviors once been dissolute be able to assure us that she has formed better resolutions and has self command enough to carry them into execution? And he just drops it. And there are other ones like this. It feels like he often is just making a kind of catalog of virtues and explaining how they Illustrate utility, but as distinct from trying to make a particular argument or claim about their particular excellences or even the way in which they balance. Another example is the one we talked about just at the end of the last section with regards to courage.

That there's, you know, it's sort of a descriptive categorization of courage, but also includes the way in which courage doesn't work out so great because it rubs up against social questions of justice and stuff like that.

10:03 Wes: Let's talk about this. The purpose of this section, this is section 6 of qualities useful to ourselves, right? He wants to bring up all these instances in which social utility per se is not necessarily served because he's having us imagine this quote, unquote monster who is, right. So in reality, right, no actual human being, no matter how selfish, wouldn't all things being equal, choose what is useful over what is pernicious. He just doesn't think such a person can really exist. But even if you did suppose such a person existed, at least with regard to social utility, you can come up with a lot of examples of virtues, maybe with a small V, that are just immediately useful to ourselves without having to think about social utility.

So he starts with, right, discretion. It's useful to us to have that virtue because if we don't do that, right? And he's thinking here of there's discretion in the sense of not breaking people's confidences. But then there's also discretion in the sense of being able to balance our risk taking with our caution. Not to be so risk averse that we do nothing, but not to throw caution entirely to the wind and be reckless, but come up somewhere in the middle. That type of virtue with a small V, we can still recognize as something inherently useful even before we get to the position of social utility.

So we have a way of getting ourselves into the concept of virtue in these pre moral values. In a way, you can almost see this as a genealogy of morals in a way sometimes reminiscent of Nietzsche, where he wants to turn us on to all of these pre moral values to say, hey, look, even before we get to the moralistic stuff and the selfless stuff, we can say a lot about virtue, pre moral virtue, right?

12:07 Mark: I mean, he's definitely engaged with Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics heavily here. And he brings up the golden mean specifically, which seems like those are the kinds of things when you introduce Aristotle to modern readers. Then the fact that there is a continuum between these moral virtues, these specifically social virtues, and just ways that we admire about people, that is one of the revelations that there is not the sharp distinction between what you were saying, capital v virtue, which would have to be the social virtues and small V virtues.

And I think the way that he's gushing them together here, Hume is just by saying, I think we were sort of saying this before, that it helps somebody, even if it's just the person who's doing it. Like that is utility. Right. So utility doesn't have to just be a specifically social thing as long as it helps somebody. But then he does want to distinguish that from avarice or ambition, excess ambition, or these things that, well, they help somebody, they help that person, but yet they're not continuous. So he doesn't straight ahead, give me a very clear way to distinguish those two kinds of selfishness.

13:18 Wes: And a lot of these things that are useful to us to have are useful to us because we would get in trouble with other people if we didn't. Right. Like chastity. Chastity is one of these things that is useful to ourselves. And you could make arguments about how it serves right. A lot of these things on this list also have social utility. So it complicates things. And you could give a social utility explanation of chastity if you want.

13:39 Mark: He does.

13:40 Wes: And. Right. But he's saying on top of that, apart from that social utility argument, it's also just benefits the woman who is being chaste because there would be severe social consequences if she weren't.

13:55 Mark: If she weren't chaste, she might be chased.

13:58 Wes: I actually made that. I've made that joke before.

14:01 Mark: Okay.

14:02 Wes: I thought it was very original. Apparently not.

14:05 Seth: But you know, then that immediately, of course invites the question about the kind of relativist social, conventional social convention nature of these things. It's like saying, yeah, the slave that doesn't revolt is virtuous. That's a good slave. And I'm not knee jerk accusing him of this. But it's like, you know, we were talking in the last, the end of the last episode about. From what perspective are you criticizing the Scythians or the Spartans for their behaviors in the way that they raise their children or do whatever it is they make lampshades out of their defeated enemies? Is it because right now the vast majority of people in the world have languages and cultures that disapprove of that. And I don't want to try to put a skeptical tint on this and get into kind of moral relativism aspect. I genuinely want to understand from his perspective what convention means here in that

15:04 Wes: respect or what I think he wants to say the humane virtues are better than the premoral virtue like courage. You can think of as a pre moral virtue in a way. Ancient Greek ethical virtue that right. That does again it does have utility to society but it has these other components. But virtues that have to do with human well being in general and sympathy and empathy are superior from a utilitarian point of view because we do lots of destructive things from courage like turn people into towels. It's not good for us overall. It's not good for human flourishing and happiness overall is the argument. It's these.

15:44 Dylan: Well, not just human. Flor I like the human flourishing argument. I think he makes more. Well well because he makes them both. So he points in the cour. In the case with the Scythians about courage is that they to your point Wes its premoral character. I don't think he quite uses that word but he calls it uncultivated and in that respect societies that lack justice

16:07 Wes: and it is a virtue by the way the Scythians do have the virtue

16:10 Dylan: of courage but he does point out that there are excesses to certain or to well maybe even to all virtues. So again he's. You're not getting out of him at least in what we're reading. How you would optimize for it. Again, this is a little bit of my point about utility is claiming utility doesn't tell you what you're optimizing for. It just means that it's useful for whatever you're optimizing too. So all of these moral distinctions that they're useful just tells you a kind of direction that you're going.

16:46 Wes: How do you balance out competing interests? Yes. Big, big ethical problem. That's the ethical problem we all face most in our daily life is you know, I want these different things. How do they balance? How do they. And overall how are they going to affect my long term well being.

17:00 Dylan: Yeah.

17:01 Wes: Often very difficult to say.

17:02 Dylan: Yeah. And in fact your sentiments I think are pretty clearly also not aligned. It's not even just in sort of your reason thinking oh well, what serves my interest the best and will I be harming myself if I make follow my sentiment in this way? Even your sentiments could be in conflict with one another. Right. In fact I mean something like the sentiment to save yourself versus save your child or save two different children. You can come up with a whole litany of moral quandaries that are driven by your immediate sentiment and what action you should take and that they wouldn't be in agreement with one another.

17:40 Mark: Yeah. So this Might be a whole critique of. Is he even doing ethics at all? If you can't get a rule like maybe it's the principle of utility or something, but that will enable you to treat of these difficult cases, then what are we even doing here? He's saying something about human anthropology and he's explaining moral psychology and why we say we have ethics, but we don't really have ethics in the sense of a normative system that applies to you whether you want it to or not, blah, blah, blah, blah.

18:12 Dylan: But Newton didn't. But doing physics doesn't make you build anything. Wouldn't that be the distinction? Doing ethics, like, in terms of trying to figure out what you ought to do is more like building something than figuring out what the rules are and what the components are and how it. And how it should, what the landscape of those choices are. This doesn't tell you what to build or how to build the house.

18:36 Wes: We might want to dig into Section 5 on why utility pleases, because that really is kind of the meat of the moral psychology here. And the whole idea that we can abstract ourselves to a quote, unquote, general preference over our personal preferences and have that somehow win out of our personal preferences, I think is important.

18:57 Seth: Yeah. So before you do that, let me just say I was going to say the same thing, that we need to get to that point about pleasing and displeasing and so forth. But I think we have to take seriously the idea here. I mean, I'm the one who brought it up, so maybe I'm the one who I should be talking to myself. But we have disagreements about sentiment. We have conflicts in our own experience of sentiment, and we have disagreements and our sentiments change over time. And I don't think Hume has any problem with that. And so there's a way in which he's even.

I think in one of the secondary pieces might have been the SEP that, you know, they said. Hume is often accused of just basically doing, Being descriptive and giving a phenomenology of sentiment and not actually giving a theory or anything like that. But, you know, I've kind of, I'm sympathetic to the idea that, look, you can have an ethical framework articulated or not, and you can have moral sentiment and you can be, you know, a morally good person, a virtuous person. And still there can be situations which are unresolvable or that you can't figure out, and there can be disagreements.

And it's like there's a sense in which, and I think the Greeks understood this, that there's a sense in which. Where art and myth and these sorts of things help you deal with the fact that we don't have this kind of A or B answer, you know, right or wrong answer to everything. And that morality is in fact, a little squishy. Because if it, if it is like every other type of sentiment and judgment, whatever, you know, or activity that we indulge in, well, that's the way all those things are too. If there was one right way to do everything and think about everything, then we would be a very different species than we are.

So like I said, I'm not accusing him of being a relativist, but I'd love to see him. Or maybe it's in here. Maybe it's not like, say something more explicit about, like. And maybe it's as simple as you're repulsed. You're repulsed by what the Scythians do. It's. And it's displeasing. It has, you know, and that's the judgment. I don't know. And then we talk about cultivation of taste and progress of human society through time and all that kind of thing. Maybe that's fine. I don't know. But. But I just want to hear it.

21:22 Dylan: Yeah.

21:22 Wes: I mean, it. It can't just be displeasing to me. Right. That's not a moral sentiment.

21:27 Seth: Right.

21:27 Wes: It's got to be displeasing to the general person with a capital P that I'm empathizing with in that moment. It's me doing a little mind meld with humanity in general and saying, this is displeasing to humanity. That's got to be the basis. And that's really what this section five works us toward. And he wants to say, right. He starts out the book saying, I'm not a relativist. And that's all disingenuous we have right now. Do I think what he's doing is going to grant. Give us enough ground for the objectivity of morality? I don't. I don't think it. Right. We could be deluded about morality. It could be all just meaningless babble. And everything he could. He says about it could still be true because he's just describing the way the human mind works. But in any case, the important part, I think, is the moral psychology of how does this work in us.

22:21 Mark: Can I get another example on the table, just to follow up on, Seth, this thing from chapter three, page 25, where there are species of creatures intermingled with men, which, though rational, were possessed of such inferior strength both the body and mind, that they were incapable of all resistance and could never, upon the highest provocation, they can feel the effects of their resentment. The necessary consequence, I think, is that we should be bound by the laws of humanity to give gentle usage to these creatures, but should not, properly speaking, lie under any restraint of justice with regard to them.

Nor could they possess any right or property exclusive of such arbitrary lords. Our intercourse with them could not be called society, which supposes a degree of equality, but absolute command on the one side and servile obedience on the other. So this is a descriptive claim. But clearly he thinks that right justice says we should just enslave them and treat them nicely as slaves. And that's what we would do. But also, isn't there room there for. But you know, actually we should, based on the beneficence, actually just make them full citizens anyway, just.

I know you can't defend yourself, but the fact that you are a rational creature, you can talk to me. Yeah, you get a vote. Your interest counts equally with ours. Like I see both of those things.

23:41 Wes: I don't remember him saying that.

23:42 Mark: He doesn't say this, but then this is what I'm wondering about, whether he allows moral progress because he says this is basically the way things are with women right now in his age.

23:54 Wes: Well, he first says it's the way we treat animals.

23:56 Mark: Yeah, right.

23:57 Wes: So if anyone objects to that, we'll just think about how we treat animals. But yeah, then he talks about women. Then he says women have won rights for themselves basically by being. Using their charms. That's something gotta be around 20, 26. So he talks about how we treat animals, he talks about how we entreat indigenous populations. And then he talks about how we treat women. And you would expect, yeah, that he has some objections to all of these things, but he doesn't explicitly voice them.

24:26 Dylan: This gets to the just the question of descriptiveness versus what he's advocating for. I guess I come down and it's just not clear if he is in a particular way advocating for anything.

24:39 Mark: Well, he says that there has been moral progress. Right. So again, these savage pre moral peoples that having the pelts of your enemies as part of your wardrobe, that that was something we have grown beyond those people in that era that really revered bravery as the virtue. If they could see what, you know, what would they say if they could see how well beneficence is working out for us. And I think you maybe just ask the question like how amazed they would be, Would they immediately jump? Would they recognize that this is progress. Probably not because they're in their mindset, but we can see through the light of history. We are sort of in the superior position that, you know, we've tried. We as species have tried out these old fashioned ways and now we have gone to something better, seemingly. You know, it's not merely a matter of drift or degeneracy, as Nietzsche might put it.

25:32 Dylan: Well, I mean, then of course you get into the whole question of it might be of utility to say society, but it might be corrupting or at least unenobling the individual soul. Right. Nietzsche would go down this route. Right. Or Rousseau. Right. That society corrupts. Society makes us less of ourselves than we would be without, tames our souls where taming is a negative. I don't, I mean Hume's not, Hume's not going down that road. No, I'm just saying that what Mark's bringing up is the kind of conversation you end up with which just muddies the waters on the question of is there categorical nature to these moral distinctions and what one ought to do and what's the force of that categorical nature, if there is any force to it. And then how does it align with utility and then utility as being social utility or personal utility. It's not clear that you escape any of the relativism question.

26:37 Mark: So I thought there was a continuity between our natural needs, our natural sentiments and then what we then build politically. Not that it would always grow. It's going to depend on. Right. He really likes Montesquieu, that the political system sort of grows in the climate in which you find yourselves, including the amount of scarcity of various resources that we talked about, but also literally the weather for Montesquieu.

27:05 Wes: Do we want to talk about section five?

27:07 Mark: Yes.

27:08 Wes: He starts by saying we have this kind of gut level normative response to utility, even if it's an inanimate objects. Right. So we might say, well, why does a ship look so beautiful? And you might think it would look more beautiful if it were just more geometrical, but it's not. It's swollen at certain point and it looks the way it does for reasons of utility. But we're so plugged into that at a deep level that that transforms it aesthetically for us. And it would be weird for a house. Right. For instance, to be perfectly geometrical. We're more charmed, we're more aesthetically responsive to the fact that it's made for us and so is irregular in, in certain ways.

Well, anyway, this, it's the kind of Thing that he says that philosophers have avoided when talking about morality because it makes it seem like it's conventional, this idea of utility. Right. But he wants to say, really? And he's going to repeat this in this section several times. This is baked in to our quote, unquote, natural affections. It's really. It's there in the structure of the human mind that we respond in this way.

28:20 Dylan: So that's the same thing as saying we find things that are useful, beautiful, but not for some kind of quote unquote, generic aesthetic reasons, but that we're drawn to things that are useful.

28:35 Wes: And then, you know, to the person who wants to come along and say, well, this is really about self interest. We've discussed this a little bit. He's going to say, you know, he's going to give a case against egoism. We feel moral sentiments even when our self interest is not at stake. You know, if we're just reading about something in history, we'll feel that way. So it's not really reducible to self interest. It's just that, quote, everything which contributes to the happiness of society recommends itself directly to our approbation and goodwill. It's just basic and irreducible.

29:06 Mark: Yeah, and he refers to Bacon specifically at some point.

29:09 Wes: You know, he.

29:09 Mark: He sees this whole thing that he's doing as a scientific enterprise. So if you're going to make a claim like beauty and utility are basically the same thing, well, you look at places where you could separate those variables. Like, he mentions things like, we see the human form as beautiful. The forms we find beautiful are the ones that are the most able to accomplish things that are strongest and fleetest. But it seems like there are plenty of places where those come apart. Right. Just the fact that beauty standards themselves vary over time and, you know, refer.

I understand. Like, okay, if you're in a famine society, then you will find the plump people more beautiful because actually it has more utility. Or at least, you know, it shows that they're successful in that kind of situation. But it seems like there's a lot. There's plenty of things where you're designing something and it's not a matter that form and function always go together. Like you have to. You want the thing to actually work. Well, it might look kind of ugly because you need a bunch of kludges for the damn thing to actually work and not degrade over time or whatever.

It's not just a given that form and function are always going to line up. So I guess that's a question he's saying that, well, they're similar. Utility and beauty are both species of taste and they line up. But is it necessary for him to counter what I just said? That like, oh, all, all taste goes to utility? Because this is not about taste. And it seemed like in our on the standard of taste episode, like, no, taste is a sui generis thing.

30:37 Seth: I don't know that all taste goes to utility, but it seems like all utility goes to taste.

30:41 Wes: So the point of that example was just to show that even within inanimate objects that utility is so baked into us. It's not that moral judgments are aesthetic, it's just that even in these aesthetic judgments that we make about inanimate objects, utility comes up. Utility is baked in at a deep level psychologically. And then he wants to move on from that, say, well, we're not. It's also, it's not reducible to self interest. We can give lots of examples. Again, you know, reading the news history and we just, we're automatically sympathizing. Even in trivial cases where someone stutters, it's sympathy is just automatic.

But you know, the way this, by the time we get to the end of the section, he's trying to argue to us that there's this conflict between moral sentiments and private personal sentiments, selfish passions. But everyone, and this is really important and this is something Kant, I don't think is plausible. He's very, very adamant about saying, well, everybody has this natural sentiment of benevolence. Even if just a tiny, tiny, tiny amount. Worst person in the world, the serial killer, most perverse monster you can imagine has this. And you can see why he needs to do this, right, if he's going to ground morality in human nature, it's natural to think, well, there can't be any exceptions because if half the population has these moral sentiments and half the population thinks serial killing is good, then which is right and which is wrong, we have to have it universal in the, in the human constitution.

So this is on looking at page 48 or 49, this is part of the function of reason is to correct us in the direction of the natural sentiment of benevolence or to help us distinguish our own private personal response to something from the response, the moral sentiment, which again is the result of this empathy with people in general.

32:43 Dylan: The intercourse of sentiments makes us form some general unalterable standard by which we may approve or disprove, disapprove of characters and manners.

32:54 Wes: So he's trying to capture this is the categorical part of morality that he's he's trying to capture, which Kant and many others, of course, famously think you can't possibly capture with moral sentiments account. How could one ever account for this being morally binding on everyone? There's no ought. Right. We're not getting any oughts out of this is, so to speak.

33:14 Dylan: Yeah. So at the bottom, if we consider the principles of the human make, such as they appear in daily experience and observation, we must a priori and conclude it impossible for such a creature as man to be totally indifferent to the well or ill being of his fellow creatures and not readily of himself to pronounce, where nothing gives him any particular bias, that what promotes their happiness is good, that what tends to their misery is evil without any further regard or consideration.

33:47 Wes: He doesn't want us to entertain this idea of a human being whose values are inverted. It hurts his account.

33:53 Dylan: Yes.

33:54 Mark: Yeah. He mentions Timon of Athens, page 47, which I wasn't exactly sure, you know. So here's the full quote. A creature absolutely malicious and spiteful, were there any such a nature, must be worse than indifferent to the images of vice and virtue. All its sentiments must be inverted directly opposite to those which prevail in the human species. Whatever contributes to the good of mankind as it crosses the constant bent of his wishes and desires must produce uneasiness and disapprobation. And on the contrary, whatever is the source of disorder and misery in society must for the same reason be regarded with pleasure and complacency. Timon, who probably from his affected spleen more than any inveterate malice, was denominated the man hater. But he embraced Alcibiades with great fondness.

34:39 Wes: So then, reading on absolute, unprovoked disinterested malice has never perhaps a place in any human breast, or if it had, must there pervert all the sentiments of morals as well as the feelings of humanity. So he's, you know, many times he just says, this is impossible. And in this case he's hemming and hawing a little bit, right? This idea of disinterested malice, which one might call the diabolical. It's either, you know, not part of human beings, or you can't just think of it as psychopathy. You can't think of it as just someone not having a conscience or being indifferent. You would just have to think that somehow the sentiments have actually been inverted so that instead of having this basic, positive, effective response to humanity, we have a negative response and vice versa.

35:30 Seth: That seems reasonable because especially in that description that Mark just read, where this is definitely an outlier. So it's easy for us to say, like, if half the people shared one sentiment and half the people shared another sentiment, this would be a difficult conversation. But if you just find somebody who just does not share at all. What he says here is they'll be inverted in the sense that they'll take delight in the things that we are that pain us and be pained by the things that delight us. And that's just saying. Not that everybody has to be the way we are, just saying that there's a norm, an overwhelming majority norm, and anybody who doesn't go against that norm, he'd be able to pick them out because they don't align.

36:10 Wes: You guys remember the Galen Strawson paper we read on free will?

36:13 Dylan: I don't.

36:14 Seth: No.

36:15 Wes: He's arguing that there's no such thing as morality because. And he gives the example of a serial killer who's been. Had such a horrible childhood and they just are the way they are and they couldn't be anything else. And so you. It's really important. Right. The structure of the creature, the psychological constitution of the creature that we're evaluating is important because at some point it can become so perverted that they're no longer susceptible to moral evaluation at all. Infants, Right. Can't do anything wrong. Dogs can't do anything wrong. If we alter our hypothetical case enough, they don't become human anymore and they can't even be subject to moral evaluation.

36:51 Dylan: Yeah, so I thought that was the direction he was going in the context of a kind of blindness. So that. A sentimental blindness. And so if you considered a. At the same time as saying, well, human beings are endowed with this sensitivity, these sentiments that allow for moral distinctions. And you go about that categorization. If you considered a creature that was blind to such things, then to your point, Wes, you wouldn't be able. They wouldn't be part of the moral community because they simply can't see those things. And I thought that that was what was going on in this section.

But you're pointing to something that is a different argument, which is the notion that if you give up the sentiment, you have to actually go to inverting the sentiment so that you would actually find the very things that you're attracted that move us in one direction for a typical human being being. Move us in the opposite direction. That we recoil from things we're drawn to and we destroy things that we normally would want to cultivate. And that doesn't seem like that's necessary. It just seems like the blindness would be enough to just separate somebody out from both being part of the moral community, but also being able to make such distinctions altogether.

You don't have to invert it, you just have to remove the sentiment. It seems like the stronger argument.

38:20 Wes: If we want our obligations to be universal, which they pretend to be. Right. If I disapprove of something, it's not just because of my personal preference. It's wrong for you to do that. It's wrong for anyone to do that. And then who's in the scope of anyone? We got to make sure that the anyones are structured correctly in a way. What he's trying to do in this section is he's trying to get us from sentiment to general principle. This is why he talks about, with the sentiments. We get a faint rudiments quote unquote of a general distinction. He's trying to say, how do you get moral principles out of this in a sense of something universal? And he has to kind of try to ground it in the universality of a certain kind of human nature, otherwise we don't get those principles.

39:02 Dylan: Yeah, and once you have that universality of a human nature, then you get this notion of, well, you're part of the moral community or not. So as you pointed out, children are humans, but they aren't part of the moral community in the same way.

39:16 Seth: Let me ask you a question about that. What would be at stake? You say, like, well, how are we going to get a grounding for a moral principle? And what if Hume says, well, you're not, but you don't need a grounding because grounding implies absolute, eternal, universal, comprehensive right. And that's not the way morality works. This particular situation will be this way and another situation is going to be a different way. But you're not going to be able to refer to a principle. You're just going to have to, you know, there'll be. What's right is going to feel right and you'll know it, or you'll get support from the community.

If you're in a group and there's a situation that arises, people will like, I'm just thinking about, like, oh, you know, we don't have a grounding principle. And I just think, like, well, okay, well, what does that cost us? Is it decision? We don't know what to do because we don't have a principle. I don't think that's the answer.

40:13 Wes: But we want to be able to say that some things are really right and some things are really wrong. That when I say when I react to a murder with moral disgust and say that that's wrong, that that's not just some kind of illusion in my head.

40:28 Dylan: Well, there would be the illusion part. Right. But doesn't it also get to the things like consistency and whether or not you can have authority over someone in that you are right or wrong, so that you can then take actions on those basis without violating. Without it being just purely capricious and arbitrary? And that principle of lack of arbitrariness is part of how we would determine the force of our rightness in enforcing it. Yeah.

41:03 Wes: The tyrant can say, well, these are my sentiments. This is my morality.

41:07 Dylan: Yes.

41:08 Wes: What are you talking about? I know, I understand. You have your morality, but I'm stronger.

41:12 Seth: So if the principle is needed because you need to reason from principles to the specifics of the case to make a decision about how to act, and Hume says, well, morality isn't about. It's not based on reason. You don't reason from principles to moral. Then like saying, we need a principle, and me saying, well, we. We don't use reason. Those two things kind of cancel each other out. There's just like, it's irrelevant.

41:36 Mark: You do use reason because once we've established that utility is the principle.

41:40 Seth: Well, no, no, no.

41:41 Mark: But you don't use reason to ground utility. That is just basic.

41:45 Seth: Yeah, yeah, but you recognize utility, your experience and your reaction to utility. You know what I'm talking about. I'm saying, like, I don't go like, oh, the trolley's coming down the track. Should I save the five people or the one person? Let me refer to that principle, that universal categorical imperative. Whatever. I'm saying, like, that's one question. And then there's the approval or disapproval of the action itself. And say, like, well, was that a moral action? Say, well, let me refer to my principle and see if it was the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do.

All I know is that it was an action, but I don't know if it's right or wrong until I match it up against my principle. And again, Hume here would say, like, well, that's. No, we don't judge. We have moral sentiment for that very reason. We don't refer to principles to determine if something's right or wrong. Instead, we have the sentiment that tells us that was good or that was a good action or that was a bad action. And so I'm wondering.

42:38 Wes: But it's a sentiment we often confuse with our own personal selfishness and self interest. And so it has to be.

42:44 Seth: It can be wrong.

42:46 Wes: Disentangled from that using reason.

42:48 Seth: Yes, but when you disentangle from your own, when you do that action, do you end up with some kind of a principle that you can appeal to later, or is that action something else?

42:59 Wes: Yeah, he wants to say we can have maxims, but again, he doesn't go a lot into that. He mentions maxims at the end in relation to the knave. But yeah, he wants to say that we can have general moral principles that we act on. Obviously those are notoriously complicated. And this is not metaethics, is not self help and in general doesn't give us any real guidance on what we should do. It's not what ethics is actually for.

43:22 Mark: I mean, he goes into a lot of detail. I don't think he's just doing meta ethics in this book. It would be much shorter if he was just doing metaethics.

43:31 Wes: Well, I would call it moral psychology. Yeah, but he's not helping us solve any ethical dilemmas, let's put it that way.

43:37 Dylan: Yeah. At 74, right. He says the notion of morals implies some sentiment common to all mankind, which recommends the same object to general approbation and makes every man, or most men agree in the same opinion or decision concerning it. It also implies some sentiment so universal and comprehensive as to extend to all mankind and render the actions and conduct even of the persons the most remote, an object of, of applause or censure according as they agree or disagree with the rule of right, which is established universal principles.

44:09 Wes: And then by contrast, the other passions, by which he means the selfish passions, yes, they reliably produce strong emotional responses, but those vary significantly between spectators. They're not as comprehensive, they're not so much in common. So that, right, because a person is my enemy, is doing something to get in my way, doesn't mean that another person is going to feel that way about them, them. But with moral sentiments, we would expect everyone to agree.

44:36 Mark: So I think it's fine if we don't settle this now because we committed ourselves to a whole second discussion where we're going to go through the appendices and part of the treatise. You know, we haven't seen like the is ought distinction that he's famous for has not actually come up here. You know, we've made the point that you need a sentiment to actually push you to do anything. Just the bare fact of there being a law out there discoverable in the world would not be enough to actually motivate us to follow it. So the meta ethical issue the relation between moral psychology and the moral metaphysics. I think we can explicitly.

45:16 Seth: Right.

45:17 Mark: Isn't that what the part that you were talking about, Wes, and the treatise is about?

45:20 Wes: Yeah, it's about whether reasons can be motivating. It's about whether we can derive an ought from an. Is all that stuff good stuff?

45:30 Mark: Okay, so. Yep, we'll have that next time. And we can pick up any pieces or quotes or parts of this book that we discover afterward that we wish we had inserted. We would love to hear what you, the listeners, would like us to cover in the future. Please email us pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com we do read all of them, even if we don't always respond or somebody responds usually.

45:53 Wes: I always respond.

45:54 Mark: Okay. I used to always respond. I've got burnout over the years.

45:58 Seth: That's mighty utile of you.

46:02 Wes: Well, it's also my designated job at this point. I have basically customer service.

46:06 Mark: There we go.

46:07 Seth: Yeah.

46:07 Mark: Follow us on social media. Reach out to us through those things. Good night, everybody.

46:12 Seth: Good night.

46:12 Wes: Good night.