Ep. 368: Hume on Reason in 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 Questions for episode 368 are something like, can reason produce morality, or do we have a moral sense? We read selection from David Hume's A Treatise of human nature from 1739. We'll also continue from our last episode discussing the end of an Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals from 1751. For more information about these texts and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin, guilty of crimes in myself, independent of my situation with respect to the universe.

0:47 Seth: This is Seth Paskin having imagined New Jerusalem but seen Paris in Austin, Texas.

0:54 Wes: This is Wes Alwan trying to do whatever gives spectators the pleasing sentiment of approbation in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1:02 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey feeling more than judging morality in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:08 Mark: All right, so I think our last episode gave a pretty good picture of Hume's moral theory. We didn't get so far as the conclusion of that book, the Inquiry, so we wanted to spend a little time with that. And there's also an appendix, one that was specifically on the role of reason versus moral sense in determining morality that maybe gets a little more technical than we got into. So I think we wanted to go through that concerning moral sentiment is is what that appendix is called. But then Wes also identified for us a few things in the treatise, his earlier book.

So we were doing book two of the Passions, part three of the Will and direct passions only, section three of the influencing motives of the will. So it, again, it's just. Can reason motivate the will by itself, which was very important for morality. Right. Do we think that the moral sense is a sense, a primary, just a reaction that we have to things, or it a conclusion, a deduction? We can just figure out, as we would figure out something in mathematics, what basic moral principles are. The bulk of what we read from the treatise that was only six pages was is book three of morals, just the beginning of it, of virtue and vice in general, sections 1 and 2.

So moral distinctions not derived from reason. Sort of the same point in a little more detail. And finally, moral distinctions derived from a moral sense in section two.

2:33 Wes: Should we just start with the conclusion?

2:35 Mark: Yeah, let's start with whatever notes we have on whatever we want to say about the conclusion of the inquiry.

2:40 Wes: So he starts off part one of the conclusion by reiterating that virtues are a matter of possessing mental qualities that are useful or agreeable to oneself and others and that these are the basis of how we value. It's not that we value because of some property that's accessible to reason or accessible to religion. It's based on this idea of having agreeable feelings or uneasy feelings in response to what people do or in response to their character traits that are manifested by what they do. And he thinks that's apparent in common life as well.

If you look at the way people actually behave, for the most part, that's the way they're treating virtue and vice. They're not extreme ascetics like monks. Asceticism isn't the way we conduct ourselves. We don't conduct ourselves as if we found out that God demands extreme self abnegation or something like that. We're just responding in this. Right. So he goes off on monkish virtues like celibacy and fasting. We have a much more practical approach to this in everyday life.

3:53 Mark: Yeah, we asked the question last time. Even if we notice that people in general have sentiments that approve of some things or what actually makes those things obligatory on us, is it an actual morality? And in this conclusion he's telling us, well, they're just attractive. You're not. We're not going to define morality as something that is in most cases extremely restrictive and against our self interest and against only inclinations that we could appreciate if we are abstracting from our personal circumstances. Yes, there are issues. There are times when we have to be objective and not say, well, it's okay for me to steal. You have to abstract in general. Do we in general approve of stealing that that's what the mature person does even about themselves.

4:36 Wes: I think he might say, psychologically we obligate ourselves. It's a psychological fact that we are obligated. But we're not going to find metaphysical obligation and we're not going to be able to find it in reason. Right. We're not going to be able to examine ontology or examine the world and find, oh look, there's obligation. Which is not to say that that's completely right. There's virtue ethics and there's Kant and there's other alternatives that give their strong theories of a groundwork for morality that has something to do with reason. But he's not addressing that here.

5:09 Dylan: It's what's what amounts to what's most. We said the word attractive, but what's what we would praise and what we would condemn amounts to what is moral and what's not moral and not.

5:22 Wes: Not praise and condemn from the standpoint of self interest. But from this more general impartial standpoint,

5:28 Mark: we all recognize the difference.

5:30 Seth: He says, yes, the praiseworthiness or the blameworthiness, we have to remember where those are. Judgments are still impelled by some sort of a passion or a feeling. So, yeah, it's generally speaking, he says pleasure and pain, but you have to think more broadly than that.

5:51 Dylan: Yeah. So you're pointing to the thing that I found consistently slippery is there is a element of reason that comes to bear or can factor in with this. But the praiseworthiness or blameworthiness is fundamentally detectable by our moral sentiment, by our ability to register those as perceptions. So he's clear on the fundamental ability of us as human beings to perceive these moral distinctions and that those are coming through that perception. But that reason. He also is adamant that reason can be part of processing those, like reason is part of processing any of those perceptions.

But reason will never determine the action. And so this is where I found it very, very slippery that I couldn't figure out how if reason is able to work on those things, that those perceptions and the actions that result from the working of those actions in us that are driven by passions are not affected by reason, even if you acknowledge that they're not.

7:10 Wes: Yeah. Let's say quickly what's covered under reason.

7:13 Dylan: Yeah.

7:13 Wes: Because he does get into the appendix. A large part of it is how reason is essential to moral judgments. It's just that we can't do away with sentiment as well. They have to combine together.

7:24 Dylan: Exactly.

7:24 Wes: And you know, and if you think about it. So reason covers statements of fact, judgments of fact. There is an apple in front of me.

7:33 Dylan: Yep.

7:33 Wes: And obviously I can't induce a passion or a desire unless something cognitive is going on. Unless I have the cognitive basis for which, which underlies those sorts of judgments. And I can be mistaken. Maybe it's not really an apple, maybe it's a fake apple and it's not as tasty as I thought. And one might say, okay, well, you made a mistake, but it's not the mistake of passions, mistake of judgment. But the main point is our judgments of fact can obviously influence our behavior. And then reason also covers mathematical demonstration, logical demonstration, and then cause, effect, connections.

And this comes up a lot in moral reasoning, because if we're thinking about utility, then we have to figure out what actually has beneficial consequences. And just think about political policy for a second. You can see how this political policy debates, we may have some vague shared value, but we disagree about what's going to produce the result, do we do tax cuts? Do we do tax increases? To speak crudely, do we do this, do we do that? We may vaguely share value, but there's lots of disagreement about cause and effect. Just to take one example.

8:53 Seth: Yeah. In the Treatise, he says something very specific about this. He actually uses the word impulse does not arise from reason, though it can be directed by it.

9:04 Mark: Yeah. It's nice. In the Treatise, again, we want to look out for places where he might have changed his mind in all those years. Like, I'm kind of reading the Treatises, maybe a little more relativist than we actually get in what we've been talking about in the inquiry. But the first part of the Treatise is his whole Epistemology and Psychology of Knowledge, and then a whole section on the passions, which Wes and I did some close reads on. And we only just scratched the very beginning of it because it is so lengthy. So he is just given this whole treatise on how motivation works. And so from that it sort of just falls out, like, oh, yeah, reason means something very technical to him. Perception means something very technical because. Right. Perception has to be either impressions or ideas, and reason is going to be the association of ideas. So he's going to. Oh, well, then.

9:57 Wes: Or relations of ideas.

9:58 Mark: Yes. And there are only specific kinds of relations of ideas. Right. Contiguity, cause and effect, contrariety. And there was one other similarity. Yeah. So if it's not one of those things, then there couldn't be anything that reason could produce that would give us a moral fact. So it has to be an impression, and that just means it is an oppression. It's, you know, it's a secondary quality. Basically, it's an impression of something in our own breast that I have a reaction to. Something. Oh, well, that's the fundamental moral thing. Even though it seems like I'm talking about the object that's making me approve of it or disprove of it, I'm actually talking about my reaction is the very basic way that he puts it.

So I feel like Treatise is providing some extra groundwork that he may or may not want to retain by the time we get to the Inquiry. Just in terms of very specific things about the psychology.

10:53 Wes: Yeah. So maybe we should just go there for now to that preliminary book on whether reason can. The section on whether reason can Influence the will. Yeah. Should we do that?

11:04 Mark: Sure.

11:05 Wes: Just in the Treatise. So this is famously, he thinks reason cannot influence the will, which is in contradiction to our typical idea of morality. I think the classic idea is that you have this battle between passion and reason. The two horses in the chariot, I think. No, reason is in the driver's seat. What are the two horses in the chariot?

11:26 Mark: Those are all Eros and Thumos.

11:29 Wes: Thumos are the horses. Yeah, so. Yeah, so. And when we do something ethical or that's good for us, like not eating the cake that we desire, hey, we use reason. We overcame passion. We overcame desire. And he wants to say, no, that is actually the wrong picture. Reason does not influence the will. That's the preamble. And then he gets into these kinds of reasoning that I just outlined, which are basically two types. The mathematical. Well, really there's three types, but one are just judgments of fact, and then there's mathematical or logical relationships, and then there's causal relationships. He puts this in terms of his epistemology of ideas and impressions. I don't think we have to do that to get the broader picture.

12:21 Dylan: I agree with everything that you said, Wes, but I found myself confused by the notion that reason can be part of evaluating or contributing, be factored into moral decisions or acts of the will, but never affect the will. And the only way I could get my head around it was the idea that the motive, action itself, the thing that results in our agency, our moving in any given direction, is never reason. It has to do with our passions. And then that somehow you could talk about the reason, that kind of judgment, as having some effect on that. And with the moment that you say that it can have an effect on that, even if it's not the source of will, it does seem like it has to have a causal connection to it.

And I found myself struggling with this over and over again. It felt like the physical analogy is that the will is like the wind in the sails and the water running over the hull of the boat. And then reason is like a rudder, you know? And so now I'm back with Plato's version, right? Is that reason is affecting the motion. So, I mean, you could just stick with Plato's analogy. You have two horses or a horse that's causing the mode of action, and then there's some function that affects it. It's not actually the mode of action. It's only affecting it.

So I found myself really struggling with Hume insisting about this distinction, but then also insisting that, yes, reason affects it. So how can reason affect our perceptions and the way we use our perception affect our will and not have some kind of part of the causal chain?

14:19 Seth: I don't think that it's the case. Even when you read him doesn't seem like it's the case that reason can't affect at least. And maybe this is where Wes's distinction between metaphysically and psychologically comes into play. But it's clear that there's an interplay between reason and emotion. I think what he means to say is, and we have to talk about the way he thinks reason actually works and the concept of truth and falsity and correspondence and all that, but ultimately he's just saying if all you have is reason, reason cannot generate motivation to act, and it can't generate feelings about actions that you witness that that comes from someplace else.

And it's not so much that I think he's even trying to, you know, he's basically just trying to say reason is not in conflict with emotion or passion. Instead, they're just two distinct things. Yes, they interact, but you don't have a war of wills, so to speak, or a war between.

15:24 Wes: Well, so what you have is a conflict between two different types of sentiment. You have a conflict between your moral sentiments and then your more passionate sentiments. But I think we should remember he wrote the treatise a long, long time before he wrote the Inquiry, and he thought of the Inquiry as his mature point of view. And the Inquiry, in the appendix, he tells us a lot about how reason interacts with moral judgments, how reason is involved. And I think this question of how reason enters into motivation is tricky because. And again, I think reason is a little bit of a misleading word because it's really more about the.

Under the understanding. And that includes just judgments of fact and intentional content. So we know that a desire has a descriptive, intentional content. I desire to eat the apple on my table, not the computer mouse on my table. It's the descriptive properties affect whether or not I'm actually going to feel desire. So when you input certain beliefs or descriptive factual judgments into the system, some of them are going to produce desire, some of them are going to produce aversion, some of them are going to produce indifference. But the point is that the indifference and the desire and the aversion don't come from the outside in the same way that we think of the sense data as coming from the outside.

So when I form a descriptive judgment, right, I think of the apple is red. I think of the data of redness is coming from the outside, and then I make that judgment. But when it comes to desiring the apple, even though it's induced in part by the judgment, the desire itself doesn't come from the outside. It comes completely from the inside. It's not like we. There's little desire particles out there that we can cognize. Right. And bring in inside of us.

17:24 Mark: It would be very nice if Hume had some vocabulary that allowed us to distinguish different kinds of causes. You know, notoriously, his notion of causality is very simple. It's just like there are things happening in sequence, in regular sequence, and that's it. But we could think, I mean, what you were saying, Dylan, it seemed like the desire is the efficient cause, is the wind pushing the sail. I don't know that saying that reason is the rudder works because reason is picking out the specific object. But the final cause, the thing that we're pursuing that object for, the reason that we find that object is also determined by passion, not determined by reason.

So wanting to be happy, wanting to eat yummy things, all these are determined by passion. And it's. So if we want to say the rudder is aiming me at the delicious apple because I think that's a good thing to eat, well, that's a combination of recognizing that's an apple, which is reason, or this is the kind of place where apples typically grow. So, you know, it could be explicit reasoning, but it's also that apples are desirable, which is not something that reason tells us.

18:29 Wes: Reason tells us that it's an apple, or it tells us how to get the apple. Right. So this other aspect, the means by which we will go about fulfilling the desire. Reason plays a very important role in that kind of hypothetical reasoning.

18:45 Dylan: Well, and as soon as you go down that road, the means, reason playing a decisive role in the means by which we go about fulfilling that desire, you very quickly go down the road of regulating of desire. And, you know, the conflict between different sorts of sentiments and the regulation of those sentiments and the gen. And the regulation of those different kinds of values. And what I mean by it being slippery is that even in Hume's account, I admit that I didn't make a gigantic dive into the difference between the inquiry and the Treatise, but on this matter, but I did find it, Maybe it comes down to the causality question, is the notion that there isn't some kind of affecting. As soon as you start using words like affecting, there's causes associated with it. You're changing directions and impulses.

19:41 Wes: I think his first example in the Treatise will make this clear. So he talks about math, for instance. And so I'll give a variation on his example. There's a guitar I want to buy. It costs $1,000. I only have $600 in my bank account now. I need reason, I need math to figure out that 600 is less than a thousand. And that's going to affect what I do. Right. And so Dylan, you can come along and say, look, you did some reasoning and that determined what your action was going to be.

20:11 Mark: You're going to steal it instead of buying it.

20:12 Wes: That's exactly. And Hume will say, yeah, I completely agree. That's all well and good, but my point point is that the math that you did is very useful in figuring out what to do. Absolutely. But it doesn't tell you you're not going to do the math to figure out whether you want the guitar. You're not going to do the math to figure out whether you think it's okay to overdraw your bank account or bounce check or whatever. You already have to have those sentiments in place before math will lead you to do one thing or another.

20:47 Seth: Yeah, I feel like Dylan is granting the point and at the same time not satisfied.

20:52 Dylan: But so where I think it becomes even more interesting and complicated is when you're doing the math and the judgments associated with something besides the purchasing of the guitar. But of which of those things are better for you than others? So in the judgments of the things that are good or bad, which ones are you going to choose? The answer for Hume is in the end, you're not using reason at all to choose amongst those things.

21:23 Wes: Well, you're getting at something really important. Dylan, he touches on this a little bit in the appendix. But think about policy reasoning or even personal decisions about what are we going to do. We often have conflicting desires. There's often trade offs. And this is one of the reasons he says that reason is so important. We got to calculate trade offs. Maybe I do have enough money for the guitar, but do I want to spend it on the guitar or do I need it? Or I would either rather buy the piano, I guess. I'm really into music. So those types of conflicts and trade offs which are really big part of the substance of moral and practical reasoning, complicate the matter. I think how we handle conflict and psychological conflict, it starts to get very interesting.

22:05 Seth: So it helps me to think about this because Hume's deceptively simple. He doesn't feel like he's arguing. And a lot of what he's doing is just like, it seems like it's deceptively simple in the way that he articulates it, even though his writing style is not deceptively simple. But I think of it as him arguing against something, somebody like Kant or some sort of a moral realist who thinks that you grasp these real moral facts and then once you grasp them, you have a sense of obligation or duty to a tenant. And then also the question of, okay, well, why are some things moral and not moral?

Once he refutes that and then he gets into the mechanics of how everyday morality actually works. And if you think about it in terms of the latter. So essentially what Hume is saying is, suppose that you sit there and he wouldn't even grant this because he would say it's absurd to even think that people do this. But you sit there and you think, okay, I'm just going to hypothesize that Dylan is in a situation where he has to make a moral decision about X. And you think through all the permutations and then you come up with a moral principle and you're like, great, here's my moral principle.

Here's my. You can call it universal or not if you want. And then you go to Dylan and say, dylan, should you ever find yourself in situation X, I've reasoned out what you should do. Here is your moral guidance. It's an obligation that you do this should you find yourself in this situation. And if I ever find myself in the situation, I'll be doing the same thing. And Dylan says, well, why? And I say, well, because of X, Y and Z. And I think what Hume is saying is there's nothing compelling. Like if it's strictly something you come to by reason, if it's strictly a reasoned argument, if you were trying to convince somebody or compel somebody to do that, and you could only offer reasons that were they need to be compelled to do it.

And I think there's strength in that aspect of his argument of just telling somebody the reason why. It's almost like logic versus rhetoric, right? Or something like this. It's almost like you want to persuade somebody in the moral world because argument isn't sufficient logic. Reason is not sufficient because what takes place in morality involves the passions. And you cannot inflame somebody's passions with just argument.

24:41 Wes: Here's another way to think about it. Reasons, right, don't give us goals on his view, or there are alternative views, right? We can't determine ends or goals with reason. So his famous example is Aristotle actually makes a similar point, is that if you ask the question why? About an action, at some point you have to come to a final end point. Why are you going to the store? Well, I'm hungry and I'm going to go and get food. Why are you getting food? Well, food satisfies my hunger. Why do you want to satisfy your hunger? Well, being hungry is painful.

Why do you want to avoid pain? Why do you like pleasure? And that's the point where the chain of reasoning comes to an end. And at some point, into that whole framework of reasoning about means and ends, our inputs, our ends are not themselves determined by reason. So it's like they're the practical version of sense data. I can have all the cognitive apparatus I want, if you're Kant, forms of sensibility, space and time and causal reasoning and this and that. But if I don't input into that system, then nothing happens, right? So I need effective inputs into the system to make something happen.

You can think of also in terms of. Sometimes people call this a kind of hydraulic model of the mind. And I think this kind of metaphor is what Hume is kind of operating on. And it creates a kind of weak spot that one can ultimately criticize. But the idea is that suppose there's a machine, and the machine in a way is. Let that be a metaphor for reason. And there's a lot of leverage in the machine. The machine can do a lot more work than a human being can. But there still has to be an input into the machine, whether it's electricity or steam or human hand doing something.

And that input is what corresponds to passion or to having goals. There's got to be energy put into the system before anything happens.

26:45 Mark: In other words, going back to Dylan, you had made the comment about passion being conditioned by reason. I wonder if specifically moral passions. It's very hard for me to see them as free from the taint of reason. Even before we're contemplating any particular thing that he just says. Well, there are different kinds of passions, passionate reactions to things. And some of them are very passionate, and some of them are just cool. And these moral judgments tend to be cool. And that's why we confuse them for just conclusions of reason, because those are also performed in a very cool way. Right. Unless you're a mathlete.

27:24 Wes: And the word he uses is calm, by the way.

27:27 Mark: Yes, calm passions. But, you know, what enters us into. Makes us into the kind of creatures who sit back and do consider the situation apart from my personal interest and, you know, think about the impartial spectator that it seems like this is something that we have learned, right, through practical reason, through phronesis. Because if we just, you know, you have things that you want and things that you approve of, and if you just obey whatever passion is ready to hand and race for that thing, it doesn't usually work out. So whether through your own experience or your parents teaching you or a more general social educational program, we now are in the as adults as opposed to children who do exactly what I was just describing.

Feel like, yes, I should. Whether I'm deciding something that is purely selfish and I'm just trying to determine, you know, where to. How to invest my money or something, or I'm trying to determine how best to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number or something. I'm just engaged in some fundamentally different prospect which it would be. I think he's going to have to say that well, it is. We approve of the idea of doing something effectively. So it's actually passion that has brought us to the point of these calm passions. Though obviously there's a lot of recognition of facts.

The fact that it didn't work when you just went after people didn't approve of that. Like there's a lot of recognition of things which does fall into the category of reason.

28:52 Wes: I think you're getting into another interesting problem here, which is the problem of empathy. And we can draw on Scheler here because we're not just feeling our own pains and pleasures, we're feeling other people's pains and pleasures, which Hume knows because he crafts very nice arguments against. Egoism is not simply reducible to our own self interest, although he may say it's reducible to our own pain or pleasure at some level. But that's not clear, especially if you think about Scheler. So if considerations enter into our action which are really a matter of other people's pains or pleasures as we empathetically imagine them, are we being driven by reason at that moment or are we being driven by affect? I find that a little bit unclear and that may be an entry point for someone who wants to argue in the other direction.

29:44 Mark: I think reason would just correct the illusions that we have about other people. That it is a matter of fundamental passion. When I just see somebody in pain in front of me, then I sympathize, I empathize with that. And so I have a pain, whatever it is, whether we want to say I'm reacting to my pain or reacting to your pain, it doesn't really matter. But you know, that is, we do not approve of such things happening. But when I'm imagining, when I'm imagining like people that are not right in front of me, then I do have to bring in reason to like properly sympathize with those people of, you know, what about all the people that are going to be affected by your.

What seems like a very rational action of opening this factory and treating people as little as possible so you can make a profit or what, you know, whatever the thing like, well, we'll think about the actual human beings at the end of this. We want to condition our passions with our recognition of facts that they really are. Of what it would be like if we were actually getting in there and witnessing them one by one.

30:44 Wes: Sure. I think it's worth pointing out we have behavioral dispositions to do things that don't depend on pain and pleasure. Some of them are just automatic. Right. Like my heart beating. I don't need pain or pleasure to keep my heart beating. And you might think, well, even in cases where we do have effective responses, sometimes those are kind of after the fact. Right. If I jump when someone surprises me, I kind of do that before I'm even aware of the feeling. Because our bodies are primed to do that. And the affects, in a way, follow the behavior.

And one might say the same thing about moral dispositions or dispositions towards people. I might be behaviorally disposed to choose certain ends independent of any affect. Or maybe the affects necessarily or typically follow on them, but the affects aren't necessarily the cause. So I think, yeah, the psychology of this, I think, gets very complicated. But I think we understand Hume's basic point here.

31:52 Dylan: Yep.

31:52 Seth: So is there a way, Wes, if we can tie what you have to say about an input into the system or an end that our passions give us ends and reason helps us get there, but ultimately can't provide that. Does that coincide with what he says about reason as a faculty determining truth and falsity? And like that section we read. Because he does make a point about saying we can find something blameworthy or praiseworthy, or we can judge an action to be virtuous or not. But those aren't judgments of fact, so to speak. They're not truth and falsity. True or false?

He says the matter of fact, the matter of whether you did something or not, can be judged true or false. And that's really what the faculty of reason, because you have an idea and it doesn't correspond to the facts in the case or ideas corresponding to each other. So I'm just wondering if this idea of teleology or goal setting somehow syncs up with that somehow.

32:56 Dylan: So you're making me think of the following, Seth. The notion that we are aimed at being happy, that's not something. That's reason. Reason will never get that. And that's clear from Hume and there's a way in which you can buy that. Right. But the particular things that one might. The way when slicing one's, the ways in which you get to that happiness, you can easily imagine that your reason would be acting on your various passions associated with that, so that this gets you to your, you know, so. So satisfying that inclination to be happy could easily be aligned with what you are judging amongst all the different ways in which that can be satisfied.

33:47 Mark: I'm thinking of this distinction between means to happiness and contents of happiness. That, yes, one of the functions of reason, as he has said, is the goal is given by passion. But the means to get to the goal, that's determined by reason. You just reach out for the apple if you think you can. But if the apple is very far away, then you have to think through how you're going to get there. But whether the apple counts as part of happiness, that's also something, I think that is going to be a matter of sentiment. So it's a little.

34:16 Seth: Yeah, this is why I think. I feel like he's constrained in some part by some notion that there are object. You know, it reminds me of Aristotle. I think it was De Anima in there. He's talking about that in a sense, they're almost like there are objects or there are sensations which are appropriate for each of the senses, right? So there's an alignment. They're hearing things are meant, you know, are for the ears to be heard and, you know, and so on. And what Hume says in the Treatise, where he's talking about truth and falsity, it's like, well, the intellect or reason or the understanding, and maybe I should be saying the understanding and not reason in general.

It's like that's for making judgments of fact. That's for putting ideas together and strictly talking about things that are true or false and things that are moral, but also things that are beautiful and things. That's for the sentiment. The idea that it's almost like. Well, because the understanding or our intellect has this limited scope, that it can only function in a certain sphere means that it. And that's the way he talks. It's very black or white, right? You just can't possibly. You can't use reason to judge. Moral sentiment comes strictly from sentiment without any input from reason.

And you can't get moral edicts from reason. And I think the latter is a stronger argument in the sense that if he's arguing against the moral realist, that you cannot deduce moral principles from some kind of landscape. Of ideas, solely ideas a priori in particular. Then there you bring in his distinction between is ought. And I think that's very powerful. But when you talk about where our moral sentiments come from and how the intellect and sentiment can work together, because sentiment is not uneducated.

36:07 Wes: Yeah, I think, you know, maybe. So the next recording we're going to do Philippa Foot and a Neo Aristotelian kind of rejoinder to the Humean position. And her idea, as you can predict, is that we can get out of this problem with teleology. A heart is for beating and it's working well. When it's beating, an eye that can't see is impaired. And that's a fact. It's not a sentiment, it's a fact accessible to reason. And human beings can be functioning well or not functioning well. And when they're not functioning well according to their telos and they have one just like an eye does, then there are ethical implications and that follows as a fact of reason.

But I think we should wait till next time to continue down that line. And then there are lots of clever ways to get reason into the picture. Kant has one right, just the willing. Kant's argument is just that willing implicates reason because willing implicates consistency. We don't want to contradict ourselves when we will and all morality falls out of that. The immoral stuff is just self contradictory and therefore irrational. But we can leave that aside for now because he's responding. He's thinking of two very specific people. I think he's thinking of a number of people, but one of them is Wollaston.

And maybe we should move to the other part of the treatise here where he's directly responding to Wollaston and this other guy, Samuel Clarke, because their ideas. Wollaston's idea is that immorality is analogous to lying, misrepresenting facts. That's how he tries to sneak reason into the picture. Or others might say, well, there are these eternal laws out there that are true and what's wrong just doesn't accord with the law. In the same way that when I make a bad judgment, I say the apple is on the table, when it's on the floor, it's not in accord with fact.

I can have actions that are not in accord with laws in the way that judgments are not in accord with facts. And I think he effectively dismantles those sorts of arguments.

38:12 Mark: I want to dwell for a minute on. One of the points I think Seth just raised was about the ultimate source, right? We have instincts but where did the instincts come from? I got the feeling, and I don't have a quote ready in the, in the more recent text, that he just kind of brushes that aside. Look, look, we just have the instincts. But he says in the treatise 4, 73, from what principles is the moral sentiment derived? He's asking, and I was trying to think like why would you think it's derived from any principles? It is. When we look at the things we react to, we can try to post hoc assign a principle to it and that's how we get the principle of utility and things like that that he talks about in the inquiry.

But there's nothing. But he goes on to just give this sort of Newtonian simplest answer is the best let's reduce things to, you know, which he loves to do throughout, especially in the treatise, very Newtonian simplifying text, to just think about like how if we had an instinct about every single duty, about every single normative claim, that's a lot of instincts. There must be some general, just a few basic instincts that we then apply to different circumstances insofar as we understand them. So that's a good reason for saying, well, maybe we just, you know, have an instinct to approve of things that go with, to approve utility.

It's not that we have an instinct to this duty, that duty and this. I think he follows up on this in the inquiry by saying, you might have thought we had a separate instinct toward justice. To approve of justice, you know, eye for an eye. We have to write this wrong. The scales of the universe are out of balance. But no, it's actually just utility. That's at least the way that we should analyze it. I guess the causal question. He's also I guess answering the affirmative in the inquiry that we get our approval of justice from this previous approval of utility.

40:04 Wes: Well, when you say utility means we have a, at a basic instinctual level, we are interested in the happiness and well being of others. Yes. Which is like a justice instinct. And it's broad. But it doesn't determine property rights. Right. There's not like an instinct for property rights and instinct for this or this or that. But the instinct involves our, how we're related to others. Well being.

40:26 Mark: Well, does it determine equality or giving everybody what they deserve? Like that would be, I don't know that utility implies either of those things.

40:35 Dylan: But the instinct for well being of others and yourself, the way in which we implement justice, the notion of equitable distribution of resources, all those things would be solutions aimed at satisfying that inclination. Those Sentiments. I think that's the way you would make the argument.

40:59 Mark: Sure. But we could argue on either way. We could argue like Rawlsian, like, we don't need everybody to be equal. Equal. We just need laws that lift the lowest down, you know, so that.

41:08 Dylan: No, no, I'm not saying it.

41:10 Mark: Yeah, or strict communism or something like it's an imperial. It becomes an empirical matter of reason of, like, which way is going to actually fulfill.

41:17 Dylan: Yeah, yep. So in the end, the examples you gave, I think, align with the way Hume would analyze them. Is that the direction that you're aiming has to do with sentiment, but the implementation is not sentiment. It's fundamentally affected by reason.

41:33 Mark: Yeah, I mean, that was how I read it before we even read the first word of Hume, when we were talking about this in the nightcap as we were getting into this is like, yeah, reason you need most of the time, because you're not just exploring your gut reactions, you're exploring these gut reactions that have been refined by conversations with other people and things that we've tried in Phronesis and all these things that are so to. It seems overly simplistic to say, oh, ultimately it boils down to sentiment. I mean, at least Hume wants to say it's not reason alone. Right. That's at least what we keep returning to this point. Not that it is sentiment at bottom alone.

42:11 Wes: He likes to draw this analogy to aesthetics, taste, as he calls it, where taste is also a matter of sentiment, but it can be educated. And it's not the case that everyone's taste is just as good as anyone else's taste. So. And if we recall our episode on that essay, he is into the idea that we can refine our sensitivity and in a way, the resolution of our aesthetic apparatus, so to speak. So that if we're more sophisticated, we're just more aware of what's going on, say, in a work of art, and therefore can have more nuanced and refined sentiments in response to it.

So, yeah, that's a clear example of the way in which reason must correct. Just a raw response. Right. If I see a painting in a modern art gallery, my uneducated impulse may just be say, oh, that's crap. That looks like nothing. But if I've been educated sufficiently, I might have different sentiments. And the same thing goes for morality.

43:17 Dylan: See, that last part about it is really where I keep getting hung up. You just said if I educate it, I might have different sentiments. Right. And so there, what you're talking about is the education is not just A rubbing against one sentiment against another. It's the involvement of reason in cultivating it, and it is adjusting what, in fact, your sentiment is tuned to be sensitive to. And that makes a lot of sense. In fact, it starts getting, you know, now we're getting perilously close to the same landscape as something like virtue ethics, where you have something that is. You're cultivating a notion of what good is and making it so that you respond to it in a way that doesn't involve you having to think about it.

44:09 Mark: All right, let's wrap up part one with that. We'll talk for another hour. I don't know that there's an hour worth of actual content, but this allow us to do more free form and connecting to aesthetics. And I really like a lot of the things that we've started to explore in here that we can do in our last part here of the treatment of Hume. You can, if you become a Partially Examined Life supporter through our website or through Patreon, you could get that second part probably right now, or at least within the next day in your feed, if you're just listening to the public feed or you have decided to give us a little money through Apple podcasts, which that'll at least make it so you don't have to hear ads anymore. But you're still going to be hearing things next week. So please come back. Thanks, everybody.

44:49 Dylan: Thanks.

44:49 Seth: Thanks.

44:50 Dylan: Thanks.