Ep. 368: Hume on Reason in Ethics (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: Hey, this is the Partially Examined Life, episode 368, part 2. We've been discussing portions of two different treatises on ethics by David Hume, a Treatise on human nature from 1739, his very early thought, and finishing up on An Inquiry concerning the Principles of morals from 1751. We've talked through most of the ideas in these sections that we picked out for today, but let's really zoom in on the book three of Morals, of Virtue and vice in general, from the Treatise to mop up anything else we want to say.

0:40 Wes: Yeah, he starts off by reminding us that moral sentiments are perceptions which he divides into ideas and impressions. So perceptions, a sensory quality like red is a perception. It's an impression in particular. And a passion like loving or hating. Well, certain passions can be impressions. I think those more complex loving and hating actually turn out to be more complicated types of passions. So I won't necessarily call them impressions.

1:09 Mark: I think maybe he does think that they are impressions, that even if, you know, we like to say, well, remember

1:15 Wes: our discussion of pride and humility? I think he thinks love and hate are just as complicated as pride and humility. And they have this double relationship.

1:22 Mark: Sure. That they're referring. Yeah, right. It's the same sort of. In saying that it's a secondary quality, it seems to be impression of the object. I see a crime happening in front of me and it seems like this is a reaction to the crime. That's what my impression is, is of crime. But really it's an impression, if I really pay attention to it, of what's going on in me. It's referring. I mean, to understand the meaning of it, I have to refer to that thing outside. But to really see what I am focusing on it is my own reaction.

1:52 Wes: What I'm saying is, yeah, the impression is the sentiment or the perception is the sentiment. And if I have a sentiment, sentiments can be quite nuanced. So if I'm feeling proud or feeling hate or any other sort of sentiment, I think one might argue that that's complicated. And it involves not just impressions, but ideas. That's all I'm saying. And there's a texture to it, depending on associations between ideas, depending on which lower level impressions enter into it. And this is relevant because he's going to say at a certain point in this reading that moral sentiments, they involve pain and pleasure, but there are many different types of pain and pleasure.

They're very, very specific type of pain or pleasure. When I approve what someone's doing, it's not like drinking wine and saying, ooh, that's tasty wine, or eating ice cream and saying, that's tasty, or enjoying a piece of art. There are many different types of pleasure. And when you get to something like. And we can be very, very specific about them, but moral sentiments in particular, it's a very specific type of pleasure and it implicates love. He'll say at the end of this. Love and hate and pride and humility, which are in a sense, the most complicated and nuanced sentiments that we can have because they're social.

3:12 Dylan: Yeah. You just remind me of this question of aesthetics. And maybe someday we'll go down this route, but that the very inclination of our reason to try to solve things or come up with simple solutions for something. The criteria by which we would say, oh, this is a satisfactory solution, or even the judgments about figuring things out. It seems like Hume would end up putting sentiment in that bucket as well. And that way the workings of reason to figure out that's not purely deductive. Like even. Like the kind of wandering around, you go to figure out whether something's working or not. And the judgments involved there would Be aesthetic.

3:58 Mark: There was a general epistemic issue that was striking me about this, just that, you know, I've taught the first inquiry recently in my intro philosophy class, and he distinguishes impression from idea just by merely that ideas are fainter. That's the only thing. But then it becomes clear, like in this book, you know, he's talking about associations between ideas. Well, do you have associations between impressions? I. I mean, sort of in that one impression occurs and then another one occurs. It's just that associations of ideas are more flexible.

We can. We have our imagination, we can play around with them, we can combine them. So all conceptualization has to do with ideas. But it's not the way that he presents it is just. It's almost like a difference in degree of vividness. But yet when it becomes a little fainter, then we get. It just seems like now it's a different type of thing. We can do so many more things with it. By him saying here that perceptions include both impressions and ideas, that the notion of a concept that we're not thinking about, that we're just sort of referring to or bringing in.

But then, like, you know, I have in general a concept of cat that just lives in my brain and is waiting to be applied when I see an individual cat. I think this is all very foreign to Hume, who doesn't like to say anything that's not strictly empirical. So when I'm thinking of cat right now, there's an idea of cat, but when that goes away. So that the whole way that, like Frege or somebody would talk about concept, the whole way any analytic philosophers would talk about concepts which are very much divorced from my thinking of the concept right now.

Like, I just think he doesn't have access to that. So does that hurt his idea? Certainly it does hurt his idea of. If you're asking, can moral obligations apply to us whether we are aware of them or whether even possibly become aware of them or not. Well, he doesn't believe in necessity. So the idea of these things, this is exactly Kant's objection is that Hume's whole epistemology doesn't allow for necessity, so it can't account for obligation. So it seems like, to rephrase our overall question about Hume, can you even have morality if you have such a simplified epistemology that you're only just a moral sentiment appears now.

More complicated. Moral sentiment appears now. You know, idea that's related to moral sentiment that we associated other things appears now. Is that enough?

6:17 Dylan: Well, I mean, his claim that is that it's Enough, because those moral sentiments exist in that they direct our actions. Now, Kant would object to that. It seems to not admit of them to be absolute. Hume doesn't seem to be worried about that kind of thing because he clearly says, well, basically, what people approve of or disapprove of is basically pretty universal.

6:44 Mark: Does he say that, though?

6:45 Seth: Or does he just say that? The concepts. All societies have concepts of approval and disapproval there. They all have moral systems.

6:54 Dylan: We have things that we find praiseworthy or blameworthy. That's universal, is what he would say, as opposed to the specific.

7:00 Mark: Yeah, the stuff about utility, the stuff we talked about in the last episode, I think that was supposed to be universal.

7:06 Dylan: Yeah.

7:06 Mark: Everybody has regard for the welfare of beings.

7:10 Seth: Yeah, to some extent.

7:11 Mark: Unless you're malfunctioning. Sorry.

7:13 Wes: Yeah. They're at least some minimal sort of regard. Right. So even if someone is deeply immoral and a terrible person and a murderer, they have to have some of that. We should recall why we need that, because if we change the nature of the creature too much, then morality no longer becomes applicable to them. If I turn someone into the equivalent of my cat, I can't have any moral sentiments towards my cat. So if the serial killer is so different from you and me, if he's too different, then moral sentiments no longer actually apply. So there's got to be this weird sense in which someone could be really, really terrible and yet at bottom, no right from wrong is the way we would put it. Have their own moral sentiments.

7:58 Mark: So now I want to see the Halloween movie where the doctor is like that. Michael Myers, he's the essence of evil. But wait, he's so evil that actually I can't apply moral concepts to him. So I guess he's not evil at all. He's just a force of nature. Yeah, that's a little less.

8:13 Wes: He would be like a lion rampaging. Right.

8:16 Mark: If it were.

8:16 Wes: If he changed the movie and made it a lion running around, there would be no moral implications to that.

8:22 Seth: But what distinguishes us from the animals? Is it the sentiment? Is it our reason, our ability to reason?

8:29 Mark: It's the aesthetics. When Michael stick somebody to the wall, then he like, turns his head like he's contemplating it. That was the. One of the subtleties of the movie of he's into this.

8:39 Wes: So he wants to say it's not that we're. Because just we're rational creatures, which is the classic account. It's that he. Mike Myers. Is that his name?

8:48 Mark: Michael Myers from Sarah.

8:50 Wes: He is constituted so as to at least be capable of those sentiments to some degree. So we. It's this weird thing where our moral sentiments don't apply to others unless they are capable of having those sentiments themselves to some degree.

9:07 Dylan: This is just like the account of agency that Tomasello has. It's a consequence of the way in which what separates human beings from other animals is where we are on the evolutionary chain. Straight up. That's what the difference is. Yeah. And it has to do with the. In Tomasello's account, which I think really aligns with this kind of thing, is it has to do with how our agency is manifest and the kinds of things that affect the choices that we make, that the directions we move as willing entities. And those things change as you go in Tomasello up the evolutionary ladder. Human beings have a wider range of things that affect and act on their agency and their agency acts on than apes do. And apes have a wider one than mice do and mammals have a wider one than lizards do.

10:11 Wes: Yeah. I think Tomasello is also relevant because as you go up that chain, right. When you get to human beings, you have this capacity for joint attention.

10:19 Dylan: Exactly.

10:19 Wes: You have this capacity to be, as Hegel would put it, pooled in a sociality, or as Scheler would tell us, we can kind of be located in the other person's mind. And I think Hegelian recognition is actually really important here. Or. Right. Tomasello's idea about language. You're pointing at something. For the pointing to make sense, I have to know. I forget how it goes, but just think of it as a hall of mirrors. Right. Where there's just like cognitive light bouncing back and forth between us several times. But so my point is that. Right. Scheler makes the point that someone who's torturing someone, that presupposes empathy, that presupposes this very ability, what we're talking about, to get inside someone else's head.

You can't enjoy the torturing unless you can do that. And my cat can't really enjoy torturing the mouse as much as it seems like she might because she doesn't have that capacity to. To enjoy the suffering of the mouse. So that's where the moral scope comes in. Someone who has that ability to be in the other's mind in a way becomes subject to moral sentiments.

11:28 Dylan: Yeah. The mouse one, I think, is really interesting because what you would say is that the cat is having fun, is playing with the mouse, but it's not enjoying the suffering of the mouse.

11:40 Wes: She's brutal, I think, is Scheller's word.

11:42 Dylan: Right? Yes.

11:43 Wes: She's brutal, different to the suffering, but she's not enjoying. She's not sadistically enjoying it.

11:47 Dylan: Yes.

11:47 Mark: Yeah, I mean, I think Hume has a little more complexity in that he had that example that we talked about last time of the alien race that is microscopic, the who's. That we actually would not have any more responsibility to them because we can't understand that they suffer but because they can't do anything to stop us from hurting them that. So this throws that you know, our moral sentiments do not lie solely on reason. Of course, if something can talk back to us and say please don't hurt me, that's a good prima facie reason to feel bad for it and not hurt it. But you know, we might have machines that soon can do that and it'll still be a further step. And I think Hume would say we are very instinctually predisposed to not regard such things as part of the moral community, even if they could claim to be so because we just have these a priori speciesist notions.

12:43 Dylan: We do already include other species as part of our moral community adjacent. It's one of the reasons why many cultures, we have a hierarchy of animal cruelty sentiments where for many cultures dogs and cats end up being much closer to human beings than others. That's not universal, but.

13:09 Mark: Right. Sorry. To say they're not in the moral community is to say, as Wes was saying, we don't expect moral action from them. Not that we have no duties to them whatsoever. You don't treat them as equals. Right. Because he even said in that example, well, our default would be that we want to treat these, these aliens, these helpless aliens like we do our pets or like, like we do women, as he says in that section, because they have no exception so far as they exert the fortitude to stop us from doing this.

13:37 Wes: Well, they use their charms to win their rights, he says.

13:40 Mark: But yeah, I mean this, I think it's like 4, 65, 66, 67 where he actually brings in non human thing and how we don't consider them to argue against the idea that morality is a matter of reason, detectable relations between things, which is what Samuel Clarke believed, that there's a simple fittingness between ingratitude and gratitude or something like this. And yeah, I want to see what you guys thought about this tree example. Like if it was just the relationship of, you know, why do we hate parricide? Patricide? It's because, you know, this individual B was born of individual A and yet commits some wounds or destruction on Individual A, that just seems the worst thing for us.

But if it was really just a matter of that pattern, then like, well, what about a tree that drops a seed? It drops a little acorn that grows into a tree that gets so big that it eclipses and destroys the original tree. We don't blame the second tree. So clearly it's not just about the relationships between things. It's about what the things are and whether we emotionally react to them or regard them as members of the moral community.

14:49 Wes: Yeah, he's responding to previous writers who have said something like, well, take ingratitude. Ingratitude is immoral because you know, someone does you good offices or has goodwill towards you, and then you respond with bad offices or bad will. And there's just something about that relation in itself which is bad. And you don't have to think about our sentimental responses to that, our approbation or our disapprobation. There's just something in itself wrong about that. And his point is that, well, if there were something in itself wrong about that, just at the level of relationship, how do you restrict the scope?

How do you say this is just about human beings and not about inanimate objects? And that problem repeats itself a number of times. In other words, if you start to try to reduce morality to matters of fact, it becomes problematic. There's another point where he says, just examine any situation. Can you see the moral? Can you see the goodness or badness? Is it out there like the color red? If you just examine the scene well enough, would you find the moral property out there in the thing? No, you wouldn't. So it's really that general type of argument.

If you try to treat what's moral and immoral as matters of fact, then matters of fact start to encompass non human objects as well. And there's no way to get around that.

16:24 Dylan: That would be his response to the categorical imperative, right?

16:28 Wes: Well, I think for Kant, it's not about matters of fact. I mean, Kant has a much more sophisticated way of sneaking reason back into the picture. And he's doing it in light of everything that Hume has said. And in a way, he's even borrowing from Hume this idea of the universality of the sentiment. So for Kant, the contradiction and consistency arises within the act of willing itself. You don't have to say anything about the external world or conformity to some rule outside of oneself, which is where all the objectionable problems come in. Yeah, because that's another tactic that he argues against.

Right. Someone might say, well, look, there are Moral laws out there. And I think I've already said it, but you know, and we can conform to them just like our judgments can conform to matters of fact. But that whole idea of conformity presupposes that those laws are obligatory, right? That they have some kind of normative force. So they presuppose what they're trying to prove.

17:22 Dylan: Yep.

17:23 Mark: I think it's time to talk about incest. He brings this up in both the readings. And I was trying to. I was looking back in the inquiry, which is page 36, which is. He's just introduced, you know, utility. And he says those who live in the same family have such frequent opportunities of license of this kind, nothing could preserve purity of manners were marriage allowed among the nearest relations or any intercourse of love between them ratified by law and custom. Incest, therefore, being pernicious in a superior degree, has also a superior turpitude and moral deformity next to it.

And talks about specifically, like why the incest laws might be different in different societies depending on how good communication and travel are, you know, but it doesn't actually, what I just read there doesn't actually explain why incest is bad. And in the treatise, page 467, this is actually just a follow up on the oak tree example. I would fain ask anyone why incest in the human species is criminal. Why the very same action and the same relations in animals have not the smallest moral turpitude and deformity. If it be answered that this action is innocent in animals because they have not reason sufficient to discover its turpitude, but that man, being endowed with that faculty which ought to restrain him to his duty, the same action instantly becomes criminal to him.

Should this be said, I would reply that this is evidently arguing in a circle. For before reason can perceive the turpitude, the turpitude must exist, and consequently is independent of the decisions of our reason and is their object more properly than their effect. According to this system, then every animal that has sense and appetite and will, that is, every animal, must be susceptible of all the same virtues and vices for which we ascribe praise and blame to human creatures. All the difference is that our superior reason may serve to discover that vice and virtue by that means may augment the blame or praise.

But still this discovery supposes a separate being in these moral distinctions, and a being which depends only on the will. And anyway, so the idea is that actually incest applies. The animals are wrong to do that too. According to this rationalist view that he's arguing against but they just don't realize it. And Hume just thinks that's silly. And of course, Kant gets away from that by just building rationality into it. And so insofar as the animal is not rational, the law is not going to exist there. But if we want to say it's God's law or something like that, it just has to be objective, categorical.

I don't care if you're a badger today, you still no incest for you.

19:43 Wes: Yeah. So we can't just say that animals don't have the rational capacity to see that it's wrong, because then we'd have to explain why it's wrong. Independent.

19:53 Mark: I mean, I kind of don't mind that.

19:55 Wes: Yeah.

19:56 Mark: Isn't some of our utopias is like the lion lies down with the lamb and all the animals are like that. Their native beastliness of eating each other and having sex with anything that moves, maybe that is something that in our ideal world we would want to overcome, even though we recognize that the limitations of the source material will preclude that from happening.

20:16 Wes: Yeah. So this is again about the scope. The scope problem. The creature has to be constituted in a certain way in order to be subject to moral sentiments.

20:26 Mark: But so on both those examples, why is incest bad? Is it just because we just don't like it? It just seems gross to us? It seems like that's what it comes down to. It's not utility.

20:34 Wes: It's only the point of the early example in utility. He's just trying to illustrate that social laws vary in severity according to social utility. So that incest laws differ between certain societies depending on whether social arrangements make incest more possible, more in danger of happening. So that if it's more likely to happen, then there's going to be more severe sanctions against it to prevent it. So that's just serving that larger point that he's trying to make earlier on in the inquiry about how our moral sentiments are related ultimately to utility and ultimately related to what's good for society.

This case is unrelated. He's addressing an entirely different problem. He just happens to be using the same example. But the problem he's addressing here is the scope problem. And yeah, if you ask why that incest is wrong or why anything is wrong, you can't say it's God's law. You can't say it's because it's unnatural. Right. That's one of the things he's arguing against here. Nature says it's unnatural and therefore it's wrong. You just have to Say that we are so constituted to have these sentiments towards other creatures which are so constituted to be recipients of those sentiments, that all those conditions have to be met.

And that's why it's wrong. It's wrong because we, from this general impartial spectator standpoint, find it to be wrong and it's hardwired. That's it. So it does look like it doesn't do all the work which a metaethicist today would like it to do. It doesn't tell us that there are these absolute metaphysical foundations of right and wrong.

22:17 Mark: All right, well, that's enough for me to entitle the whole episode. Hume on incest.

22:22 Wes: Should we maybe let's look at the appendix? Because I guess we don't. Yeah.

22:26 Mark: So, right, we're back to the inquiry. And he had set aside some of this issue on reason versus sentiment to put in a more technical appendix, which I'm very surprised, given how much we've talked about reason versus sentiment, that there's anything we have not covered here. But please read from your notes.

22:44 Wes: Well, yeah, you know, I think he's kind of remedying some of the problems of the earlier account in the treatise and some of the things that Dylan was picking up on, because he has a more sophisticated account here, I think, of the way reason enters into moral judgments. And really he starts off the appendix by emphasizing this idea that reason must have a considerable share in moral judgments. And I think we could go a little bit more into that, but I think we've given enough examples of why that is. He gets into this concept as well that Dylan got us into of there being conflicting interests.

This is on page 82 to 83. And it may be that if we're trying to calculate utility, there might just be a little bit more utility in one course of action versus another. That's an example where reason must play a big role because we have to finally discriminate and know all about the causes and the effects of our actions and what effects they're likely to produce and all that stuff, and then how to weigh them against each other.

23:44 Dylan: In the middle of 83, he starts with, though reason, when fully assisted and improved, be sufficient to instruct us on the pernicious or useful tendency of qualities and actions, it is not alone sufficient to produce any moral blame or approbation. Utility is only a tendency to a certain end. And then he ends that paragraph on the sentiment can be no other than a feeling for the happiness of mankind and a resentment to their misery. Therefore, reason instructs Us in the several tendencies of actions, and humanity makes a distinction in favor of those which are useful and beneficial. So it was paragraphs like that where we have a very, very intimate connection between reason interacting with sentiment that not muddied the waters. But maybe this is the distinction between the. I mean, the treatise and the inquiry, because he brings them together a lot more here.

24:45 Wes: Right. We want others to be happy, but does that mean making them live in a society where women are veiled?

24:53 Dylan: Yes.

24:53 Wes: Is that what happiness means? Or is it some other arrangement? So that general sentiment is the fuel that we have to put into the engine or the energy that we have to input into the machine, as I was saying. Yep. But how the machine should be structured is a whole other matter. Or maybe that's not the right analogy here. But the details of what we're going to do have to be figured out through reason. The same thing as in art. You know, again, we got to make a lot of fine distinctions. We got to be able to kind of zoom in on things and look at them in great detail and weigh different interests against each other, whether it's within ourselves. Right. We can have an internal psychological conflict or different interests in society. Right. People have different interests. And so how do you weigh that if you're doing social or political policy?

25:41 Dylan: Yeah. So this question of figuring things out in the Appendix on page 85 became more clear, but also more challenging. It's section two, I guess, here where he's again contrasting geometry or mathematics with moral judgments. And he gives the example of. In order to determine the proportion of lines in any triangle, it's necessary to examine the nature of that figure and the relation which its several parts bear to each other. He makes the distinction, notwithstanding the appearing similarity in the case of morality. In the case of geometry, there is at bottom an extreme difference.

The speculative reason concerning triangles or circles considers the several known and given relations of the parts of these figures. And this infers some unknown relation which is dependent upon the former. But in moral deliberations we must be acquainted beforehand with all of the objects and all their relations to each other, and from a comparison of the whole fix our choice or approbation. No new fact to be ascertained, no new relation to be discovered. So this distinction was really interesting because it means that there is no figuring out in morality in this way.

So you can figure things out in geometry. You can go from the relationships between lines and figure out new properties of them that were implied by their relation, but you did not know them before. Your understanding did not get them.

27:18 Wes: Let's use the Pythagorean theorem as an example, right? So we know by the time we get to the end of book one of Euclid, we know a lot about triangles. In the case of the triangle under consideration, we know it's a right triangle. And then we can use everything we know to get this new property, A squared plus B squared equals C squared. And that kind of conclusion that theorem A squared plus B squared equals C squared. There's no moral judgment that's ever going to look like that, where we just know certain facts about the world, or maybe metaphysics, who knows?

And then do a little derivation, mathematical or logical. And then, oh, here's a new proposition that says we ought to do X, Y or Z. That's never going to happen, according to Hume, unless you input some sentiment. But at the point where you input sentiment, you're inputting the normative, the ought. Right? The ought that doesn't just magically appear out of the derivation or the demonstration. Ought doesn't appear like squared might appear. Right. It's just some other mathematical operation. Ought has to go in with the premises in the very beginning.

And you're not going to get it out unless it's in there in the beginning.

28:33 Mark: Which, yes, of course, we engage in lots of moral reasoning in which we are trying to determine an unknown from a bunch of knowns that anytime we try to. Is abortion bad? Is. Is. Am I the asshole? You know, we're trying to. Of course, yes. So one of the premises at least, will be normative already. And this is where all the interesting stuff comes in. I mean, the, the idea of, of trying to figure out what constitutes consent in various specific circumstances is a complicated one. And we're looking at a lot of facts because we're assuming that there are some.

I'm not sure that all the moral facts are given in full. Yes, there is normal normativity in the premises, in the equation, but we're trying to figure out the degree to which normativity applies in the new. Maybe even in a whole set of cases, right? If somebody doesn't complain about something, does that mean that they've consented to it? It might seem like. Well, we could understand why you would have to do some extra work to sort of evaluate them. Are they the kind of person that could consent? Are they in a power relationship with me? That would make it difficult for them to object to that, you know, so it requires thinking about these things.

29:44 Wes: Mark has been reading about the P. Diddy case. It's funny because I was going to slack you guys earlier and make a joke that I wanted to do an episode just on the opening argument by his lawyer. I actually have a really psychologically fascinating. And she's talking about jealousy and can be a concept of consent and all this stuff. And I thought, wow, this is really quite philosophically and psychologically fascinating in and of itself. But, yeah, that's a difficult ethical problem.

30:13 Mark: And I guess it's coming to the same thing. When we were asking about now that we've developed the whole enterprise of calm moral deliberation, does that mean that reason has not just applied some prior sentiment to a new area, but has made us into different sorts of creatures so that we have different sorts of sentiments? And I think that is maybe what is happening when we say, oh, this whole group of things that we thought were fine because, say, the workers were consenting to what the boss is at, but now we're, you know, we have some more positive notion of social justice or something like this, that we actually are changing our moral sentiments, not merely learning new facts that let us apply existing moral sentiments to the world.

30:58 Wes: Well, it is true, right. I think Hume would acknowledge that our belief systems strongly affect our moral sentiments. And it goes just even in the simple case of the apple, where believing that there's an apple in front of me induces the desire. But likewise, I could have all sorts of beliefs about women, for instance, that lead me to have certain sentiments towards them as opposed to other sentiments, sentiments that might be more or less ethical. So there has to be sentimental there from the beginning, but it can be organized and altered by these beliefs about the world.

31:39 Dylan: Yeah. And I guess the section three, that's next. In this. In this, he's going through his proof to show that reason is not sufficient for morality. And the third section, he goes about comparing moral beauty with natural beauty. And he again evokes the analogy with. Or the contrast with geometry, where geometry is the paradigm of reason. And he points to all the ways in which we make aesthetic judgments and points out that the beauty is not a quality of the circle.

32:20 Wes: Yeah. So we might, you know, right. If we're going to evaluate a painting, we're going to talk a lot about formal structure. We're going to say, oh, look at the composition, look at the triangle here and the circle there.

32:33 Dylan: Maybe the balance, the color contrast.

32:36 Wes: So one might think, oh, well, aesthetics is all about formal structure. We don't need. And sentiment comes out of that. It's like it falls out of it like the PYTHAGOREAN theorem falls out of a demonstration. But he's going to say, no, sentiment has to be there. Again, input from the beginning. Now, of course, yeah, we can refine our aesthetic sensibility and that's all about refining our sensitivity to formal structure. And that will alter and refine our sentimental responses. But it's got sentiment. We got to have something to work with from the beginning. We're not going to ever see a painting as beautiful unless there are just certain fundamental impulses built into us psychologically to find beauty in various things. So morality is supposed to work in the same way. Yeah, I really like that analogy.

33:28 Mark: And so right before that, page 86, right before the beauty part, when we condemn Nero, it's not that we see any relations of which he was ignorant, but that from the rectitude of our disposition we feel sentiments against which he was hardened from flattery and long perseverance in the most enormous crimes. So how do we blame people? Do we blame people for being wrong about facts? He says, not in general. I don't think this is an absolute thing. But if you are merely pursuing something because you have a mistaken impression. Right. I'm trying to root out injustice, but actually I ended up lynching an innocent person. Like, well, do we blame.

34:06 Wes: Well, I think that's a more complicated example. The easier example, right, is someone who's sleepwalking and murders in their sleep or just is out of their mind, truly

34:15 Dylan: psychotic kill somebody in their sleep. Right. Because the murder is the morally wrong form of killing.

34:21 Seth: Right.

34:23 Mark: What if they were dreaming about that person and killing them and in the dream they intended to kill that person.

34:28 Wes: But yeah, so you get the idea it's involuntary. I mean, normally we might want to say, well, they didn't know right from wrong or they weren't functioning rationally. And he wants to say, I think he would grant the spirit of that, but at a technical level that's not quite right.

34:45 Mark: My question was, do we blame people for ignorance? And I think it's very much like the sort of motives versus results thing, that if somebody is drunk driving and nothing happens versus they kill somebody, there's a certain amount of moral luck that we actually do blame them, even though it's the very same act. We do blame them if it's the worst thing, you know, with the worst outcome because they were doing something wrong all along. So if you were the lynching example. Lynching is not something you should do, even if you really think that this person is guilty and is being Overlooked by the system. So if you screw up your lynching and you lynch the wrong person instead of the mo, the serial killer who has somehow slipped through the cracks of the justice system, yeah, that's very bad.

35:27 Wes: The point is, yeah, it's not that Nero didn't rationally understand some law, some moral law, said his heart was hardened and then we judge that. So in the case of the drunk driver, it's not that they are malicious, but they're negligent. There's something going on that we can ascribe viciousness to or vice to. And it's not simply not knowing something. It has something to do with their sentimental comportment to the world, so to speak.

35:56 Seth: Yeah, and this is really. This, I think, highlights another difference. Honestly, I can't remember whether it was in Hume or if it was in somebody else because I'm a little blurry. But the idea that judgments of, you know, moral judgments, they have degrees, they have shades, they have depth, they have contrast there, as opposed to judgments of fact which are theoretically right or wrong, true or false. Just if you take it at a macro level, we're talking about a different kind of phenomenon here. And so there's a sense in which what Hume is trying to say is the way in which we approach questions of mathematics and geometry and metaphysics and science and the faculties and the decisions we use or the decision making process that we use doesn't work in this realm.

And what I learned from the inquiry. Right. Is kind of great painstaking lengths to make that obvious through the use of cataloging examples. Right. You know, okay, let's just prima facie or let's just take a phenomenological kind of approach. It's like this phenomena of morality exists and it has all these nuances, has all these shadings, and it's not something that we can either explain as far as its origin or explain as far as its function in the same way that we explain things like mathematics and science and so forth. So, you know, he's trying to get to another place.

How can we then explain it? And I have to say I think his diagnosis is pretty compelling. I just think the framework of both philosophy and psychology that he had to work with had him swimming down certain lanes. And as you know, Dylan brought up earlier, like Hume, I think will continue to resonate, you know, as new advances come and new understanding of identity and self and consciousness and all that. Because I think he's onto a lot of the right things. He just didn't have the framework to like, really, he's trying to solve the problem he diagnosed without having the tools to do it.

38:11 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, if people want to look at a contemporary defense of Hume and maybe we can, hopefully we'll do him at some point. Jesse Prinz. I think that's how you pronounce it. The emotional construction of morals includes an extensive defense of the Humean conception of morality, but makes use of modern neuroscience and cognitive science and all that stuff. So I think the human conception of morality is quite popular. And then the alternatives are people like Christine Korsgaard, who I think we should do as well soon. She's a neo Kantian, really great. And then Philippa Foot with virtue ethics, this thing that we're going to do next, natural goodness. You have other contenders still. The same battle is still being fought out today between the rationalists, let's say, and the sentimentalists.

39:01 Mark: So one point I think we have not really taken on directly, at least in this discussion, is Seth had brought up as a question, does he really think that everybody has the same sentiments? Because he says in both these, in the inquiry, in the part we were just looking, morality is a matter of taste. So you can't ultimately argue, well, let's just leave that floating there.

39:21 Wes: And the Treatise, the taste is not subjective, right? Even for aesthetics, it's not subjective.

39:25 Mark: All right, well, in the Treatise, he says it's a category mistake to say that a sentiment is wrong, that it is, because there would have to be a right sentiment for it to correspond to. But sentiments are just things people have. It is fundamentally just a matter of a phenomenon, of us having these sentiments. That is what is at root. So yes, we build these edifices, these edify, like he has done by saying, well, in general, we approve of utility, so let's start using that as a rule and use our reason to apply it. But ultimately it does come down to.

So you've already just denied the premise of my question, Wes, and said, oh, no, well, that doesn't mean it's subjective in any way. But I feel like, especially in this point in the Treatise where he says, fundamentally in the inquiry, it was like, we can still blame Nero for having hardened tastes, right? For having bad taste. Certainly we can't say it's false. We can say his taste is not in accord with mine, in accord with the norm, in accord with what the rest of us believe, but we can't say it's wrong.

40:29 Wes: Yeah, I mean, you're getting at the critique how a rationalist might critique him. You know, or someone who wants a stronger conception of morality and thinks that maybe he reduces to relativism or something like that. How can you say that something is truly wrong if there's no fact of the matter about whether something is right or wrong? If it's all just, well, we're just hardwired to feel this way? In other words, is he an error theorist? Is he an emotivist? I think Jesse Prinz will argue that he's not an emotivist. Some philosophers today treat him as if he is an emotivist and an error theorist.

And so I'm going to kind of save him and give a more sophisticated constructivist argument, which I don't know precisely how that's done. But, yeah, that's the danger of this point of view. And that's the thing that Kant is trying to dig out of. There is no such thing as morality on Hume's point of view according to the Kantian Critique anymore.

41:25 Mark: I think we're on the final lap here. Is there anything else that jumped out from your notes that we have not yet hit, or do we want to talk more about how this is similar or dissimilar to aesthetics?

41:37 Dylan: I guess just aiming to wrap up. I had a lot of things that I brought up that I was like, wow, this is kind of slippery, or it's trying to sort it out. I did want to leave with just having been reminded how interesting Hume is to read. I found him to be super clear and super, even with the slipperiness of the ideas, that it seemed to be more of a consequence of the kinds of distinctions he's making than somehow he himself is. I find him incredibly engaging to read. I'd forgotten that I hadn't read him in quite a long time. And I found it very, very, very engaging, which was not the way I always feel about the philosophy that we read. Sometimes it's worth the price spent to try to understand it, but there isn't a lot of enjoyment of spending it.

42:30 Wes: And remember, he wrote the Treatise when he was in his 20s, which just make us all feel ashamed.

42:37 Seth: I'm not going to beat myself up anymore.

42:40 Wes: The Inquiry. When he was 40, he published the Inquiry. And that's like, yeah, he's an old man at that point.

42:46 Seth: Yeah. For 15 years we've been pointing out how much more accomplished all these fuckers were than us at their ages. I'm just tired of hitting myself in the head with a stick.

42:58 Mark: So let's just congratulate ourselves for outliving most of them

43:03 Seth: exactly by the time most philosophers were my age, they were dead.

43:09 Mark: Sounds good.

43:11 Wes: Let's just cut it right there. All right, that's a wrap.

43:15 Mark: He was getting very specific in how he was trying to characterize these rationalists. I guess I'm not believing I'd like to actually hear from Clarke or Balguy, one of these rationalists. I'm not throwing that idea away, which was going to be our next episode. It just. Wes is already halfway into this Philippa Foot thing. So yeah, let's get to the present day, get out of a modern philosophy world for a while to something contemporary and probably we'll have to. I would not be surprised if we just move on to some other. Just because there's just a limit to how long maybe I want to spend in any particular area.

Even though I'm still very interested in just how many people do we have to. Hume is addressed in a very direct way, this reason versus sentiment thing, in a way that was only hinted at in the Scheler, in the Brentano and the Stein. So there's more to be said, but maybe enough has been said for now.

44:09 Wes: Yeah, I mean my preference would be to look at. Yeah. What are the major contenders to this type of theory? People who want to defend the rationalist point of view, but not in the ham fisted way that Clarke and Wollaston were doing it. So Christine Korsgaard, the major neo-Kantian ethicist of our time, and Philippa Foot virtue ethics. And then we could look at any other alternatives because yeah, reading Hume just makes me want to say, okay, well, yeah, how do you get around Hume's insight here? It's really difficult. I just find this like this gets really to the core problem of ethics. Where does the normative come from? Is it just an illusion? And so yeah, I want to look at these alternative. These realists, maybe let's call them, are rationalists. See if they can respond to Hume in a forceful way.

45:03 Seth: I think that would be interesting. I also think, Wes, you're right. It also kind of gets to. As I was trying to say earlier, it's like tackling this question really gets to the heart of how we think, how we experience life and what makes us basically consciousness. Like why do we say these things about ourselves and not about animals? Why are the rules different? Why do we have this thing called a moral? And why is it so weird and different? I mean, right. Every time we talk about aesthetics and morality, it's like it gets weird and squishy and confusing.

But it's important to Us and it's part of our experience. So the one thing you can say for Hume is that, like, he wasn't doing a drag bunt. You know, he's swinging for the fences, man. Everything he did was like he's trying to hit the big one. And that's why it's compelling to come back, because it just. It stirs that stuff up, which still hasn't been answered. And with everything. That's all the science and everything that's happened in the 20th century and the development of technology and that, are we any closer to understanding the nature of consciousness than we were 200 years ago?

46:09 Wes: Well, you're turning the tables now, Seth. Yeah, we don't have to feel bad about ourselves because it's pointless anyway.

46:16 Dylan: So I think you're right about all that being super interesting. And I do think that the reason that we end up caring so much about this goes back to desperately thinking that there are reasons to hang what we ought to do and what we expect of other people and obligations that we enforce either on ourselves or on other people that have some source outside of ourselves and the power other people have over us. And so the notion that there is some way and some force of just acts or regulation of our acts that we can talk about as right or wrong and therefore hold people accountable to them, and that is force them to do things in line with those because they're wrong or right, that is not fundamentally come down to something only within ourselves.

Because then that fact is super interesting. Right. That fact is when we find the existential force of geometry somehow more compelling than us deciding that cruelty is bad and saying it's bad just because it. Just because I said it's bad, we feel it's much more compelling. And we can appeal to justice because it's part of the good or because God told us that the world is just and God's on our side and we're just instruments of God or some other version of it, we find it more compelling. That's outside of us.

48:06 Mark: I'll add to Wes's list of books. We've had this J.L. Mackie book about moral error theory on our radar for a long time. And, you know, so maybe he's just a human who's willing to bite the bullet that, like, yeah, it doesn't actually provide more than. I feel strongly that this is something that should not be done. And that's like what Rorty would say. Like, that's all we can say. We as the community approve of this. And if you want more than that you're channeling some obsolete theological conception of necessity and objectivity and obligation.

Well, folks should let us know what they think that we should read in the ethical world. What is the book that most influenced you that we have not yet gotten to, or that we should return to? Thanks so much for listening. You can reach out to us through pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com where there's a contact form just on the website. You could make a comment on the episode as posted there, or reach out through Facebook, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Thanks everybody, and good night.

49:06 Wes: Good night.