I recently read Feminist Interpretations of David Hume, there are a lot of good essays in it, and I’d encourage anyone interested in Hume or feminist philosophy to give it a read. I’d like to discuss Genevieve Lloyd’s piece, “Hume on the Passion for Truth”, because I found the essay an excellent work of philosophy. It draws out some of the themes in Hume’s work that I find most interesting and the piece has direct relevance to some of the concerns floated in my first post. The essay also raises a good opportunity to think about why some of Hume’s arguments can be uncomfortable (I say this as a sort-of-Humean!). I’d recommend giving Lloyd’s essay a read, if you can find a copy of the book. It can be a difficult to find, but you can borrow a copy from the Internet Archive (here). I can also send anybody who asks with a PDF copy of Lloyd’s essay (hastythoughts @ proton.me).

I want to first provide some context regarding Hume’s ethical theories to show how Lloyd’s essay can show some of the strengths of Hume’s ideas. Hume’s ethical investigations attempt to show how our natural, emotional capacities and responses form the basis for our ethical judgements. This flows from his more general philosophy of mind, that takes our empirical judgements to be basically associative: I make a judgement that event A causes event B, not because I perceive an essential or necessary connection between the two, but because I have come to associate the events with each other through repeated experience. Repeated experiences gives us ideas that we link together and make judgements with, and the emotions that certain events elicit in us are the basis for our judgements about how we ought to act and judge others. The associative nature of our judgement is also what gives rise to sympathy, when I see another person expressing an emotion my mind is moved to recall occasions on which I acted similarly and remember how I felt when I did so. For Hume, we literally feel what other people feel and this gives a social aspect to his moral arguments.

Lloyd’s essay deals with the passions underlying human motives and behaviour, with specific reference to our reasons for intellectual pursuits such as philosophy. She demonstrates that, for Hume, we pursue philosophy for the pleasure we take in our mind’s working: “[this] movement of the mind is the true source of the philosopher’s pleasure” (Lloyd, 47). We know from past experience that thinking in philosophical ways is pleasant, so we seek to do it again. Sympathy then comes into the picture as we seek to reinforce and justify our pursuit of philosophy in the eyes of others, with social utility (the potential benefit of our reasoning to others) serving to “get the mind into motion” (Lloyd, 47). Hume uses the analogy of hunting to demonstrate how and why we rationalise pursuits like philosophy. A hunter’s motivation for hunting may be the pleasure he takes in it, but he reinforces, increases, and justifies his hobby by thinking about the potential utility (the fowl on the dinner plate) of his actions (Lloyd, 47). With philosophy we tend to do something similar, and this is particularly interesting to me because, as Hume notes, once we have stopped ‘actively philosophising’, we sometimes resort to our ‘common sense’ beliefs. This generates a tension: How genuine can we be about the social utility of philosophy, if it is pursued for pleasure and its conclusions often fail to figure in our practical decision-making?

So is this a good answer to why we pursue philosophy? If we follow Hume then we might say that pleasure and approbation are really why we do anything. Even when we are compelled to do something like going to work, we can argue that we do so because it is somehow more pleasurable than the alternative. But there should be something uncomfortable about this for those of us hoping to pursue philosophy (or any other intellectual discipline) professionally, given that this is only possible under social conditions that are basically unjust¹. Furthermore, I think that we can feel discomfort at the possibility that our basic judgements about right and wrong are only contingently grounded in how we happen to feel. There’s a potential slip, I think, from a lack of necessity (modal?) to assuming that these judgements are thus arbitrary and should not be afforded any authority when we are thinking about how we ought to live together.

I think that looking at how Adam Smith (one of Hume’s closest confidants, and greatly influenced by Hume’s system) adapted some aspects of Hume’s ethical theory can shed some light on how some people seek to settle their potential discomfort and resign themselves to accepting such social conditions. Smith, I think, tries to avoid the contingency of Hume’s ethical system by adding further psychological mechanisms to the theory of human understanding. Sentiment is still at the heart of the system, but Smith works with a larger set of ‘basic’ sentiments than Hume, He also adds mechanisms beyond association to relate these sentiments to one another. The change typically noted as the largest is Smith’s development of Hume’s impartial spectator in the theory of sympathy, which seems to presage ideal/impartial observer theories in modern(ish) metaethics. More interesting to me, however, is Smith’s rejection of Hume’s analysis of justice as an artificial virtue (which we can gloss as a theory of the social construction of morals) and his argument that expected utility is not sufficient to explain our desire for well-ordered social system. One of his arguments against expected utility’s role is that, because we will occasionally work harder than any expected benefit to adopt certain arrangements. Someone “voluntarily puts himself at more trouble than he could have suffered from the want of it” (IV.1.4) in seeking certain arrangements and “confound[s] it [the utility or pleasure of that arrangement] in our imagination with the order, the regular and harmonious movement of the system” (IV.1.9). Part of Smith’s argument is that we have a pleasurable sentiment when we think of totalising, well-ordered systems. He develops this further to try and show the dangers of certain species of political demagoguery, but it’s interesting to me in that it naturalises more complicated ethical responses, rather than allowing them to be built up from smaller constituents. It’s certainly a Humean line of argument, it’s rooted in repeated experience and association to some degree, but it turns it back on itself, and thus requires further grounding for our ethical judgements.

So to me it seems like Smith is trying to avoid the discomfort he feels in the basic contingency of Hume’s argument. He seeks to ground our ethical judgements by arguing that we have a natural tendency to prefer certain ways of being, that Hume’s system takes to be essentially historically contingent. While neither Hume, nor Smith, were radicals (and, in fact, Hume could be viciously reactionary, his racism is particularly expressive of this), the basic structure of Hume’s ethical theory leaves space for us to suggest that what we currently take to be good is only such because of the experiences that have shaped us. If we feel discomfort at the thought that we pursue a practice like philosophy for pleasure (given the conditions necessary to support such a practice are clearly wrong), it’s left open to us to argue that these conditions can change and our ethical responses can also change in response to this. Smith, in seeking to escape this contingency, could be driven into a more conservative ethical position that takes the way we are now to be the way we must be.

I’m not sure whether this makes sense! It is my feeling, though, that a lot of responses to Hume try to escape the contingency of his thought, and what it says about what sort of creatures we are, rather than trying to look at what that contingency might mean for how we can shape ourselves in our reason and action. It’s grounded in our nature, but because our nature responds to a variable and changing world it can’t itself be fixed.