The test of a concept is in experience. When we cannot find a way to confirm that a way of thinking matches our way of living, then we tend to reject it. I think that this is a fairly weak requirement; I haven’t, for example, said that a concept must be confirmed in experience by testing its predictive abilities or its success in referring to unique objects. We do, however, test, adapt, and discard concepts as we go about our lives making judgments and forming decisions. If a concept no longer fits, if it’s no longer useful, then we may drop it. This isn’t a hard rule; hypocrisy and weakness of the will both seem to indicate that we can hold onto an idea that is in some tension with our experience and the rest of our concepts, but these are both rather large topics that I can’t deal with properly here.

Ethics has a (or has been taken to have a) fraught relationship with this idea of confirmation. When we discuss ethical questions, engage in ethical arguments, or try to deliberate about what to do, we often make use of concepts that aim to give an account of how the world should be rather than how it is. Philosophers diverge over whether these categories coincide, but the distinction recommends itself so confidently that those philosophers who take it to be illusory incur a significant explanatory burden. But an interesting problem arises for those who accept the distinction: How do we explain change in our ethical concepts? More precisely: How do we explain change in ethical concepts, resulting from the failure of those concepts to meet some circumstance?

One way to potentially explain such a change is by adopting a modified form of empirical confirmation. This form relies on a feeling of subjective recognition as the bar for whether a concept is admitted as having ethical force. I don’t mean by this to take sides on whether ethics is subjective, objective, or something in-between; all I mean to argue is that we often use recognition as a signpost showing us that an ethical concept has something to it. One way that this sense of recognition is often elicited is through the description of an individual’s reactions (in a particular circumstance, or in general) followed by the (potentially implicit) question: Don’t you feel this too? I also want to suggest that this method of argument is used in metaethical (second-order ethical) debates, something that seems to imply that the distinction between first- and second-order ethics is at least a little porous, though I think that many of us already implicitly accept that this is the case.

Showing that this style of argument is used in ethics is possible through a brief analysis of two major ethical thinkers, Spinoza and Hume, and the way that they treat our ethical passions. Now I am aware that, in Spinoza’s case at least, this requires a creative enough reading so as to be a misreading. I do, however, think that we can sort of make the case for his continuing relevance by an appeal to this relatively weak notion of recognition, even though he would likely wish to distance himself from it entirely. Think of this as an experiment (I am), I want to make some assumptions and test them out. I haven’t entirely convinced myself, in fact, I think there are serious flaws with this account, but I’m trying to get an outline of how to describe ethical argument that is satisfying, and doing so is surprisingly difficult. With that said, last year I read Spinoza’s Ethics for the first time, and shortly afterwards I read Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature in full for the first time. There are some interesting parallels in their arguments¹, despite the received wisdom that they are paradigmatic of a rationalist/empiricist divide that can’t be bridged. Something that struck me was the way both thinkers described human emotions as both works called forth, at points, the recognition response that I have outlined, and I want to try and explain how that is.

Spinoza’s analysis of the role of emotions in ethics is not an obvious place to look to when aiming to defend the value of empirical descriptions in philosophical argument. Spinoza’s method in the Ethics is not to start from empirical observations and their analysis, but to outline basic definitions and work to examine the rational relationships between those definitions and postulates. These systems still challenge us to respond to them, though, and we test them, at least partly, by working through our experience and asking: Spinoza says that in circumstances like this, we respond like that, does that match how I recall acting in the past? I found Spinoza to be frequently insightful in this way, particularly when it comes to his analysis of the relationship of complex emotions to less complex emotions and the role of apprehension in the onset of an emotion. Understanding his account requires a working knowledge of the metaphysical framework it rests upon; take the following as an incomplete account of this framework.

Spinoza takes all living things to strive towards self-preservation, though he doesn’t mean to impute a fundamental selfishness to us. Self-preservation, for Spinoza, is what living things strive towards because it’s in striving towards this preservation that gives them their thing-ness. A bad analogy might go as follows: I can tell that a rock is a rock, and not a mouse, because what’s good for a rock is not the same as what’s good for a mouse. This drive is conceived of in terms of perfection; what makes me more me-like (more human, etc.) is defined by Spinoza as what makes me more perfect. This perfection is also conceived of in terms of the power to act, which means the power to understand the causes of things and our place in them. Because Spinoza is a really thoroughgoing monist, he thinks that everything (mind and body) are all different variations on the same substance, and this means that when the body moves towards perfection, the mind experiences an identical movement.

This gives us the basics required to understand how he describes our emotions and their dynamics. Spinoza defines joy as “the passion by which the mind passes to a greater perfection” (Bk 3, P11) and, accompanied by a corresponding definition of sadness, this provides the basic ingredients for his account of the richness of our emotional life. Love, for example, is “joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause” (Bk 3, P13), and when I reflect on the way that my own passions colour my understanding of the world, I can’t help but feel as though there is some truth in the way Spinoza defines it. Joy’s relation to perfection or self-realisation helps prevent his characterisation of love from slipping into a trite identification with those things that make us happy. We recognise that love makes us better or more whole in some way, and Spinoza works this into his definition.

Complex passions are also treated by Spinoza, and he is able to provide a convincing account of their operations. Fear and hope, for example, are related both to one another and our apprehension of the future. Fear being “inconstant sadness which has also arisen from the image of a doubtful thing” and hope “an inconstant joy which has arisen from an image of a future or past thing whose outcome we doubt” (Bk 3, P18). The identical target means “there is no hope without fear, and no fear without hope” (Bk 3, Df XIII). I can’t help but recognise and respond to this. Uncertain anticipations tend to usher in pain and pleasure; my mind has a tendency to naturally turn from hoping that something will occur to fearing that it won’t.

I don’t know how to reconcile the accuracy of Spinoza’s observations and my attraction to them with my opposition to his system and style of philosophy it advances. I can’t simply dismiss it, either. It would be disrespectful and inconsistent to just skim the results of Spinoza’s work, particularly since the force of his observations follows from their interrelatedness and position in his overall system. The problem here is partly the problem of assessing the success of a formal system generally, but Spinoza doesn’t seem to be abstracting away from the mess of reality to make predictions or study its properties so much as he is making claims about nature that are meant to hold true all the way down. Still, looking at it in this way might help to make sense of how we can think of recognition that his system accurately predicts and describes subjective responses as providing some support for it. Ethics is concerned, at least partly, with this first-personal experience, and Spinoza’s model gives one way that we can reason about these experiences.

Hume is also concerned with the role of emotion in ethical experience and judgment, though his definitions and analysis are more concerned with our immediate experience. Hume’s treatment of the passions falls squarely into his overall philosophy of mind, central to which is the distinction between impressions (immediate, sensory) and ideas (essentially memories of these impressions). The passions are secondary impressions, which he distinguishes from primary impressions not by describing a lack of immediacy or force, but by identifying their causes. Secondary impressions arise when we experience primary impressions; they result from them. Here’s how Hume puts it:

Bodily pains and pleasures are the source of many passions, both when felt and consider’d by the mind; but arise originally in the soul, or in the body, whichever you please to call it, without any preceding thought or perception. A fit of the gout produces a long train of passions, as grief, hope, fear; but is not deriv’d immediately from any affection or idea (T 2.1.1.2).

The point here is that the passions “grief, hope, fear” arise immediately when we think about the experience of pain brought about by gout, without needing a physical source or a long period of deliberation about the pain. Of course, this natural tendency of the mind to move from one impression to another is just an example of Hume’s grounding of judgment-making in custom (repeated experience). This identification, and some of his comments regarding the effect that custom (in the sense of social customs) have on our ethical judgments, imply to me that his denial that there is a “preceding thought” should be understood as meaning that these passions arise without our needing to consciously think about them, not that the ideas that we form over time do not have an impact on the passions. In other words, I think that the way Hume’s system builds our conceptual representations from our repeated experience of the world means that the way we represent the world to ourselves has a strong impact on the way that we react to it emotionally and ethically. Because of this, Hume is able to give an account of ethical experience that accounts for the contingency of our ethical judgments without allowing this contingency to undermine their apparent authority.

Hume’s discussion of love and its grounding in pleasure gives some indication as to how contingency and authority can be explained together. Hume describes love as being directed towards “some other person, of whose thoughts, actions, and sensations we are not conscious” (T 2.2.1.3). Because love and hate are both directed towards other people, however, it can’t just be that others being others is the cause of our feeling love towards them; if this were the case, “it wou’d produce these opposite passions in an equal degree; and as they must, from the very first moment, destroy each other” (T 2.2.1.3). So there must be something about the objects for our love and hate that produce these emotional reactions in us, something about the object makes a certain response fitting. Hume demurs here, however, and says that the causes of love are “much diversify’d, and have not many things in common” (T 2.2.1.4). He lists the “virtue, knowledge, wit, good sense, good humour of any person” as eliciting love, as well as “bodily accomplishments, such as beauty, force, swiftness, dexterity” and the “external advantages and disadvantages of family, possessions, cloaths, nation and climate” (T 2.2.1.4). Some of these causes might make us pause; they certainly made me pause when reading the Treatise. A person’s clothes or possessions, their physical beauty; none of these things seem to justify love. There is a superficiality to them; we might accept them as accompanying love, or as sparking it, but these qualities don’t seem capable of justifying the deep commitment that love requires. I can think of three responses to this.

Firstly, causes and justifications for love might be different things. Both causes and justifications seek to explain why you love somebody, but to different people and for different reasons. It seems to me typical to seek to justify love by identifying as particularly salient some causes for the emotion from many others. Some of those other causes might be considered morally superfluous, or even potentially undermining². Another response is that this list of causes makes sense in the context of Hume’s phenomenology: Love, as a passion, is an essentially pleasant emotion. To love an object is to feel good when you think about it; when I think about somebody’s beauty, I feel good³, and this explains why beauty is a cause of love. I also think that we can respond by citing how thoroughly Hume embraces contingency; he isn’t concerned that what causes me to love somebody may not reflect an essential or necessary truth, he’s just concerned to trace out how he sees the human mind working and to make do with our capacities as they really exist. This third response is in a state of some tension with the first. If all causes for love are contingent in this way, then none of them can necessarily be signalled out as justifying the sort of moral partiality that we might want to claim is warranted by feelings of love.

This embrace of contingency is what I find so attractive in Hume’s description of love and our ethical emotions more broadly. He doesn’t aim to strip away the contingent causes for our feeling love towards another (or hate for them), and thus define it in terms of essential characteristics or necessities. While the judgments we make are made using limited and contingent capacities, we cannot avoid making them and taking them seriously. When I read Hume’s description of the causes of love, I find myself forced to confront the fact that the love I feel for my family is essentially ungrounded and has no more claim to being ‘right’ than the love any other person bears for their family. One way to read this is as an essentially liberal impulse: If nobody’s love can be considered more right than anybody else’s, then we have good reason to treat their claims to ethical consideration equally. We get to a widening of the circle of moral and political concern from an account of human psychology. On the other hand, though, the other side of Hume’s argument regarding contingency is that this contingency doesn’t matter; we continue to act as though the judgments we form have the authority of necessary, rational judgments. So, we reach something of an impasse, where consummating that liberal impulse that I think really is in Hume (despite himself) is not required, and, in fact, seems to require not just political action, but a program of psychological or ethical exercises designed to make us regularly reflect on the ungroundedness of our judgments. For what it’s worth, both Hume and Spinoza draw on the Stoics in their ethical work, and the contemporary revival of Stoic philosophy essentially treats it as a sequence of psychological exercises designed to moderate our emotional reactions in this manner! There’s also been some recent work on liberalism as a way of life that makes similar claims.

What I find myself drawing from Hume and Spinoza is something very different, but in both cases what I draw from it is a recognition that something they have described has a parallel in my own emotional experience. This recognition is weaker than the sort of proof that we get from seeing a result proved in a formal system, but it is real nevertheless and seems to say something true. Part of it, I think, comes from their willingness to name and describe these emotions and then trust us to follow the way that they develop and are accounted for in their systems. Their willingness to do this relies on trust; they trust that we will recognise and follow the phenomena that they describe, even if we can’t assent to their arguments fully, and I think that this shows us the sort of evidence that might be worthwhile counting on in ethical arguments.

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