Hume’s doctrine of morals parallel to his doctrine of nature.
1. In his speculation on morals, no less than on knowledge, Hume follows the lines laid down by Locke. With each there is a precise correspondence between the doctrine of nature and the doctrine of the good. Each gives an account of reason consistent at least in this that, as it allows reason no place in the constitution of real objects, so it allows it none in the constitution of objects that determine desire and, through it, the will. With each, consequently, the ‘moral faculty,’ whether regarded as the source of the judgments ‘ought and ought not,’ or of acts to which these judgments are appropriate, can only be a certain faculty of feeling, a particular susceptibility of pleasure and pain. The originality of Hume lies in his systematic effort to account for those objects, apparently other than pleasure and pain, which determine desire, and which Locke had taken for granted without troubling himself about their adjustment to his theory, as resulting from the modification of primary feelings by ‘associated ideas.’ ‘Natural relation,’ the close and uniform sequence of certain impressions and ideas upon each other, is the solvent by which in the moral world, as in the world of knowledge, he disposes of those ostensibly necessary ideas that seem to regulate impressions without being copied from them; and in regard to the one application of it as much as to the other, the question is whether the efficiency of the solvent does not depend on its secretly including the very ideas of which it seems to get rid.
Its relation to Locke: Locke’s account of freedom, will, and desire.
2. The place held by the ‘Essay concerning Human Understanding,’ as a sort of philosopher’s Bible in the last century, is strikingly illustrated by the effect of doctrines that only appear in it incidentally. It does not profess to be ethical treatise at all, yet the moral psychology contained in the chapter ‘of Power’ (II. 21), and the account of moral good and evil contained In the chapter ‘of other Relations’ (II. 28) furnished the text for most of the ethical speculation that prevailed in England, France, and Scotland for a century later. If Locke’s theory was essentially a reproduction of Hobbes’, it was yet in the form he gave it that it survived while Hobbes was decried and forgotten. The chapter on Power is in effect an account of determination by motives. More, perhaps, than any other part of the essay it bears the marks of having been written ‘currente calamo.’ In the second edition a summary was annexed which differs somewhat in the use of terms, but not otherwise, from the original draught. The main course of thought, however, is clear throughout. Will and freedom are at first defined in all but identical terms as each a ‘power to begin or forbear action barely by a preference of the mind’ (§§ 5, 8, 71). Nor is this identification departed from, except that the term ‘will’ is afterwards restricted to the ‘preference’ or ‘power of preference,’ while freedom is confined to the power of acting upon preference; in which sense it is pointed out that though there cannot be freedom without will, there may be will without freedom, as when, through the breaking of a bridge, a man cannot help falling into the water, though he prefers not to do so. ‘Freedom’ and ‘will’ being thus alike powers, if not the same power, it is as improper to ask whether the will is free as whether one power has another power. The proper question is whether man is free (§§ 14, 21), and the answer to this question, according to Locke, is that within certain limits he is free to act, but that he is not free to will. When in any case he has the option of acting or forbearing to act, he cannot help preferring,i.e.willing, one or other alternative. If it is further asked, What determines the will or preference? the answer is that ‘nothing sets us upon any new action but some uneasiness’ (§ 29), viz., the ‘most urgent uneasiness we at any time feel’ (§ 40), which again is always ‘the uneasiness of desire fixed on some absent good, either negative, as indolence to one in pain, or positive, as enjoyment of pleasure.’ In one sense, indeed, it may be said that the will often runs counter to desire, but this merely means that we ‘being in this world beset with sundry uneasinesses, distressed with different desires,’ the determination of the will by the most pressing desire often implies the counteraction of other desires which would, indeed, under other circumstances, be the most pressing, but at the particular time of the supposed action are not so.
Two questions: Does man always act from the strongest motive? and,What constitutes his motive? The latter the important question:Distinction between desires that are, and those that are not,determined by the conception of self.
3. So far Locke’s doctrine amounts to no more than this, that action is always determined by the strongest motive; and only those who strangely hold that human freedom is to be vindicated by disputing that truism will care to question it. To admit that the strongest desire always moves action (there being, in fact, no test of its strength but its effect on action) and that, since every desire causes uneasiness till it is satisfied, the strongest desire is also the most pressing uneasiness, [1] is compatible with the most opposite views as to the constitution of the objects which determine desire. To understand that it is this constitution of the desired object, not any possible intervention of unmotived willing between the presentation of a strongest motive and action, which forms the central question of ethics, is the condition of all clear thinking on the subject. It is a question, however, which Locke ignores, and popular philosophy, to its great confusion, has not only continued to do the same, but would probably resent as pedantic any attempt at more accurate analysis. When we hear of the strongest ‘desire’ being the uniform motive to action, we have to ask, in the first place, whether the term is confined to impulses determined by a prior consciousness, or is taken to include those impulses, commonly called ‘mere appetites,’ which are not so determined, but depend directly and solely on the ‘constitution of our bodily organs.’ Theappetiteof hunger is obviously quite independent of any remembrance of the pleasure of eating, yet nothing is commoner than to identify with such simple appetite the desire determined by consciousness of some sort, as when we say of a drunkard, who never drinks merely because he is thirsty, that he is governed by his appetite. Upon this distinction, however, since it is recognised by current psychology, it is less important to insist than on that between the kinds of prior consciousness which may determine desire proper. Does this prior consciousness consist simply in the return of an image of past pleasure with consequent hope of its renewal, or is it a conception—the thought of an object under relations to self or of self in relation to certain objects—in a word, self-consciousness as distinct from simple feeling?
[1] Locke’s language in regard to ‘the most pressing uneasiness’ will not be found uniformly consistent. His usual doctrine is that the strength of a desire, as evinced by the resulting action, and the uneasiness which it causes are in exact proportion to each other. According to this view, desire for future happiness can only become a prevalent motive when the uneasiness which it causes has come to outweigh every other (Cf. Chap, xxi., Secs. 43 and 45). On the other hand, he sometimes seems to distinguish the desire for future pleasure from present uneasiness, while at the same time implying that it may be a strongest motive (Cf. sec. 65). But if so, it follows that there may be a strongest desire which is not the most pressing uneasiness. (See below, sec. 13.) Hume, distinguishing strong from violent desires, and restricting ‘uneasiness’ to the latter, is able to hold that it is not alone the present uneasiness which determines action. (Book II., part 3, sec. 3, sub fin.)
Effect of this conception on the objects of human desire.
4. Of desire determined in the former way we have experience, if at all, in those motives which actuate us, as we say, ‘unconsciously’; which means, without our attending to them—feelings which we do not fix even momentarily by reference to self or to a thing. As we cannot set ourselves to recall such feelings without thinking them, without determining them by that reference to self which we suppose them to exclude, they cannot be described; but some of our actions (such as the instinctive recurrence to a sweet smell), seem only to be thus accounted for, and probably those actions of animals which do not proceed from appetite proper are to be accounted for in the same way. But whether such actions are facts in human experience or no, those which make us what we are as men are not so determined. The man whom we call the slave of his appetite, the enlightened pleasure-hunter, the man who lives for his family, the artist, the enthusiast for humanity, are alike in this, that the desire which moves their action is itself determined not by the recurring image of a past pleasure, but by the conception of self. The self may be conceived of simply as a subject to be pleased, or may be a subject of interests, which, indeed, when gratified, produce pleasure but are not produced by it—interests in persons, in beautiful things, in the order of nature and society—but self is still not less the ‘punctum stans’ whose presence to each passing pleasure renders it a constituent of a happiness which is to be permanently pursued, than it is the focus in which the influences of that world which only self-conscious reason could constitute—the world of science, of art, of human society—must be regathered in order to become the personal interests which move the actions of individuals. It is in this self-consciousness involved in our motives, in that conversion into a conception by reference to self, which the image even of the merest animal pleasure must undergo before it can become an element in the formation of character, that the possibility of freedom lies. Without it we should be as sinless and as unprogressive, as free from remorse and aspiration, as incapable of selfishness and self-denial as the animals. Each pleasure would be taken as it came. We should have ‘the greatest happiness of which our nature is capable,’ without possibility of asking ourselves whether we might not have had more. It is only the conception of himself as a permanent subject to be pleased that can set man upon the invention of new pleasures, and then, making each pleasure a disappointment when it comes, produce the ‘vicious’ temper; only this that can suggest the reflection how much more pleasure he might have had than he has had, and thus produce what the moralists know as ‘cool selfishness’; only this, on the other hand, which, as ‘enlightened self-love,’ perpetually balances the attraction of imagined pleasure by the calculation whether it will be good for one as a whole. Nor less is it the conception of self, with a ‘matter’ more adequate to its ‘form,’ taking its content not from imagined pleasure, but from the work of reason in the world of nature and humanity, which determines that personal devotion to a work or a cause, to a state, a church, or mankind, which we call self-sacrifice.
Objects so constituted Locke should consistently exclude: But he finds room for them by treating every desire for an object, of which the attainment gives pleasure, as a desire for pleasure.
5. If, now, we ask ourselves whether Locke recognised this function of reason, as self-consciousness, in the determination of the will, the answer must be yes and no. His cardinal doctrine, as we have sufficiently seen, forbade him to admit that reason or thought could originate an object. The only possible objects with him are either simple ideas or resoluble into these, and the simple idea, as that which we receive in pure passivity, is virtually feeling. Now no combination of feelings (supposing it possible [1]) can yield the conception of self as a permanent subject even of pleasure, much less as a subject of social claims. It cannot, therefore, yield the objects, ranging from sensual happiness to the moral law, humanity, and God, of which this conception is the correlative condition. Thus, strictly taken, Locke’s doctrine excludes every motive to action, but appetite proper and such desire as is determined by the imagination of animal pleasure or pain, and in doing so renders vice as well as virtue unaccountable—the excessive pursuit of pleasure as well as that dissatisfaction with it which affords the possibility of ordinary reform. On the other hand, the same happy intellectual unscrupulousness, which we have traced in his theory of knowledge, attends him also here. Just as he is ready on occasion to treat any conceived object that determines sense as if it were itself a sensation, so he is ready to treat any object that determines desire, without reference to the work of thought in its construction, as if it were itself the feeling of pleasure, or of uneasiness removed, which arises upon satisfaction of the desire. In this way, without professedly admitting any motive but remembered pleasure—a motive which, if it were our only one, would leave ‘man’s life as cheap as beasts’’—he can take for granted any objects of recognised interest as accounting for the movement of human life, and as constituents of an utmost possible pleasure which it is his own fault if every one does not pursue.
[1] Cf. Introduction to Vol. I., §§ 215 and 247.
Confusion covered by calling ‘happiness’ the general object of desire.
6. The term ‘happiness’ is the familiar cover for confusion between the animal imagination of pleasure and the conception of personal well-being. It is so when—having raised the question. What moves desire?—Locke answers, ‘happiness, and that alone.’ What, then, is happiness? ‘Good and evil are nothing but pleasure and pain,’ and ‘happiness in its full extent is the utmost pleasure we are capable of.’ [1] This is ‘the proper object of desire in general,’ but Locke is careful to explain that the happiness which ‘moves every particular man’s desire’ is not the full extent of it, but ’so much of it as is considered and taken to make a necessary part of his happiness.’ It is that ‘wherewith he in his present thoughts can satisfy himself.’ Happiness in this sense ‘every one constantly pursues,’ and without possibility of error; for ‘as to present pleasure the mind never mistakes that which is really good or evil.’ Every one ‘knows what best pleases him, and that he actually prefers.’ That which is the greater pleasure or the greater pain is really just as it appears (Ibid. §§ 43, 58, 63). Now in these statements, if we look closely, we shall find that four different meanings of happiness are mixed up, which we will take leave to distinguish by letters—(a)happiness as an abstract conception, the sum of possible pleasure;(b)happiness as equivalent to the pleasure which at any time survives most strongly in imagination;(c)happiness as the object of the self-conscious pleasure-seeker;(d)happiness as equivalent to any object at any time most strongly desired, not really a pleasure, but by Locke identified with happiness in sense(b)through the fallacy of supposing that the pleasure which arises on satisfaction of any desire, great in proportion to the strength of the desire, is itself the object which excites desire.
[1] Ibid., sec. 42, and cap. 28, sec. 5.
‘Greatest sum of pleasure’ and ‘Pleasure in general’ unmeaning expressions.
7. Happiness ‘in its full extent,’ as ‘the utmost pleasure we are capable of,’ is an unreal abstraction if ever there was one. It is curious that those who are most forward to deny the reality of universals, in that sense in which they are the condition of all reality, viz., as relations, should yet, having pronounced these to be mere names, be found ascribing reality to a universal, which cannot without contradiction be supposed more than a name. Does this ‘happiness in its full extent’ mean the ‘aggregate of possible enjoyments,’ of which modern utilitarians tell us? Such a phrase simply represents the vain attempt to get a definite by addition of indefinites. It has no more meaning than ‘the greatest possible quantity of time’ would have. Pleasant feelings are not quantities that can be added. Each is over before the next begins, and the man who has been pleased a million times is not really better off—has no more of the supposed chief good in possession—than the man who has only been pleased a thousand times. When we speak of pleasures, then, as forming a possible whole, we cannot mean pleasures as feelings, and what else do we mean? Are we, then, by the ‘happiness’ in question to understand pleasurein general, as might be inferred from Locke’s speaking of it as the ‘object of desirein general’? But it is in its mere particularity that each pleasure has its being. It is a simple idea, and therefore, as Locke and Hume have themselves taught us, momentary, indefinable, in ‘perpetual flux,’ changing every moment upon us. Pleasurein general, therefore, is not pleasure, and it is nothing else. It is not a conceived reality, as a relation, or a thing determined by relations, is, since pleasure as feeling, in distinction from its conditions which are not feelings, for the same reason that it cannot be defined, cannot be conceived. It is a mere name which utilitarian philosophy has mistaken for a thing; but for which—since no one, whatever his theory of the desirable, can actually desire either the abstraction of pleasure in general or the aggregate of possible pleasures—a practical substitute is apt to be found in any lust of the flesh that may for the time be the strongest.
In what sense of happiness is it true that it ‘is really just as it appears?’ In what sense that it is every one’s object?
8. Having begun by making this fiction ‘the proper object of desire in general,’ Locke saves the appearance of consistency by representing the particular pleasure or removal of uneasiness, which he in fact believed to be the object of every desire, as if it were a certain part of the ‘full extent of happiness’ which the individual, having this full extent before him, picked out as being what ‘in his present thoughts would satisfy him.’ Nor does he ever give up the notion of a ‘happiness in general,’ in distinction from the happiness of each man’s actual choice, as a possible motive, which a man who finds himself wretched in consequence of his actions may be told that he ought to have adopted. His real notion, however, of the happiness which is motive to action is a confused result of the three other notions of happiness, distinguished above as(b),(c)and(d). As that about which no one can be mistaken, ‘happiness’ can only be so in sense(b), as the ‘pleasure which survives most strongly in imagination.’ Of this it can be said truly, and of this only, that ‘it really is just as it appears,’ and that ‘a man never chooses amiss’ since he must ‘know what best pleases him.’ But with this, almost in the same breath, Locke confuses ‘happiness’ in senses(c)and(d). So soon as it is said of an object that it is ‘taken by the individual to make a necessary part of his happiness,’ it is implied that it is determined by his conception of self. It is something which, as the result of the action of this conception on his past experience, he has come to present to himself as a constituent of his personal good. Unless he were conscious of himself as a permanent subject, he could have no conception of happiness as a whole from relation to which each present object takes its character as a part. Nor of the objects determined by this relation is it true, as Locke says, that they are always pleasures, or that they ‘are really just as they appear.’ Our readiness to accept his statements to this effect, is at bottom due to a confusion between the pleasure, or removal of uneasiness, incidental to the satisfaction of a desire and the object which excites the desire. If having explained desire, as Locke does, by reference to the good, we then allow ourselves to explain the good by reference to desire, it will indeed be true that no man can be mistaken as to his present good, but only in the sense of the identical proposition that every man most desires what he does most desire; and true also, that every attained good is pleasure, but only in the sense that what satisfies desire does satisfy it. The man of whom it could be truly said, in any other sense than that of the above identical proposition, that his only objects of desire—the only objects which he ‘takes to make a necessary part of his happiness’—were pleasures, would be a man, as we say, of no interests. He would be a man who either lived simply for pleasures incidental to the satisfaction of animal appetite, or one who, having been interested in certain objects in which reason alone enables us to be interested—e.g., persons, pursuits, or works of art—and having found consequent pleasure, afterwards vainly tries to get the pleasure without the interests. To the former type of character, of course, the approximations are numerous enough, though it may be doubted whether such an ideal of sensuality is often fully realised. The latter in its completeness, which would mean a perfect misery that could only issue in suicide, would seem to be an impossibility, though it is constantly being approached in proportion to the unworthiness and fleetingness of the interests by which men allow themselves to be governed, and which, after stimulating an indefinite hunger for good, leave it without an object to satisfy it; in proportion, too, to the modern habit of hugging and poring over the pleasures which our higher interests cause us till these interests are vitiated, and we find ourselves in restless and hopeless pursuit of the pleasure when the interest which might alone produce it is gone.
No real object of human desire can ever be just as it appears.
9. Just as it is untrue, then, of the object of desire, as ‘taken to be part of one’s happiness’ or determined by the conception of self, that it is always a pleasure, so it is untrue that it is always really just as it appears, except in the trifling sense that what is most strongly desired is most strongly desired. Rather it is never really what it appears. It is least of all so to the professed pleasure-seeker. Obviously, to the man who seeks the pleasure incidental to interests which he has lost, there is a contradiction in his quest which for ever prevents what seems to him desirable from satisfying his desire. And even the man who lives for merely animal pleasure, just because he seeks it as part of a happiness, never finds it to be that which he sought. There is no mistake about the pleasure, but he seeks it as that which shall satisfy him, and satisfy him, since he is not an animal, it cannot. Nor are our higher objects of desire ever what they seem. That is too old a topic with poets and moralizers to need enforcing. Each in its turn, we know, promises happiness when it shall have been attained, but when it is attained the happiness has not come. The craving for an object adequate to oneself, which is the source of the desire, is still not quenched; and because it is not, nor can be, even ‘the joy of success’ has its own bitterness.
Can Locke consistently allow the distinction between true happiness and false? Or responsibility?
10. The case, then, stands thus. Locke, having too much ‘common sense’ to reduce all objects of desire to the pleasures incidental to satisfactions of appetite, takes for granted any number of objects which only reason can constitute (or, in other words, which can only exist for a self-conscious subject) without any question as to their origin. It is enough for him that they are not conscious inventions of the individual, and that they are related to feeling—though related as determining it. This being so, they are to him no more the work of thought than are the satisfactions of appetite. The conception of them is of a kind with the simple remembrance or imagination of pleasures caused by such satisfactions. The question how, if only pleasure is the object of desire, they came to be desired before there had been experience of the pleasures incidental to their attainment, is virtually shelved by treating these latter pleasures as if they were themselves the objects originally desired. So far consistency at least is saved. No object but feeling, present or remembered, is ostensibly admitted within human experience. But meanwhile, alongside of this view, comes the account of the strongest motive as determined by the conception of self—as something which a man ‘takes to be a necessary part of his happiness,’ and which he is ‘answerable to himself’ for so taking. The inconsistency of such language with the view that every desired object must needs be a pleasure, would have been less noticeable if Locke himself had not frankly admitted, as the corollary of this view that the desired good ‘is really just as it appears.’ The necessity of this admission has always been the rock on which consistent Hedonism has broken. Locke himself has scarcely made it when he becomes aware of its dangerous consequences, and great part of the chapter on Power is taken up by awkward attempts to reconcile it with the distinction between true happiness and false, and with the existence of moral responsibility. If greatest pleasure is the only possible object, and the production of such pleasure the only possible criterion of action, and if ‘as to present pleasure and pain the mind never mistakes that which is really good or evil,’ with what propriety can any one be told that he might or that he ought to have chosen otherwise than he has done? ‘He has missed the true good,’ we say, ‘which he might and should have found’; but ‘good,’ according to Locke, is only pleasure, and pleasure, as Locke in any other connexion would be eager to tell us, must mean either some actual present pleasure or a series of pleasures of which each in turn is present. If every one without possibility of mistake has on each occasion chosen the greatest present pleasure, how can the result for him at any time be other than the true good,i.e., the series of greatest pleasures, each in its turn present, that have been hitherto possible for him?
Objections to the Utilitarian answer to these questions.
11. A modern utilitarian, if faithful to the principle which excludes any test of pleasure but pleasure itself, will probably answer that every one does attain the maximum of pleasure possible for him, his character and circumstances being what they are; but that with a change in these his choice would be different. He would still choose on each occasion the greatest pleasure of which he was then capable, but this pleasure would be one ‘truer’—in the sense of being more intense, more durable, and compatible with a greater quantity of other pleasures—than is that which he actually chooses. But admitting that this answer justifies us in speaking of any sort of pleasure as ‘truer’ than that at any time chosen by any one—which is a very large admission, for of the intensity of any pleasure we have no test but its being actually preferred, and of durability and compatibility with other pleasures the tests are so vague that a healthy and unrepentant voluptuary would always have the best of it in an attempt to strike the balance between the pleasures he has actually chosen and any truer sort—it still only throws us back on a further question. With a better character, it is said, such as better education and improved circumstances might have produced, the actually greatest happiness of the individual—i.e., the series of pleasures which, because he has chosen them, we know to have been the greatest possible for him—might have been greater or ‘truer.’ But the man’s character is the result of his previous preferences; and if every one has always chosen the greatest pleasure of which he was at the time capable, and if no other motive is possible, how could any other than his actual character have been produced? How could that conception of a happiness truer than the actual, of something that should be most pleasant, and therefore preferred, though it is not—a conception which all education implies—have been a possible motive among mankind? To say that the individual is, to begin with, destitute of such a conception, but acquires it through education from others, does not remove the difficulty. How do the educators come by it? Common sense assumes them to have found out that more happiness might have been got by another than the merely natural course of living, and to wish to give others the benefit of their experience. But such experience implies that each has a conception of himself as other than the subject of a succession of pleasures, of which each has been the greatest possible at the time of its occurrence; and the wish to give another the benefit of the experience implies that this conception, which is no possible image of a feeling, can originate action. The assumption of common sense, then, contradicts the two cardinal principles of the Hedonistic philosophy; yet, however disguised in the terminology of development and evolution, it, or some equivalent supposition, is involved in every theory of the progress of mankind.
According to Locke present pleasures may be compared with future, and desire suspended till comparison has been made.
12. Such difficulties do not suggest themselves to Locke, because he is always ready to fall back on the language of common sense without asking whether it is reconcilable with his theory. Having asserted, without qualification, that the will in every case is determined by the strongest desire, that the strongest desire is desire for the greatest pleasure, and that ‘pleasure is just so great, and no greater, than it is felt,’ he finds a place for moral freedom and responsibility in the ‘power a man has to suspend his desires and stop them from determining his will to any action till he has examined whether it be really of a nature in itself and consequences to make him happy or no.’ [1] But how does it happen that there is any need for such suspense, if as to pleasure and pain ‘a man never chooses amiss,’ and pleasure is the same with happiness or the good? To this Locke answers that it is only present pleasure which is just as it appears, and that in ‘comparing present pleasure or pain with future we often make wrong judgments of them;’ again, that not only present pleasure and pain, but ‘things that draw after them pleasure and pain, are considered as good and evil,’ and that of these consequences under the influence of present pleasure or pain we may judge amiss. [2] By these wrong judgments, it will be observed, Locke does not mean mistakes in discovering the proper means to a desired end (Aristotle’s ἀγνοία ἡ καθ’ ἕκαστα) [3], which it is agreed are not a ground for blame or punishment, but wrong desires—desires for certain pleasures as being the greater, which are not really the greater. Regarding such desires as involving comparisons of one good with another, he counts them judgments, and (the comparison being incorrectly made)wrongjudgments. A certain present pleasure, and a certain future one, are compared, and though the future would really be the greater, the present is preferred; or a present pleasure, ‘drawing after it’ a certain amount of pain, is compared with a less amount of present pain, drawing after it a greater pleasure, and the present pleasure preferred. In such cases the man ‘may justly incur punishment’ for the wrong preference, because having ‘the power to suspend his desire’ for the present pleasure, he has not done so, but ‘by too hasty choice of his own making has imposed on himself wrong measures of good and evil.’ ‘When he has once chosen it,’ indeed, ‘and thereby it is become part of his happiness, it raises desire, and that proportionately gives him uneasiness, which determines his will.’ But the original wrong choice, having the ‘power of suspending his desires,’ he might have prevented. In not doing so he ‘vitiated his own palate,’ and must be ‘answerable to himself’ for the consequences. [4]
[1] II. 21, Sec. 51 and 56.
[2] Ibid., Sec. 61, 63, 67.
[3] [Greek ἀγνοία ἡ καθ’ ἕκαστα (agnoia he kath’ hekasta) = unawareness of the particular circumstances. Tr.]
[4] Ibid., Sec. 56.
What is meant by ‘present’ and ‘future’ pleasure? By the supposed comparison Locke ought only to have meant the competition of pleasures equally present in imagination …
13. Responsibility for evil, then (with its conditions, blame, punishment, and remorse) supposes that a man has gone wrong in the comparison of present with future pleasure or pain, having had the chance of going right. Upon this we must remark that as moving desire—and it is the determination of desire that is here in question—NO pleasure can be present in the sense of actual enjoyment, or (in Hume’s language) as ‘impression,’ but only in memory or imagination, as ‘idea.’ Otherwise desire would not be desire. It would not be that uneasiness which, according to Locke, implies the absence of good, and alone moves action. On the other hand, to imagination EVERY pleasure must be present that is to act as motive at all. In whatever sense, then, pleasure, as pleasure,i.e.as undetermined by conceptions, can properly be said to move desire, every pleasure is equally present and equally future. [1] For man, if he only felt and retained his feelings in memory, or recalled them in imagination, the only difference among the imagined pleasures which solicit his desires, other than difference of intensity, would lie in the imagined pains with which each may have become associated. One pleasure might be imagined in association with a greater amount of the pain of waiting than another. In that sense, and only in that, could one be distinguished from the other as a future pleasure from a present one. According as the greater imagined intensity of the future pleasure did or did not outweigh the imagined pain of waiting for it, the scale of desire would turn one way or the other. Or with one pleasure, imagined as more intense than another, might be associated an expectation of a greater amount of pain to be ‘drawn after it.’ Here, again, the question would be whether the greater imagined intensity of pleasure would have the more effect in exciting desire, or the greater amount of imagined sequent pain in quenching it—a question only to be settled by the action which results. In whatever sense it is true of the ‘present pleasure or pain,’ that it is really just as it appears, it is equally true of the future. Whenever the determination of desire is in question, the statement that present pleasure is just as it appears must mean that the pleasurepresent in imaginationis so, and in this sense all motive pleasures are equally so present. Undoubtedly the pleasure associated with the pain of prolonged expectancy might turn out greater, and that associated with sequent pain less, than was imagined; but so might a pleasure not thus associated. Of every pleasure alike it is as true, that while it is imagined it is just as it is imagined, as that while felt it is just as it is felt; and if man only felt and imagined, there would be no more reason why he should hold himself accountable for his imaginations than for his feelings. Whatever pleasure was most attractive in imagination would determine desire, and, through it, action, which would be the only measure of the amount of the attraction. It would not indeed follow because an action was determined by the pleasure most attractive in imagination, that the ensuing pleasure in actual enjoyment would be greater than might have been attained by a different action—though it would be very hard to show the contrary—but it would follow that the man attained the greatest pleasure of which his nature was capable. There would be no reason why he should blame himself, or be blamed by others, for the result.
[1] It is noticeable that when Locke takes to distinguishing the pleasures that move desire into present and future, he speaks as if the future pleasure alone were an absent good, in contradiction to his previous view that every object of desire is an absent good. (Cf. sec. 65 with sec. 57 of cap. 21.)
… and this could give no ground for responsibility. In order to do so, it must be understood as implying determination by conception of self.
14. Thus on Locke’s supposition, that desire is only moved by pleasure—which must meanimaginedpleasure, since pleasure, determined by conceptions, is excluded by the supposition that pleasure alone is the ultimate motive, and pleasure in actual enjoyment is no longer desired—the ‘suspense of desire,’ that he speaks of, can only mean an interval, during which a competition of imagined pleasures (one associated with more, another with less, of sequent or antecedent pain) is still going on, and none has become finally the strongest motive. Of such suspense it is unmeaning to say that a man has ‘the power of it,’ or that, when it terminates in an action which does not produce so much pleasure as another might have done, it is because the man ‘has vitiated his palate,’ and that therefore he must be ‘answerable to himself’ for the consequences. This language really implies that pleasures, instead of being ultimate ends, are determined to be ends through reference to an object beyond them which the man himself constitutes; that it is only through his conception of self that every pleasure—not indeed best pleases him, or is most attractive in imagination—but becomes his personal good. It may be that he identifies his personal good with the pleasure most attractive in imagination; but a pleasure so identified is quite a different motive from a pleasure simply as imagined. It is no longer mere pleasure that the man seeks, but self-satisfaction through the pleasure. The same consciousness of self, which sets him on the act, continues through the act and its consequences, carrying with it the knowledge (commonly called the ‘voice of conscience’) that it is to himself, as the ultimate motive, that the act and its consequences, whether in the shape of natural pains or civil penalties, are due—a knowledge which breeds remorse, and, through it, the possibility of a better mind. Thus, when Locke finds the ground of responsibility in a man’s power of suspending his desire till he has considered whether the act, to which it inclines him, is of a kind to make him happy or no, the value of the explanation lies in the distinction which it may be taken to imply, but which Locke could not consistently admit, between the imagination of pleasure and the conception of self as a permanent subject of happiness, by reference to which an imagined pleasure becomes a strongest motive. It is not really as involving a comparison between imagined pleasures, but as involving the consideration whether the greatest imagined pleasure will be the best for one in the long run, that the suspense of desire establishes the responsibility of man. Even if we admitted with Locke that nothing entered into the consideration but an estimate of ‘future pleasures’—and Locke, it will be observed, by supposing the estimate to include ‘pleasures of a sort we are unacquainted with,’ [1] which is as much of a contradiction as to suppose a man influenced by unfelt feelings, renders this restriction unmeaning—still to be determined by the consideration whether something is good for me on the whole is to be determined, not by the imagination of pleasure, but by the conception of self, though it be of self only as a subject to be pleased.
[1] Cap. 21, sec. 65. He has specially in view the pleasures of ‘another life’, which ‘being intended for a state of happiness, must certainly be agreeable to every one’s wish and desire: could we suppose their relishes as different there as they are here, yet the manna in heaven will suit every one’s palate.’
Locke finds moral freedom in necessity of pursuing happiness.
15. The mischief is that, though his language implies this distinction, he does not himself understand it. ‘The care of ourselves,’ he tells us, ‘that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty. The stronger ties we have to an unalterable pursuit of happiness in general, which is our greatest good, and which, as such, our desires always follow, the more are we free from any necessary determination of our will to any particular action, till we have examined whether it has a tendency to, or is inconsistent with, our real happiness.’ [1] But he does not see that therationaleof the freedom, thus paradoxically, though truly, placed in the strength of a tie, lies in that determination by the conception of self to which the ‘unalterable pursuit of happiness’ is really equivalent. To him it is not as one mode among others in which that self-determination appears, but simply in itself, that the consideration of what is for our real happiness is the ‘foundation of our liberty,’ and the consideration itself is no more than a comparison between imagined pleasures and pains. Hence to a reader who refuses to read into Locke an interpretation which he does not himself supply, the range of moral liberty must seem as narrow as its nature is ambiguous. As to its range, the greater part of our actions, and among them those which we are apt to think our best, are not and could not be preceded by any consideration whether they are for our real happiness or no. In truth, they result from a character which the conception of self has rendered possible, or express an interest in objects of which this conception is the condition, and for that reason they represent a will self-determined and free; but they do not rest on the foundation which Locke calls ‘the necessary foundation of our liberty.’ As to the nature of this liberty, the reader, who takes Locke at his word, would find himself left to choose between the view of it as the condition of a mind ‘suspended’ between rival presentations of the pleasant, and the equally untenable view of it as that ‘liberty of indifference,’ which Locke himself is quite ready to deride—as consisting in a choice prior to desire, which determines what the desire shall be. [2]
[1] Cap. 21, sec. 51.
[2] Cf. the passage in sec. 56: ‘When he has once chosen it, and thereby it is become part of his happiness, it raises desire,’ &c. (Cf. also sec. 43 sub fin.)
If an action is moved by desire for an object, Locke asks no questions about origin of the object: But what is to be said of actions, which we only do because we ought?
16. This ambiguous deliverance about moral freedom, it must be observed, is the necessary result on a mind, having too strong a practical hold on life to tamper with human responsibility, of a doctrine which denies the originativeness of thought, and in consequence cannot consistently allow any motive to desire, but the image of a past pleasure or pain. The full logical effect of the doctrine, however, does not appear in Locke, because, with his way of taking any desire of which the satisfaction produces pleasure to have pleasure for its object, he never comes in sight of the question how the manifold objects of actual human interest are possible for a being who only feels and retains, or combines, his feelings. An action moved by love of country, love of fame, love of a friend, love of the beautiful, would cause him no more difficulty than one moved by desire for the renewal of some sensual enjoyment, or for that maintenance of health which is the condition of such enjoyment in the future. If pressed about them, we may suppose that—availing himself of the language probably current in the philosophic society in which he lived, though it first became generally current in England through the writings of his quasi-pupil, Shaftesbury—he would have said that he found in his breast affections for public good, as well as for self-good, the satisfaction of which gave pleasure, and to which his doctrine, that pleasure is the ‘object of desire in general,’ was accordingly applicable. The question—of what feelings or combinations of feelings are the objects which excite these several desires copies?—it does not occur to him to ask. It is only when a class of actions presents itself for which a motive in the way of desire or aversion is not readily assignable that any difficulty arises, and then it is a difficulty which the assignment of such a motive, without any question asked as to its possibility for a merely feeling and imagining subject, is thought sufficiently to dispose of. Such a class of actions is that of which we say that we ‘ought’ to do them, even when we are not compelled and had rather not. We ought, it is generally admitted, to keep our promises, even when it is inconvenient to us to do so and no punishment could overtake us if we did not. We ought to be just even in ways that the law does not prescribe, and when we are beyond its ken; and that, too, in dealing with men towards whom we have no inclination to be generous. We ought even—so at least Locke ‘on the authority of Revelation’ would have said—to forgive injuries which we cannot forget, and if not ‘to love our enemies’ in the literal sense, which may be an impossibility, yet to act as if we did. To what motive are such actions to be assigned?
Their object is pleasure, but pleasure given not by nature but by law.
17. ‘To desire for pleasure or aversion from pain,’ Locke would answer, ‘but a pleasure and pain other than the natural consequences of acts and attached to them by some law.’ This is the result of his enquiry into ‘Moral Relations’ (Book II., chap. 28). Good and evil, he tells us, being ‘nothing but pleasure and pain, moral good or evil is only the conformity or disagreement of our actions to some law, whereby good or evil,i.e., pleasure or pain, is drawn on us by the will and power of the law-maker.’ All law according to its ‘true nature’ is a rule set to the actions of others by an intelligent being, having ‘power to reward the compliance with, and punish deviation from, his rule by some good and evil that is not the natural product and consequence of the action itself; for that, being a natural convenience or inconvenience, would operate of itself without a law.’ Of such law there are three sorts. 1. Divine Law, ‘promulgated to men by the light of nature or voice of revelation, by comparing their actions to which they judge whether, as duties or sins, they are like to procure them happiness or misery from the hands of the Almighty.’ 2. Civil Law, ‘the rule set by the Commonwealth to the actions of those who belong to it,’ reference to which decides ‘whether they be criminal or no.’ 3. ‘The law of opinion or reputation,’ according to agreement or disagreement with which actions are reckoned ‘virtues or vices.’ This law may or may not coincide with the divine law. So far as it does, virtues and vices are really, what they are always supposed to be, actions ‘in their own nature ‘severally right or wrong. It is not as really right or wrong, however, but only as esteemed so, that an act is virtuous or vicious, and thus ‘the common measure of virtue and vice is the approbation or dislike, praise or blame, which by a tacit consent establishes itself in the several societies, tribes, and clubs of men in the world, whereby several actions come to find credit or disgrace among them, according to the judgment, maxims, or fashions of the place.’ Each sort of law has its own ‘enforcement in the way of good and evil.’ That of the civil law is obvious. That of the Divine Law lies in the pleasures and pains of ‘another world,’ which (we have to suppose) render actions ‘in their own nature good and evil.’ That of the third sort of law lies in those consequences of social reputation and dislike which are stronger motives to most men than are the rewards and punishments either of God or the magistrate (chap. 28, §§ 5-12).
Conformity to law not the moral good, but a means to it.
18. ‘Moral goodness or evil,’ Locke concludes, ‘is the conformity or non-conformity of any action’ to one or other of the above rules (§ 14). But such conformity or non-conformity is not a feeling, pleasant or painful, at all. If, then, the account of the good as consisting in pleasure, of which the morally good is a particular form, is to be adhered to, we must suppose that, when moral goodness is said to be conformity to law, it is so called merely with reference to the specific means of attaining that pleasure in which moral good consists. Not the conception of conformity to law, but the imagination of a certain pleasure, will determine the desire that moves the moral act, as every other desire. The distinction between the moral act and an act judiciously done for the sake, let us say, of some pleasure of the palate, will lie only in the channel through which comes the pleasure that each is calculated to obtain. If the motive of an act done for the sake of the pleasure of eating differs from the motive of an act done for the sake of sexual pleasure on account of the difference of the channels through which the pleasures are severally obtained, in that sense only can the motive of either of these acts, upon Locke’s principles, be taken to differ from the motive of an act morally done. The explanation, then, of the acts not readily assignable to desire or aversion, of which we say that we only do them because we ‘ought,’ has been found. They are so far of a kind with all actions done to obtain or avoid what Locke calls ‘future’ pleasures or pains that the difficulty of assigning a motive for them only arises from the fact that their immediate result is not an end but a means. They differ from these, however, inasmuch as the pleasure they draw after them is not their ‘natural consequence,’ any more than the pain attaching to a contrary act would be, but is only possible through the action of God, the magistrate, or society in some of its forms.
Hume has to derive from ‘impressions’ the objects which Locke took for granted.
19. After the above examination we can easily anticipate the points on which a candid and clear-headed man, who accepted the principles of Locke’s doctrine, would see that it needed explanation and development. If all action is determined by impulse to remove the most pressing uneasiness, as consisting in desire for the greatest pleasure of which the agent is at the time capable; if this, again, means desire for the renewal of some ‘impression’ previously experienced, and all impressions are either those of sense or derived from them, how are we to account for those actual objects of human interest and pursuit which seem far removed from any combination of animal pleasures or of the means thereto, and specially for that class of actions determined, as Locke says, by expectation of pain or pleasure other than the ‘natural consequence’ of the act, to which the term ‘moral’ is properly applied? Hume, as we have seen, [1] in accepting Locke’s principles, clothes them in a more precise terminology, marking the distinction between the feeling as originally felt and the same as returning in memory or imagination as that between ‘impression and idea,’ and excludingoriginalideas of reflection. ‘An impression first strikes upon the senses, and makes us perceive heat or cold, thirst or hunger, pleasure or pain, of some kind or other. Of this impression there is a copy taken by the mind, which remains after the impression ceases; and this we call an idea. This idea of pleasure or pain, when it returns upon the soul, produces the new impressions of desire and aversion, hope and fear, which may properly be called impressions of reflection, because derived from it’(a). ‘These, again, are copied by the memory and imagination, and become ideas; which perhaps in their turn give rise to other impressions’(b). Thus the impressions of reflection, marked(a), will be determined by ideas copied from impressions of sense. If desires, they will be desires for the renewal either of a pleasure incidental to the satisfaction of appetite, or of a pleasant sight or sound, a sweet taste or smell. These desires and their satisfactions will again be copied in ideas, but how can the impressions(b)to which these ideas give rise be other than desires for the renewal of the original animal pleasures? How do they come to be desires as unlike these as are the motives which actuate not merely the saint or the philanthropist, but the ordinary good neighbour or honest citizen or head of a family?
[1] General Introd., Vol. I, par. 195
Questions which he found at issue, a. Is virtue interested? b. What is conscience?
20. During the interval between the publication of Locke’s essay and the ‘Treatise on Human Nature’ there had been much writing on ethical questions in English. The effect of this on Hume is plain enough. He writes with reference to current controversy, and in the moral part of the treatise probably had the views of Clarke, Shaftesbury, Butler, and Hutcheson more consciously before him than Locke’s. This does not interfere, however, with the propriety of affiliating him in respect of his views on morals, no less than on knowledge, directly to Locke, whose principles and method were in the main accepted by all the moralists of that age. His characteristic lies in his more consistent application of these, and the effect of current controversy upon him was chiefly to show him the line which this application must take. It was a controversy which turned almost wholly on two points;(a)the distinction between ‘interested and disinterested,’ selfish and unselfish affections;(b)the origin and nature of that ‘law,’ relation to which, according to Locke, constitutes our action ‘virtuous or vicious.’ In the absence of any notion of thought but as a faculty which puts together simple ideas into complex ones, of reason but as a faculty which calculates means and perceives the agreement of ideas mediately, it could have but one end.
Hobbes’ answer to first question,
21. By the generation in which Hume was bred the issue as to the possible disinterestedness of action was supposed to lie between the view of Hobbes and that of Shaftesbury. Hobbes’ moral doctrine had not been essentially different from Locke’s, but he had been offensively explicit on questions which Locke left open to more genial views than his doctrine logically justified. Each started from the position that the ultimate motive to every action can only be the imagination of one’s own pleasure or pain, and neither properly left room for the determination of desire by a conceived object as distinct from remembered pleasure. But while Locke, as we have seen, illogically took for granted desires so determined, and thus made it possible for a disciple to admit any benevolent desires as motives on the strength of the pleasure which they produce when satisfied, Hobbes had been more severe in his method, and had explained every desire, of which the direct motive could not be taken to be the renewal of some animal pleasure, as desire either for the power in oneself to command such pleasure at will or for the pleasure incidental to the contemplation of the signs of such power. Hence his peculiar treatment of compassion and the other ‘social affections,’ which it is easier to show to be untrue to the facts of the case than to be other than the proper consequence of principles which Locke had rendered orthodox. [1] The counter-doctrine of Shaftesbury holds water just so far as it involves the rejection of the doctrine that pleasure is the sole ultimate motive. It becomes confused just because its author had no definite theory of reason, as constitutive of objects, that could justify this rejection.
[1] See ‘Leviathan,’ part 1, chap. 6.
Counter-doctrine of Shaftesbury. Vice is selfishness: But no clear account of selfishness.
22. He begins with a doctrine that directly contradicts Locke’s identification of the good with pleasure, and of the morally good with pleasure occurring in a particular way, ‘In a sensible creature that which is not done through any affection at all makes neither good nor ill in the nature of that creature; who then only is supposed good, when the good or ill of the system to which he has relation is the immediate object of some passion or affection moving him.’ [1] This, it will be seen, as against Locke, implies that the good of a man’s action lies not in any pleasure sequent upon it to him, but in the nature of the affection from which it proceeds; and that the goodness of this affection depends on its being determined by an object wholly different from imagined pleasure—theconceivedgood of a system to which the man has relation,i.e., of human society, which in Shaftesbury’s language is the ‘public’ as distinct from the ‘private’ system. It is not enough that an action should result in good to this system; it must proceed from affection for it. ‘Whatever is done which happens to be advantageous to the species through an affection merely towards self-good does not imply any more goodness in the creature than as the affection itself is good. Let him in any particular act ever so well; if at the bottom it be that selfish affection alone which moves him, he is in himself still vicious.’ [2] Here, then, we seem to have a clear theory of moral evil as consisting in selfish, of moral good as consisting in unselfish affections. But what exactly constitutes a selfish affection, according to Shaftesbury? The answer that first suggests itself, is that as the unselfish affection is an affection for public good, so a selfish one is an affection for ‘self-good,’ the good of the ‘private system.’ Shaftesbury, however, does not give this answer. ‘Affection for private good’ with him is not, as such, selfish; it is so only when ‘excessive’ and ‘inconsistent with the interest of the species or public.’ [3] This qualification seems at once to efface the clear line of distinction previously drawn. It puts ‘self-affection’ on a level with public affection which, according to Shaftesbury, may equally err on the side of excess. It implies that an affection for self-good, if only it be advantageous to the species, may be good; which is just what had been previously denied. And not only so; although, when the self-affections are under view, they are only allowed a qualified goodness in virtue of their indirect contribution to the good of the species, yet conversely, the superiority of the affections, which have this latter good for their object, is urged specially on the ground of the greater amount of happiness or ‘self-good’ which they produce.
[1] ‘Inquiry concerning Virtue,’ Book I. part 2, sec. 1.
[2] Ibid., Book I., part 2, sec. 2.
[3] Ibid., Book II., part 1, sec. 3.
Confusion in his notions of self-good and public good: Is all living for pleasure, or only too much of it, selfish?
23. The truth is that the notions which Shaftesbury attached to the terms ‘affection for self-good’ and ‘affection for public good’ were not such as allowed of a consistent opposition between them. They can only be so opposed if, on the one hand, self-good is identified with pleasure; and on the other, affection for public good is carefully distinguished from desire for that sort of pleasure of which the gratification of others is a condition. But with Shaftesbury, affections for self-good do not represent merely those desires for pleasure determined by self-consciousness—for pleasure presented as one’s personal good—which can alone be properly reckoned sources of moral evil. They include equally mere natural appetites—hunger, the sexual impulse, &c.—which are morally neutral, and they do not clearly exclude any desire for an object which a man has so ‘made his own’ as to find his happiness—‘self-enjoyment’ or ‘self-good,’ according to Shaftesbury’s language—in attaining it, though it be as remote from imagined pleasure as possible. [1] On the other hand, ‘affections for public good,’ as he describes them, are not restricted to such desires for the good of others as are irrespective of pleasure to self. They include not only such natural instincts as ‘parental kindness and concern for the nurture and propagation of the young,’ which, morally, at any rate, are not to be distinguished from the appetites reckoned as affections for self-good, but also desires for sympathetic pleasure—the pleasure to oneself which arises on consciousness that another is pleased. Shaftesbury’s special antipathy, indeed, is the doctrine that benevolent affections are interested in the sense of having for their object a pleasure to oneself, apart from and beyond the pleasure of the person whom they move us to please; but unless he regards them as desires for the pleasure which the subject of them experiences in the pleasure of another, there is no purpose in enlarging, as he does with much unction, on the special pleasantness of the pleasures which they produce. With such vagueness in his notions of what he meant by affections for ‘self-good’ and for ‘public good,’ it is not strange that he should have failed to give any tenable account of the selfishness in which he conceived moral evil to consist. He could not apply such a term of reproach to the ‘self-affections’ in general, without condemning as selfish the man who ‘finds his own happiness in doing good,’ and who is in truth indistinguishable from one to whom ‘affection for public good’ has become, as we say, the law of his being. Nor could he identify selfishness, as he should have done, with all living for pleasure without a more complete rupture than he was capable of with the received doctrine of his time and without bringing affection for public good, in the form in which it was most generally conceived, and which was, at any rate, one of the forms under which he presented it to himself—as desire, namely, for sympathetic pleasure—into the same condemnation. His way out of the difficulty is, as we have seen, in violation of his own principle to find the characteristic of selfishness not in the motive of any affection but in its result; not in the fact that a man’s desire has his own good for its object, which is true of one to whom his neighbour’s good is as his own, nor in the fact that it has pleasure for its object, which Shaftesbury, as the child of his age, could scarcely help thinking was the case with every desire, but in the fact that it is stronger than is ‘consistent with the interest of the species or public.’
[1] Book II., part 2, sec. 2.
What have Butler and Hutcheson to say about it? Chiefly that affections terminate upon their objects. But this does not exclude the view that all desire is for pleasure.
24. Neither Butler nor Hutcheson [1] can claim to have carried the ethical controversy much beyond the point at which Shaftesbury left it. Each took for granted that the object of the ‘self-affection’ was necessarily one’s own happiness, and neither made any distinction between living for happiness and living for pleasure. They could not then identify selfishness with the living for pleasure without condemning the self-affection, and with, it the best man’s pursuit of his own highest good in the service of others, altogether as evil. Nor in the absence of any better theory of the object of the self-affection could the social affections, which, according to Butler, are subject in the developed man to the direction of self-love, escape the suggestion that they are one mode of the general desire for pleasure. Butler and Hutcheson, indeed, are quite clear that they are ‘disinterested’ in the sense of ‘terminating upon their objects.’ [2] This means, what is sufficiently obvious when once pointed out,(a)that a benevolent desire is not a desire for that particular pleasure, or rather ‘removal of uneasiness,’ which shall ensue when it is satisfied, and(b)that it cannot originally arise from the general desire for happiness, since this creates no pleasures but merely directs us to the pursuit of objects found pleasant independently of it, and thus, if it directs us to benevolent acts, presupposes a pleasure previously found in them. This, however, as Butler points out, is equally true of all particular desires whatever—of those styled self-regarding, no less than of the social—and if it is not incompatible with the former being desires for pleasure, no more is it with the latter being so. Much confusion on the matter, it may be truly said, arises from the loose way in which the words ‘affection’ and ‘passion’ are used by Butler and his contemporaries, not excluding Hume himself, alike for appetite, desire, and emotion. In every case a pleasure other than satisfaction of desire must have been experienced before desire can be excited by the imagination of it. A pleasure incidental to the satisfaction ofappetitemust have been experienced before imagination of it could excite thedesireof the glutton. In like manner, social affection, asdesire, cannot be first excited by the pleasure which shall arise when it is satisfied; it must previously exist as the condition of that pleasure being experienced; but it does not follow that it is other than a desire for an imagined pleasure, for that sympathetic pleasure in the pleasure of another in which the social affection asemotionconsists. Now though Butler and Hutcheson sufficiently showed that it is no other pleasure than this which is the original object of benevolent desires, they did not attempt to show that it is not this; and failing such an attempt, the received doctrine that the object of all desire, social and self-regarding alike, is pleasure of one sort or another, would naturally be taken to stand. This admitted, there can be nothing in the fact that a certain pleasure depends on the pleasure of another, and that a certain other does not, to entitle an action moved by desire for the former sort of pleasure to be called unselfish in the way of praise, and one moved by desire for the latter sort selfish in the way of reproach. The motive—desire for his own pleasure—is the same to the doer in both cases. The distinction between the acts can only lie in that which Shaftesbury had said could not constitute moral good or ill—in the consequences by which society judges of them, but which do not form the motive of the agent. In other words, it will be a distinction fixed by that law of opinion or reputation, in which Locke had found the common measure of virtue and vice, though he had not entered on the question of the considerations by which that law is formed.
[1] The works of Hutcheson, published before Hume’s treatise was written, and which strongly affected it, were the ‘Enquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue’ (1725), and the ‘Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections’ (1728). In what follows I wrote with direct reference to his posthumous work, not published till after Hume’s treatise, but which only reproduces more systematically his earlier views.
[2] See in Preface to Butler’s Sermons, the part relating to Sermon XI., ‘Besides, the only idea of an interested pursuit’ &c.; also the early part of Sermon XI., ‘Every man hath a general desire,’ &c.
Of moral goodness Butler’s account circular: Hutcheson’s inconsistent with his doctrine that reason gives no end.
25. Such a conclusion would lie ready to hand for such a reader of Butler and Hutcheson as we may suppose Hume to have been, but it is needless to say that it is not that at which they themselves arrive. Butler, indeed, distinctly refuses to identify moral good and evil respectively with disinterested and interested action, [1] but neither does he admit that desire for pleasure or aversion from pain is the uniform motive of action in such a way as to compel the conclusion that moral good and ill represent a distinction, not of motives, but of consequences of action contemplated by the onlooker. An act is morally good, according to him, when it is approved by the ‘reflex faculty of approbation,’ bad when it is disapproved, but what it is that this ‘faculty’ approves he never distinctly tells us. The good is what ‘conscience’ approves, and conscience is what approves the good—that is the circle out of which he never escapes. If we insist on extracting from him any more satisfactory conclusion as to the object of moral approbation, it must be that it is the object which ‘self-love’ pursues,i.e., the greatest happiness of the individual, a conclusion which in some places he certainly adopts. [2] Hutcheson, on the other hand, gives a plain definition of the object which this faculty approves. It consists in ‘affections tending to the happiness of others and the moral perfection of the mind possessing them.’ If in this definition by ‘tending to’ may be understood ‘of which the motive is’—an interpretation which the general tenor of Hutcheson’s view would justify—it implies in effect that the morally good lies in desires of which the object is not pleasure. That desire for moral perfection, if there is such a thing, is not desire for pleasure is obvious enough; nor could desire for the happiness of others be taken to be so except through confusion between determination by the conception of another’s good, to which his apparent pleasure is rightly or wrongly taken as a guide, and by the imagination of a pleasure to be experienced by oneself in sympathy with the pleasure of another. Nor is it doubtful that Hutcheson himself, though he might have hesitated to identify moral evil, as selfishness, with the living for pleasure, yet understood by the morally good the living for objects wholly different from pleasure. The question is whether the recognition of such motives is logically compatible with his doctrine that reason gives no ends, but is only a ‘subservient power’ of calculating means. If feeling, undetermined by thought or reason, can alone supply motives, and of feeling, thus undetermined, nothing can be said but that it is pleasant or painful, what motive can there be but imagination of one’s own pleasure or pain—one’s own, for if imagination is merely the return of feeling in fainter form, no one can imagine any feeling, any more than he can originally feel it, except as his own?
[1] See preface to Sermons (about four pages from the end in most editions):-‘The goodness or badness of actions does not arise hence,’ &c. The conclusion he there arrives at is that a good action is one which ‘becomes such creatures as we are’; and this, read in the light of the second sermon, must be understood to mean an action ‘suitable to our whole nature,’ as containing a principle of ‘reflex approbation.’ In other words, the good action is so because approved by conscience.
[2] See a passage towards the end of Sermon III., ‘Reasonable self-love and conscience are the chief,’ &c. &c.; also a passage towards the end of Sermon XI., ‘Let it be allowed though virtue,’ &c. &c.
Source of the moral judgment: Received notion of reason incompatible with true view. Shaftesbury’s doctrine of rational affection; spoilt by doctrine of ‘moral sense’
26. The work of reason in constituting the moral judgment (‘I ought’), as well as the moral motive (‘I must, because I ought’), could not find due recognition in an age which took its notion of reason from Locke. The only theory then known which found the source of moral distinctions in reason was Clarke’s, and Clarke’s notion of reason was essentially the same as that which appears in Locke’s account of demonstrative knowledge. [1] It was in truth derived from the procedure of mathematics, and only applicable to the comparison of quantities. Clarke talks loftily about the Eternal Reason of things, but by this he means nothing definite except the laws of proportion, and when he finds the virtue of an act to consist in conformity to this Eternal Reason, the inevitable rejoinder is the question—Between what quantities is this virtue a proportion? [2] In Shaftesbury first appears a doctrine of moral sense. Over and above the social and self-regarding affections proper to a ‘sensible’ creature, the characteristic of man is a ‘rational affection’ for goodness as consisting in the proper adjustment of the two orders of ‘sensible’ affection. This rational affection is not only a possible motive to action—it is the only motive that can make that character good of which human action is the expression; for with Shaftesbury, though a balance of the social and self-affections constitutes the goodness of those affections, yet the man is only good as actuated by affection for this goodness, and ‘should thesensibleaffections stand ever so much amiss, yet if they prevail not because of those other rational affections spoken of, the person is esteemed virtuous.’ [3] Such a notion, it is clear, if it had met with a psychology answering it, had only to be worked out in order to become Kant’s doctrine of the rational will as determined by reverence for law; but Shaftesbury had no such psychology, nor, with his aristocratic indifference to completeness of system, does he seem ever to have felt the want of it. He never asked himself what precisely was the theory of reason implied in the admission of an affection ‘rational’ in the sense, not that reason calculates the means to its satisfaction, but that it is determined by an object only possible for a rational as distinct from a ‘sensible’ creature; and just because he did not do so, he slipped into adaptations to the current view of the good as pleasure and of desire as determined by the pleasure incidental to its own satisfaction. Thus, to a disciple, who wished to extract from Shaftesbury a more definite system than Shaftesbury had himself formed, the ‘rational affection’ would become desire for a specific feeling of pleasure supposed to arise on the view of good actions as exhibiting a proper balance between social and self-regarding affections. This pleasure is the ‘moral sense,’ [4] with which Shaftesbury’s name has become specially associated, while the doctrine of rational affection, with which he certainly himself connected it, but which it essentially vitiates, has been forgotten.
[1] See Clarke’s Boyle Lectures, Vol. II., proposition 1. The germ of Clarke’s doctrine of morals is to be found in Locke’s occasional assimilation of moral to mathematical truth and certainty. (Cf. Essay, Book IV, ch. 4, sec. 7, and ch. 12, sec. 8).
[2] Cf. Hume, Vol. II., p. 238. [Book III., part I., sec. I.]
[3] ‘Inq. concerning Virtue,’ Book I., pt. 2. sec. 4. Cf. Sec. 3 sub init.
[4] In using the term ‘moral sense,’ Shaftesbury himself, no doubt, meant to convey the notion that the moral faculty was one of ‘intuition,’ in Locke’s sense of the word, as opposed to reason, the faculty of demonstration, rather than that it was a susceptibility of pleasure and pain.
Consequences of the latter.
27. That doctrine is of value as maintaining that those actions only are morally good of which the rational affection is the motive, in the sense that they spring from a character which this affection has fashioned. But if the rational affection is desire for the pleasure of moral sense, we find ourselves in the contradiction of supposing that the only motive which can produce good acts is one that cannot operate till after the good acts have been done. It is desire for a pleasure which yet can only have been experienced as a consequence of the previous existence of the desire. Shaftesbury himself, indeed, treats the moral sense of pleasure in the contemplation of good actions as a pleasure in the view of the right adjustment between the social and self-affections. If, however, on the strength of this, we suppose that certain actions are first done, not from the rational affection, but yet good, and that then remembrance of the pleasure found in the view of their goodness, exciting desire, becomes motive to another set of acts which are thus done from rational affection, we contradict his statement that only the rational affection forms the goodness of man, and are none the nearer to an account of what does form it. To say that it is the ‘right adjustment’ of the two orders of affection tells us nothing. Except as suggesting an analogy from the world of art, really inapplicable, but by which Shaftesbury was much influenced, this expression means no more than that goodness is a good state of the affections. From such a circle the outlet most consistent with the spirit of that philosophy, which had led Shaftesbury himself to bring down the rational affection to the level of a desire for pleasure, would lie in the notion that a state of the affections is good in proportion as it is productive of pleasure; which again would suggest the question whether the specific pleasure of moral sense itself, the supposed object of rational affection, is more than pleasure in that indefinite anticipation of pleasure which the view of affections so ordered tends to raise in us.