Hume on promises and the peculiar act of the mind

Journal of the History of Philosophy

Volumn 44, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 25-45

  Cohon, Rachel ^a  

^a STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949936918     PISSN: 00225053     EISSN: 15384586     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/hph.2006.0007     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature.
2. numerals following 'SBN' indicate a page in David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed., eds. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).
3. For example, there is no discussion of the peculiar act of mind in the otherwise illuminating account of Hume's theory of promise given by Annette Baier in A Progress of Sentiments [Progress] (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Press, 1991), ch.10. I have learned a great deal, however, from Baier's detailed and perceptive interpretation.
4. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). 344-50;
5. See T. M. Scanlon, "Promises and Practices," Philosophy and Public Affairs 19 (1990): 199-226.
6. and What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Press, 1998), ch. 7.
7. See Rachel Cohon. "Hume's Difficulty with the Virtue of Honesty," Hume Studies 23 (1997) : 91-112. In the present text I spell out the parallel process for promise-keeping.
8. One interpreter who reads this text as I do, as saying that moral approval and disapproval strengthened by "propaganda" provide a principal motive of just action, is Páll S. Árdal, Passion and Value in Hume's Treatise (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), 186-87 (where he sees the resultant problem of circularity as basically insoluble).
9. J. L. Mackie, in Hume's Moral Theory (London: Routledge, 1980), 100-101, thinks moral sentiment plays some role in motivation. Self-interest is the principal motive, but our interests will be well served only if people develop stable dispositions to keep promises even where it does not serve their interest to do so. We fulfill the occasional disadvantageous promise because the human psyche is inflexible: "dispositions. cannot be quickly switched on and off." (So, no further motive would seem to be involved.) But the development of the full disposition to keep promises depends upon moral feeling: "the very fact that I have promised to do something should be felt to give me a reason for doing it."
10. Knud Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1981), ch. 2 (esp. Part 8). Haakonssen's effort to account for the peculiar mental act is the most perceptive that I have seen to date.
11. J. L. Mackie, "Hume's Moral Theory," 96-104, esp. 103;
12. Francis Snare, Morals, Motivation and Convention (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Part II, esp. chs. 7 and 9 (see, e.g., 265-69).
13. David Gauthier, "Artificial Virtues and the Sensible Knave" ["Artificial Virtues"], Hume Studies 18 (1992): 401-27.
14. To some extent, and in different ways, both Gauthier and Haakonssen are indebted to Marcia Baron's account of Hume's artificial virtues as involving a "noble lie" we all must believe in order to possess fidelity and honesty: the lie that every act of compliance serves the agent's own interest. See "Hume's Noble Lie: an Account of his Artificial Virtues." Canadian Journal of Philosophy 12 (1982): 539-55,
15. repr. in Hume: Moral and Political Philosophy, ed. Rachel Cohen (Aldershot: Ashgate/Dartmouth, 2001). Gauthier thinks that the Hume of the Treatise does not see it as a lie-he believes it himself, but the Hume of the moral Enquiry realizes its falsehood.
16. On Gauthier's interpretation of the Treatise, the peculiar act of the mind may be mistakenly postulated by nonconventionalists (although he does not say why they would postulate the willing of an obligation rather than just some non-moral motive or other), and perhaps an illusion of it resides in the popular imagination (though he does not say why it would). But Hume himself "has no need to burden his own account with such an act" (Gauthier, "Artificial Virtues," 416). However, alas for Hume, he does it anyway.
17. See G. Watson, "On The Primacy of Character," in Identity, Character and Morality: Essays in Moral Psychology, eds. O. Flanagan and A. O. Rorty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 449-69;
18. and J. McDowell, "Virtue and Reason," Monist 62 (1979), 331-50.
19. Some virtue theorists will be perfectly happy with this result. See Rosalind Hursthouse, "Applying Virtue Ethics," in Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory, eds. R. Hursthouse, G. Lawrence and W.S. Quinn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 57-75.
20. But note important differences in her view in On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
21. Michael Stocker, "The Schizophrenia of Modern Moral Theories" ["Schizophrenia"], Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976): 453-66.
22. Bernard Williams, "Persons, Character and Morality," in his Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 18. (Williams's actual example is more complex than this, and is aimed to make a subtler point, in criticism of Kantian ethics. He thinks that should the man reason that saving his wife in preference to a stranger is permissible and not unfair to the stranger, this would be "one thought too many" and incompatible with genuine love, which would motivate him to save her solely because it is she who needs saving.)