Hume's difficulty with the virtue of honesty

Hume Studies

Volumn 23, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 91-112

  Cohon, Rachel ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 80053686176     PISSN: 03197336     EISSN: 19479921     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/hms.2011.0112     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. Page references in parentheses within the text are abbreviated as follows: 'T' followed by page number: David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed. revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).
2. 'E' followed by page number: David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd ed. revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). All italics in original.
3. This wording is from T 483 of the (first) Selby-Bigge edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888, reprinted 1975), not the second, Nidditch edition. Nidditch interpolates the word 'naturally': "...we have naturally no real or universal motive for observing the laws of equity...," following revisions made in Hume's hand on the printed first edition of the Treatise. I am grateful to V. C. Chappell for drawing this difference to my attention.
4. A comparable claim occurs in Hume's essay "Of the Original Contract": "The second kind of moral duties which includes those of honestyl are such as are not supported by any original instinct of nature, but are performed entirely from a sense of obligation" (David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary [Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 19871, 480).
5. David Gauthier, "Artificial Virtues and the Sensible Knave," Hume Studies 18.2 (1992): 401-427, is helpful on the meanings of 'natural'.
6. For the different view that Hume introduces artifice to remove the circle, see Jonathan Harrison, Hume's Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 8
7. J. L. Mackie, Hume's Moral Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 79-80
8. Francis Snare, Morals, Motivation and Convention, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chap. 7. Harrison and Mackie think Hume does eliminate the circle; Snare thinks he confuses two distinct Hume's Difficulty with the Virtue of Honesty 109 circles and has the materials to eliminate one but not the other, which is in fact intractable.
9. Terence Penelhum does not address the issue of the circle directly, but thinks Hume's account of the origins of honesty in the convention of ownership eliminates the puzzle of how we can regard honesty as a virtue even though we lack natural inclinations to such actions in his Hume (London: Macmillan, 1975), 154-5.
10. An objection of this type is made by Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, v. 15 (1994, given 1992), 75, in her discussion of the knavish lawyer.
11. "When we ask the reason of an action, we sometimes mean, 'What truth shows a quality in the action, exciting the agent to do it?'...Sometimes for a reason of actions we show the truth expressing a quality, engaging our approbation.... The former sort of reasons we will call exciting, and the latter justifying. Now we shall find that.. .the justifying [reasonsj presuppose a moral sense" (Francis Hutcheson, Illustrations on the Moral Sense, edited by Bernard Peach [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 19711, 121).
12. Annette Baier is right that it is not self-interest in general that threatens the destruction of society, but rather "avidity" or "the interested affection"-that is, material greed specifically. However, self-interest in general could well motivate compliance with the society-preserving rules of property, since the preservation of society not only gratifies people's greed but also fulfills desires and needs for security, mutual assistance, and companionship. (A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume's Treatise, [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991], 220-221.)
13. Interpretations along these lines were proposed by Geoffrey Sayre-McCord in his comments on my "Why Are Some Virtues Artificial?", an address to the flume Society in Chicago, April 1993, and by Don Garrett, in personal communication. David Gauthier, "Artificial Virtues and the Sensible Knave," attributes it to the flume of the Treatise; I discuss his more complex interpretation below.
14. Marcia Baron, "flume's Noble Lie: An Account of His Artificial Virtues," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 12 (1982).
15. The view of Knud Haakonssen in The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), chap. 2 (esp. Part 8), is that interest is not a morally approved motive, and so we imagine another motive, the willing of an obligation, which we hate ourselves for lacking. David Gauthier, in "Artificial Virtues and the Sensible Knave," proposes that "the initial self-interested motive fails to survive critical reflection" but our approval of conformity to the rules of property persists, so we then imagine another nonmoral motive, the willing of an obligation. Both writers apply this analysis to the virtue of fidelity to promises as well as honesty. The idea that we "feign" a special motive, the willing of an obligation, comes from flume's discussion of promising in T III ii 5.
16. This is the interpretation of Gauthier, "Artificial Virtues and the Sensible Knave." Gauthier points out that this leaves Hume with a defective view. Once we realize that redirected interest cannot move informed people to strict, constant compliance, we will cease to approve of redirected interest. But there is no other nonmoral motive of reliable compliance of which we can approve instead. Since, according to (2), there must be a nonmoral motive first if moral approval is to take hold, we will not be able to approve, and so we will be left without any moral motive for compliance either. Here I note two points of departure from this article besides the ones in the text. First, Gauthier's claim that Hume, that crafty student of Hobbes, did not see that honest action sometimes is not in our (even redirected) interest until he came to write the second Enquiry is rather surprising, especially given Hume's examples of this in the Treatise. (The Treatise contains passages strongly suggesting that he saw it and others strongly suggesting that he did not.) Second, Gauthier thinks that on Hume's account we cannot approve of the motive of honesty in the end, whatever that motive may be, because honest actions, while they benefit others, harm oneself. But this misunderstands the way moral approval works in Hume. Hume can certainly account for our approval of things that are a net loss to ourselves. In occupying the common point of view we take account of the responses of all persons affected by the trait and so come to approve of what generates more pleasure than pain on the whole. In the case of honesty, in coming to feel moral approval or disapproval we imaginatively take the viewpoint of the whole of society. The impact of the trait on ourselves is encompassed in that already. So we will approve, even though we may not be moved, since mere approval is often less motivating than interest. Stephen Darwall, in The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought':1640-1 740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 309-11, likewise reads the Treatise as claiming that compliance with the rules of property is in fact in the (long-term) interest of every agent on every occasion, although this may not always be clear to her, and lesser short-term gains may also tempt her to violate; while in the second Enquiry and the essay "The Origin of Government" Hume recognizes the possibility that on occasion compliance actually is contrary to the agent's over-all interest. For Darwall, however, Hume's ultimate position is not an error theory; rather, the motivating disposition which constitutes the virtue of honesty is the acceptance of the rules of property as authoritative in guiding one's actions, a "disposition to engage in a form of practical reasoning substantially different from any countenanced by Hume's] official theory of the will" (317). Thus, Hume is committed to the existence of a motivating disposition, rule-acceptance, in spite of himself. Apart from anything Hume says, it is probably true that the honest person engages in a form of practical reasoning and motivation which is not goal-directed in the way in which Hume thinks all motivation is. But since there is no room for such a phenomenon in Hume's theory, I read him, not as contradicting his hedonism and general theory of the will and motivating passions (which my account preserves), but instead as waiving a less fundamental requirement of his science of human nature, his requirement of a nonmoral motive as the sole primary ground of approval.