The Pursuit of Certainty. Shirley Robin Letwin

       Virtue in a Bundle of Perceptions

      Having tumbled reason from her high throne to set her on earth judging facts and thus removed the divine imprint from man’s soul, Hume used the same means to show that man bore no mark of Satan. For man restored to nature, he described a virtue that required no struggle with sin, no repression, no divine intervention, nothing but what could come naturally to human beings.

      The passions, in which Hume casually included animal instincts and passions, along with moral sentiments and natural beliefs, were reduced, like everything else, to a form of sensation. Instead of being the unruly elements of the soul, opposed to reason, they became innocuous “reflective impressions.” They arose, Hume said, as internal responses to “original impressions,” that is, to sensations caused by external objects or operations of the body. In other words, they were responses to bodily pleasures and pains. Some, like the sense of beauty and deformity, were calm; others, like love and hatred, grief, joy, pride and humility, were violent; all were equally natural and capable of being beneficial. They were secondary, internal, reflective impressions and neither good nor evil. They were the results of causes that “operated after the same manner thro’ the whole animal creation”¹ and were therefore, like reason, common to man and animals.

      By describing passions as responses to impressions, Hume made it impossible for them to be ruled by reason. Reason, in Hume’s sense, could only judge abstract relations between ideas, or the relations between ideas and matters of fact. With neither of these judgements could reason excite desire or aversion, that is, give rise to passion or influence it.² Passions themselves are called into being by nothing but impressions, and they can be opposed only by contrary passions. What is taken for the combat between reason and passion, Hume explained, is in reality a “calm” passion opposing a “violent” one: “Thus it appears that the principle which opposes our passions cannot be the same with reason, and is only call’d so in an improper sense. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”¹ Man is not then a divided nature but all one, and he is moved, not by two opposing principles, but by a variety of sensations.²

      Thus Hume denied the basis for the traditional account of virtue. He had ruled out even the possibility of giving reason ascendancy in Spinoza’s manner. Spinoza, too, had reversed the order of reason and passion, but in his account the master governing passion is the passion to act rationally for its own sake. In the end, Spinoza differentiated man from beast, and the free man from the slave, by his power of making reason and judgement control action and passion. For the only passion reason could not examine was the passion to reason. According to Hume, however, reason is always controlled by passion, by any and every desire which may happen to employ reason as a means to its fulfilment. Reason could never make an all-inclusive survey of all passions or desires.

      Yet Hume was very far from wishing to conclude that therefore virtue and vice could or should be confounded. He ranked those who “denied the reality of moral distinctions” among “disingenuous disputants.”¹ Although he appreciated Mandeville’s “spirit of satire,”² and felt considerable sympathy with his attack on the hypocritical enemies of joy and pleasure, who asked men to forswear wants that supported society, Hume could not be so irreverent. He would not for a moment, even in jest, argue that all moral distinctions arise from education, as Mandeville said, and were “at first, invented, and afterwards encouraged by the art of politics in order to render man tractable.”³ Morality is certain, and there is a clear distinction between virtue and vice, Hume affirmed; he denied only that it was absolute.

      He managed to preserve the certainty of morals without letting it become absolute by founding it on sentiment. Virtue and vice were not matters of fact whose existence could be discovered by reason. In wilful murder, for instance, no one can observe anything that could be called vice. The only fact in the case that makes us call it vicious is a feeling in some person: “In whichever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions, and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object.”⁴ Vice and virtue are not then qualities in objects, not anything outside human beings, but perceptions within them:

      When you pronounce any Action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing but that from the particular Constitution of your nature, you have a Feeling or Sentiment of Blame from the Contemplation of it. Vice and Virtue, therefore may be compar’d to sounds, colours, heat and cold, which, according to modern Philosophy are not Qualitys in Objects but Perceptions in the Mind.⁵

      That his moral theory was a great advance in speculative science, Hume readily claimed. But he denied that it had any radical consequences for practice.¹ Prudence alone perhaps required him to say so at a time when the arbiters of morality cried down any modification of their theories as a challenge to all established notions of good and bad. And in one sense, it was perfectly true that Hume’s theory left practice unaffected. It did not sanction murder or incest, or deny the value of honesty and gratitude. It did, however, radically change the manner in which these standards were to be applied.

      This was inevitable once Hume traced virtue to a basic principle that made it impossible to think of morality in the old way as a divine command. Instead, Hume showed that virtuous behaviour is simply useful to mankind, that it conforms to, rather than violates, what is natural to men. The utility of an action or character, he explained, arouses a natural sentiment of approval. Because of the sympathy between men, this approval becomes general, that is, attached to other things and men and to whatever contributes to the happiness of society. All men can feel a sympathy with the possessor of a useful quality. So men come to approve what benefits not only themselves but also others. And what is useful to men generally is called a virtue.

      Virtue does not then require men either to discern super-human purposes, or to deny their human needs and wants. Quite the contrary, it shows how best to satisfy them. To be virtuous, men need not struggle with or repress their natural inclinations—“all morality depends on the natural course of our passions and actions.”² The virtuous man is drawn to his duty “without an effort or endeavour.” Virtue therefore is congenial to men and only superstition is “odious and burthensome.”³ Moral conflict is not a combat between divine reason and brute passion, but a purely human balancing of the calm against the violent passions. Thus Hume removed the dismal dress with which divines and philosophers had disguised virtue, and demonstrated that a happy life spent in festivals, mirth, philosophizing, and singing was, as the ancient Strabo had taught, the best way for man to imitate divine perfection.

      Although a large part of traditional morality was unaffected by Hume’s denial of super-human perfection, his account of virtue did imply some important changes. He did not, for instance, accept the Christian view of suicide. Since man is not unique but an intimate part of the natural order, whatever he wishes to do with his life, Hume argued, cannot be contrary to nature or God. The life of man “is of no greater importance to the universe than the life of an oyster,”¹ and therefore suicide is no more impious than agriculture. When life becomes a burden, when we can do but small good to society at the expense