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Hume, Kant, and the Motivation for Morality Paul Guyer 1. Introduction

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Hume, Kant, and the Motivation for Morality Paul Guyer 1. Introduction Passion for Reason 1 Draft 3 Passion for Reason: Hume, Kant, and the Motivation for Morality Paul Guyer 1. Introduction Hume is famous for the assertion that “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 meaning that our ends are set entirely by our feelings and that reason merely figures out the means to those ends. As a member of the “moral sense” tradition established by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, Hume intends this to apply to moral as well as any other practical reasoning: morally permissible or mandatory ends are likewise supposed to be determined solely by feeling, with reason again confined to the role of figuring out the means to realize those ends. Thus, Hume says, “„tis impossible, that the distinction betwixt moral good and evil, can be made by reason: since that distinction has an influence upon our actions, of which reason alone is incapable. Reason and judgment may, indeed, be the mediate cause of an action, by prompting, or by directing a passion,” but they cannot “bestow those moral qualities on the actions, which are their” immediate or primary “causes.”2 Meanwhile, Kant is equally famous for the assertions that the ground of moral obligation “must not be sought in the nature of the human being or in the circumstances of the world in which he is placed, but a priori simply in concepts of pure reason,”3 from which it is supposed to follow that “an action from duty is to put aside entirely the influence of inclination and with it every object of the will; hence there is left for the will Passion for Reason 2 nothing that could determine it except objectively the law and subjectively pure respect for this practical law, and so the maxim of complying with such a law even if it infringes upon all my inclinations.”4 The contrast could hardly be clearer: for Hume, passion alone determines even our moral goals and the role of reason in the realization of these goals is strictly instrumental, while for Kant reason alone determines the principle of morality and our inclinations or feelings must play no role either in determining what is morally good or motivating us to try to realize that. At least in its first appearance, the “obscure feeling” of respect for the moral law that Kant recognizes is supposed to be “a feeling self-wrought by means of a rational concept and therefore specifically different from all feelings” of any other kind,5 and moreover seems to be a consequence and not a cause of the determination of our will by the moral law. But is the contrast between Hume and Kant as simple as I have just made it seem? I will argue that there is more common ground between the two philosophers than first appears, and suggest that it is only on the ground that is common between them that we could erect a plausible theory of our motivation to be moral. On the one hand, while Hume does stand by his theory that our ends are always determined by our passions, he also supposes that most of us are ultimately motivated by a passion for calm or tranquility, or a passion for freedom, at least in the negative sense of freedom from domination by importunate desires. Thus reason may be the slave of the passions, but we also have a fundamental passion to be reasonable. On the other hand, for Kant the ultimate aim of morality is also freedom, although his understanding of freedom is fuller than Hume‟s. Further, Kant‟s theory of moral motivation, at least at the empirical level, is that we cannot be moral without an original passion for freedom, although that passion must be redirected by reason from our own freedom to the freedom of all without loosing its force. Thus, both authors ground the content and the possibility of morality in our passion for freedom, although for Hume that is equivalent to a passion for reasonableness while for Kant our native passion for freedom must be tempered by reason, and once so tempered Kant himself would no longer call it a passion. Passion for Reason 3 2. Hume: Calm Passion and a Passion for Calm I begin with Hume. My exposition of Hume‟s account of the foundation of morality will proceed in three steps. First I will remind you of Hume‟s well-known argument for his thesis that reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions. Next, I will remind you of his equally well-known claim that what appears to be more than merely instrumental reason in moral motivation is actually only calm rather than violent passion. But finally I will turn from Hume‟s Treatise of Human Nature to his restatement of his moral theory in his Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals to provide the evidence that he ultimately grounds morality in our underlying passion for calm or tranquility. Hume‟s argument that “moral distinctions” are “not deriv‟d from reason”6 is that reason just reports facts and neither has nor generates preferences of its own, thus is not motivating, while moral principles must be motivating and therefore depend on preferences that do not arise from reason. In summarizing the argument this way I am using the word “facts” broadly, but that fits with Hume‟s own broad usage of the term “reason” in his statement of this argument. For while in his argument in Book I of the Treatise and the first Enquiry that our causal beliefs are not founded on reason Hume had restricted the faculty of reason to the analysis of “relations of ideas” and inferred that all of our beliefs about existence or “matters of fact,”7 including our beliefs about the existence of causal relations, must be grounded on something other than reason, namely repeated experience, in his thesis about moral principles in Books II and III of the Treatise what was previously contrasted with reason, namely experience, is now lumped together with it. Thus Hume argues that neither “demonstration [n]or probability,” neither knowledge of “the abstract relations of our ideas, or those relations of objects of which experience only gives us information,”8 by themselves give us any reason to act. We may know that one sum is greater than another, that some object exists, or that some causal relation between objects or states of affairs holds, but none of that would give us any reason to act unless we also have a preference for a larger or smaller amount of something, for the presence or absence of Passion for Reason 4 something, or for some alteration that we could effect by exploiting the causal connections that obtain in the world. Taking action depends on an “aversion or propensity towards [some] object,” or on “the prospect of pain or pleasure” from it,” and such impulses arise “not from reason” but are only “directed by it,” because “these emotions extend themselves to the causes and effects” of objects “as they are pointed out to us by reason and experience,”9 where the latter is actually part of the former. Specifically, reason can tell us whether the objects of our emotions really exist and whether the means we have chosen for a “design‟d end” are causally sufficient to bring it about,10 but such knowledge has an influence on our action only to the extent that we have desires or aversions, emotions or passions, with regard to the current or possible states of the objects that may affect us and that we can affect. The passions for ends, however, are not themselves established by reason, and it is on that account that Hume says so dramatically that “„Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger,” or conversely “to choose my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of [a]...person otherwise unknown to me.”11 Hume then completes his argument in Book III of the Treatise by taking it for granted that “morals” are supposed to “have an influence on the actions and affections,” from which it follows that “they cannot be deriv‟d from reason...because reason alone, as we have already prov‟d, can never have any such influence.”12 Just as any action must originate from some emotion or passion arising independently of reason even if reason‟s knowledge of relations, existence, and causal connections may direct that impulse most effectively toward its object, so too moral actions, including moral appraisals, must originate in a “moral sense,” or in feelings of “pleasure or pain, which arises from characters and actions, of that peculiar kind, which makes us praise or condemn.” Such feelings of pleasure are not functionally different from those in “A good composition of music and a bottle of good wine,” although they are phenomenologically distinct from those and those are phenomenologically distinct from each other.13 Again, the broadly speaking factual knowledge provided by reason may direct our impulses to action that arise from our moral sentiments, but reason does not originate those impulses. Passion for Reason 5 Now all this is well-known, and I have belabored it only to remind you that the conception of reason on which Hume bases his argument about the non-rational foundation of moral principles, although broader than his conception of reason in Book I of the Treatise, is still quite specific. My next point is also well-known.
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