The man who was arguably the greatest thinker in modernity and without a doubt the greatest philosopher to have ever written in the English language was David Hume. While it seems a crime, especially to a Hume admirer such as myself, to even attempt to summarize Hume in one post, this is exactly what I plan to do. So as to not drag this post out for a dozen pages or so, we will limit ourselves almost entirely to his ideas concerning epistemology, morality and religion. We will see that Hume’s brutal attacks against many of the ideas which we think we “know” leave him sounding like a skeptic, although such would probably be a misreading of him. Perhaps the best way of approaching him for the first time would be to see him as attempting to place human knowledge upon a firmer foundation.
Hume’s epistemology, as we will see, mirrors that of Locke in its basic components. A self is but a bundle of ideas which is compared to a parade in which each soldier that drops out is replaced by another. Ideas are the persistence, in a weaker vivacity, of the original sense impressions from which they originate, and all knowledge of the outside world is mediate, at minimum, by the physical senses. Of course impressions are not merely limited to the sensations, but also include passions, emotions and even reflections. Hume, however, broadened the means by which ideas could be associated with one another: resemblance, spatiotemporal contiguity and cause and effect.
At this point, Hume draws an important distinction between two different types of knowledge, a difference which would greatly influence most of philosophy after him. Man can have knowledge of relations between ideas that is either intuitively certain or are demonstrable. Such knowledge, however, is tautological and lacks any existential implication whatsoever. Sure, 2+2 might equal 4, but this tells us absolutely nothing about what the world is actually like. The other kind of knowledge, knowledge of matters of fact, are based of cause and effect, except in the case of immediate sense experience.
It is here that Hume’s strongly skeptical conclusions come out, for cause and effect are simply concepts which we derive from our experience of constant conjunction. When A is repeatedly followed by B and A and B occur closely together in space and time, then we say that A caused B. But, and this is Hume’s main empirical point, we never actually observe anything which we could call “causation” happening; all we ever observe is the constant conjunction of two events. Thus, our knowledge of matters of fact is determined by cause and effect, but cause and effect are simply based in experience and nothing else. What justifies our belief in experience? We cannot appeal to cause and effect, for this would be to beg the question. The answer, according to Hume, is a psychological disposition which he calls natural instinct, custom or habit.
This concept of causation is easily misunderstood, and it is only with a firm grasp of what Hume takes causation to be or not be that we can fully understand much of his work. Causation is not some metaphysical entity nor can it be established by rational analysis. Instead, causation is simply an epistemic conclusion or tool in which anything can be the cause of anything. Indeed, there is no logical inconsistency in the possibility that in the future those A’s which we seen to cause B’s will cease to do so, and to appeal to our experience that the past has always resembled the future would simply be to beg the question entirely. Accordingly, Hume sees Newton’s accomplishment as expanding our knowledge in very important, though very small ways. Even if we know that gravity causes B to happen, we have no idea what causes gravity. Thus, Hume uses his empiricism to attack the metaphysical doctrines of power, force and necessary connection.
Hume was also one of the first major proponents of a compatibilist version of freewill, by suggesting that the debate between determinists such as Hobbes and Spinoza and the defenders of freewill such as Descartes were entirely verbal in nature. Liberty, which Hume sees as being an adequate version of freewill, is simply the absence of external restraint, and such is entirely compatible with a causally determined universe. Indeed, he argues that if our choices were actually uncaused, then they would be completely random in nature and would thus carry no moral responsibility. Following his ideas concerning our natural instincts, Hume argues that the predictability of actions and choices is a natural assumption upon which we depend in day to day life.
We will see that Hume’s epistemology plays an integral part in his account of morality, a subject which he attempts to entirely revolutionize. Rather than offering a new moral code, something which would not have been at all revolutionary, he intends to offer a scientific theory of morality which could go with his scientific theory of the mind. Hume argues that morality is not based in human reasoning, for not only are more intelligent people not necessarily morally superior to others, but simpletons and children are capable of moral judgment and action.
Furthermore, there is nothing moral about simple physical facts or states of affairs. Indeed, while the entire subject of metaethics had its beginning in the work of G.E. Moore, the field has essentially been aimed at answering the question which Hume famously put forth: How can one derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’? According to Hume, morality is not a matter of human reasoning, but is instead based in the feelings or sentiment of approbation or disapprobation which arise in us in reaction to what are otherwise merely physical events. Naturally, these sentiments are also natural instincts:
“All of the passions and dispositions are the result of natural sentiments conditioned by experience to be expressed toward or withheld from a given object.”
What is it that causes these sentiments of approbation and disapprobation which are, for the most part, universal? Hume sees this as a scientific question deserving of a scientific answer, and the answer which he gives is utility. It is because something is of use to us that we judge it to be good, and it is those actions in other people which are most useful to both themselves as well as society at large. Hume attempts to demonstrate this by showing that once laws or virtues such as justice are no longer of any use, they are no longer regarded as being morally good.
In this view of morality we can see the obvious influences of Bishop Joseph Butler among others. The differences, however, between Hume and the British sentimentalists such as Butler should not be ignored. First of all, Butler saw no difference between self-interest and virtue, while Hume’s model focuses more on public utility than on private desires. The second difference is that while Butler saw our natural instincts which were foundational to his morality as being put there by God, Hume simply acknowledged that there were a part of our natures. So much so, in fact, that Hume famously said that “passion rules reason, as it should.” By this he meant that our passions have been fitted by nature to seek pleasure and avoid pain and using our reason rather than our passion in such pursuits usually ends up bad.
This leads us to what was by far Hume’s most controversial of works, so controversial that his friends urged him not to publish it until after his death, and even so with an additional chapter which in effect reverses the conclusions which the rest of the book brings the reader to. Hume’s Critique Concerning Natural Religion was a thorough refutation of most any appeal to the book of nature to discover God and His nature.
His first point is that the inference of religion from our experience with the world is highly problematic for a number of reasons. First, it left religion as being merely probable at best, for empirical knowledge can never be absolute. Second, the analogy of drawing inferences about an earthly designer and that which he designs is very weak, for the dissimilarities between creation and men’s creation are far more striking than are their similarities. Third, we only have experience regarding one and only one universe and any inferences drawn from one instance are little more than mere guesswork. Forth, in the case of any reasoning from empirical data, negative data (falsifying data) counts far more than does affirmative data, and examples of disteleology in the universe are not difficult to come by.
Hume continues with his brutal attack by supposing, just for the sake of argument, that we can allow for the inference of religious doctrines from empirical data. He argues that such empirical data would never suggest the God of natural religion. Why would we ever assume that an imperfect and finite universe required a perfect and infinite designer? We could never rationally infer the unity of God from the size and diversity of the universe. Furthermore, all design which unquestionably does suggest a designer was done so by a process of using their bodies to manipulate preexistent materials, why would we ever suggest that the designer of this world must be incorporeal or that He does need or use tools of some kind? Indeed, the world seems to resemble a plant more than it does a machine, why not suggest that the universe was created by a cosmic seed or egg? Worst of all, if the stupid humans that we are can improve on the creation, why would we ever assume that this designer were any more intelligent than they?
This leads one to the argument from evil, which we have already seen Voltaire employing in his writings at about the same time. How can we suggest that the goodness which is so abundant in our world suggests a benevolent deity when all of our literature and history is filled to the brim with tragedy and suffering? Hume brings his point home by suggesting to anybody who honestly thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds that they visit the children’s ward of any hospital. There are many ways in which an all powerful God could improve the world: He could eliminate pain, especially that caused by natural evils such as disasters and diseases, He could allow the just to live longer and happier than the unjust by ruling by particular rather than by general or He could expand the powers and faculties of human reasoning and life.
But He doesn’t. The state of affairs we observe in the universe only allows for four distinct possibilities: the ultimate cause of things is infinitely good, the ultimate cause of things is infinitely evil, it is composed of both good and evil warring against each other or it is neither good nor evil. Hume sees the final option as being the only available one.
“Suppose … that matter were thrown into any position, by a blind, unguided force; it is evident that this first position must in all probability be the most confused and most disorderly imaginable… Suppose, that the actuating force, whatever it may be, still continues in matter… Thus the universe goes on for many ages in a continued succession of chaos and disorder. But is it not possible that it may settle at last…? May we not hope for such a position, or rather be assured of it, from the eternal revolutions of unguided matter, and may not this account for all the appearing wisdom and contrivance which is in the universe?”
It should be noted that Hume lived well before Darwin did, and his absence of a competing explanation for the design in the world did leave the hypothesis espoused by natural religion as the only real competitor. Nevertheless, we can see from Hume’s writings that he would have loved evolution as we now understand it, and probably would have seen the modern field of evolutionary psychology as a dream come true. Indeed, whenever his reasoning leads him to a skeptical conclusion (we have no reason to believe the future will resemble the past, we cannot know about the outside world for sure, etc.) Hume’s favorite move is to suggest that we are naturally inclined to believe what we have no rational justification for.
