Hume Studies

Introduction

Rachel Cohon's Hume is a moral sensing theorist, who holds both that moral qualities (virtue and vice) are mind-dependent and that there is such a thing as moral knowledge. He is an anti-rationalist about motivation, arguing that reason alone does not motivate, but allows that both beliefs and passions are motivating. (That is, some beliefs cause passions and some passions cause action.) And he is both a descriptive and a normative moral theorist who, despite having resources for putting checks on our sentimentally-based moral evaluations, does end up with a kind of a relativistic account of the virtues and vices. Professor Cohon's arguments in Hume's Morality¹ are tight and vigorous. Anyone working on these issues will have to grapple with her interpretations, which are sane and provocative at the same time. I focus here on the first part of her book, where Cohon offers an original response to what she describes as the common reading of Hume's metaethics. The second part of her book deals with Hume's theory of the virtues and the perplexities in his account of artificial virtue, but unfortunately I have no room to discuss all of these matters. At the risk of wearing out a familiar caveat: philosophers have a curious way of praising a book by disagreeing with its author's arguments. My discussion is no exception. [End Page 267]

1. A Word about "the Common Reading" of Hume's Metaethics

According to Cohon, "the common reading" of Hume's metaethics comprises at least three theses:

While I agree that the first and third are part of a traditional reading of Hume, I think that readers and critics have offered varied readings on the issue of moral knowledge in Hume and that no one interpretation is actually standard. Non-cognitivism was a fairly typical reading of Hume in the 1970s and 80s and earlier, but even J. L. Mackie in his 1980 Hume's Moral Theory found a variety of theses in Hume in this regard: that moral judgments are statements about people's sentiments; that moral judgments may state facts and express or arouse emotions in others at the same time; that moral judgments ascribe fictitious qualities to actions and are all false.² Recent readers have also found nuances in Hume's view of moral judgments, and attributions have ranged over emotivism or expressivism,³ cognitivism,⁴ a kind of realism,⁵ and a complex view whereby a moral judgment is an expression of feeling while also an ascription of a quality to an action or character.⁶ Some readers have also proposed that Hume's theory not be classified under these contemporary categories at all. Be that as it may, I do share with Cohon the view that Hume does not eschew the possibility of moral knowledge. I find this reading of his metaethics ultimately non-problematic, as she does, despite its requiring some explanation how to reconcile it with his sentimentalism.⁷ However, I want to focus a good part of my commentary on the first thesis Cohon attributes to the "common reading." Here she and I have the largest differences, and her arguments present some formidable challenges to the standard interpretation of Hume on motivation. I also offer some remarks on Cohon's reading of Hume on the nature of morality.

2. Hume on Reason, Belief, and Motivation

Readers agree that Hume regards reason as motivationally inert (the "Inertia of Reason Thesis," 14)⁸; it does not cause passion or action on its own. On the standard reading, this thesis becomes the thesis that beliefs by themselves cannot move us to action ("Inertia of Belief," 11).⁹ The argument for this understanding of Hume goes: if reason causes beliefs, if beliefs cause passions, and if passions cause actions, then by transitivity of causation, reason causes actions. But this is exactly [End Page 268] what Hume denies. So, given that passions clearly cause actions, and assuming reason causes beliefs, it follows, according to the standard view, that beliefs do...