Elizabeth S. Radcliffe

Hume’s thesis that reason alone does not motivate is taken as the ground for this theory: Reason produces beliefs only, and beliefs are mere representations of fact, which, without passions for the objects the beliefs concern, cannot move anyone at all. Discussions of the Humean theory of motivation usually begin with the motivating passions in place without asking about their genesis. This emphasis, I think, overlooks a good deal of what Hume’s thesis concerning the motivational impotence of reason is about: It concerns the incapacity of reason to generate the motivating passions in the first place, and not just the ineffectiveness of beliefs, without passions, to produce action. [...] In this paper, I will offer an interpretation of Hume's theory of motive formation and show how it provides crucial support for a famous claim in his argument against the moral rationalists[...]. As it turns out, reason does play a necessary role in motive formation even for Hume, but the answer why it is not sufficient is a telling difference between a rationalist moral psychology and Hume's.

The main aim of Christopher Williams’s book is to develop and advocate a Humean account of what it is to be a “reasonable” person. The project is motivated by the fact that Hume depicts reason paradoxically as both a source of skepticism and as a source of belief, as both enslaved to the passions and as important to establishing which passions are morally significant. In his preface, Williams tell us that genre matters to philosophy; how it matters, he says, “is another question”. He sees his project in the genre of an essay, although he acknowledges that a book, with sustained arguments over several chapters, can’t ideally cultivate the “casual, unsystematic air that is the cachet of the great essayists ‘attempts’”. However, even in Hume, the master essayist, structure has its purpose, and Williams’s discussion could benefit from more of it, especially since he has some sophisticated insights into Hume and Humean positions that can get lost, ironically, on the casual reader. Whatever Williams’s intent to communicate by the manner of presentation, the approach often obscures the content.