Annette Claire Baier

(1929 - 2012)

David Hume has been invoked by those who want to found morality on human nature as well as by their critics. He is credited with showing us the fallacy of moving from premises about what is the case to conclusions about what ought to be the case; and yet, just a few pages after the famous is-ought remarks in A Treatise of Human Nature, he embarks on his equally famous derivation of the obligations of justice from facts about the cooperative schemes accepted in human communities. Is he ambivalent on the relationship between facts about human nature and human evaluations? Does he contradict himself – and, if so, which part of his whole position is most valuable? Between the famous is-ought passage and the famous account of convention and the obligations arising from established cooperative schemes once they are morally endorsed, Hume discusses the various meanings of the term “natural.” “Shou'd it be ask'd, Whether we ought to search for these principles [upon which all our notions of morals are founded] in nature or whether we must look for them in some other origin? I wou'd reply, that our answer to this question depends upon the definition of the word, Nature, than which there is none more ambiguous and equivocal.” The natural can be opposed to the miraculous, the unusual, or the artificial. It is the last contrast that Hume wants, for his contrast between the “artificial” culturally variant, convention-dependent obligations of justice and the more invariant “natural virtues,” and what he says about that contrast in this preparation for his account of the “artificial” virtues, makes it clear why he can later refer to justice as “natural” and to the general content of the rules of justice – that is, of basic human conventions of cooperation – as “Laws of Nature”.

Berkeley says that "the making and unmaking of ideas doth very properly denominate the mind active." What did Berkeley take as the paradigm of that making which denominates mind active? He speaks in the same passage of exciting "ideas in my mind at pleasure," of varying and shifting the scene "as oft as I see fit. It is no more than willing and straightway this or that idea arises in my fancy." This quite clearly takes human idea-making to be fantasizing. But if this is the only sort of making we are capable of, it is a poor model for that divine making which Berkeley wishes to obtain by "reflecting on my own soul, heightening its powers, and removing its imperfections." Ideas of the fancy are not strong, lively, vivid, nor real for other minds. Has Berkeley any other, better, human model for the divine making? In his Commonplace Book, Berkeley notes tersely, "We move our legs ourselves." This suggests that our voluntary actions could be taken by Berkeley as ideas made by us. This would at least give him a human model for that divine responsibility for something real, something strong, vivid, lively, something which other minds have no choice but to see, when in broad daylight they open their eyes from the appropriate vantage point.

Both in ethics and in epistemology one source of scepticism in its contemporary version is the realization, often belated, of the full consequences of atheism. Modern non-moral philosophy looks back to Descartes as its father figure, but disowns the Third Meditation. But if God does not underwrite one's cognitive powers, what does? The largely unknown evolution of them, which is just a version of Descartes’ unreliable demon? “Let us … grant that all that is here said of God is a fable, nevertheless in whatever way they suppose that I have arived at the state of being that I have reached, whether they attribute it to fate or to accident, or make out that it is by a continual succession of antecedents, or by some other method — since to err and deceive oneself is a defect, it is clear that the greater will be the probability of my being so imperfect as to deceive myself ever, as is the Author to whom they assign my being the less powerful”.