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”.

Both a morality, like Kant's, which relies on wrongdoers' guilt feelings and expectation of punishment, as enforcement for its requirements, and one which, like Hume's, relies on the feelings of shame and expectation of their fellows' contempt which will be felt by those showing lack of the moral virtues, seem to merit the charge that morality is an intrinsically cruel institution. The prospects for a gentle non-punitive morality are explored, and Hume's views found more promising, for this purpose, than Kant's

Frankena sees moral point of view theories as steering a middle course between scepticism or relativism in ethics and absolutism or dogmatism. The constraints of a distinctive point of view limit the range of moral judgments, provide some basis to expect agreement between different moral judges, and generate standards if not of moral truth at least of moral acceptability. Since however these constraints arise only from the moral point of view, they are avoidable if the point of view is avoidable, and do not impose absolute inescapable demands on every person. Frankena sees the judgments made from the moral point of view to include categorical ones, but since he does not characterize the point of view itself as either the final court of practical reason or as an inevitable point of view, the categorical judgments made from that point of view are themselves externally conditional on taking that view-point. The most that can be said is that when and if one takes that viewpoint, certain demands are inescapable and unconditional. The whole illocutionary act of making the categorical moral judgment is as it were limited by the condition that one’s hearers, including oneself as hearer, share the point of view. Made fully explicit, what I am calling the external conditional would take this form: “Provided that one takes the moral point of view, one must acknowledge the unconditional obligation to …”. This is quite different from claims like “If one is a parent one has obligations to one’s child,” which is itself presumably a claim which may have an implicit initial qualifier of the form “From the moral point of view …” or “From the legal point of view …”. It might of course also be saying “From the point of view of practical rationality as such, a point of view which one cannot refuse to take, and beyond which lies no more comprehensive or corrected point of view …”. Frankena distinguishes this ultimately authoritative practical judgment from a moral judgment, while nevertheless suggesting that practical reason will normally endorse what morality has decreed. It is not, however, part of the very meaning of “moral point of view” that that point be final or inescapable for human persons.

In recent decades in North American social and moral philosophy, alongside the development and discussion of widely influential theories of justice, taken as Rawls takes it as the ‘first virtue of social institutions,’ there has been a counter-movement gathering strength, one coming from some interesting sources. For some of the most outspoken of the diverse group who have in a variety of ways been challenging the assumed supremacy of justice among the moral and social virtues are members of those sections of society whom one might have expected to be especially aware of the supreme importance of justice, namely blacks and women. Those who have only recently won recognition of their equal rights, who have only recently seen the correction or partial correction of long-standing racist and sexist injustices to their race and sex, are among the philosophers now suggesting that justice is only one virtue among many, and one that may need the presence of the others in order to deliver its own undenied value. Among these philosophers of the philosophical counterculture, as it were - but an increasingly large counterculture - I include Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Stocker, Lawrence Blum, Michael Slote, Laurence Thomas, Claudia Card, Alison Jaggar, Susan Wolf and a whole group of men and women, myself included, who have been influenced by the writings of Harvard educational psychologist Carol Gilligan, whose book In a Different Voice caused a considerable stir both in the popular press and, more slowly, in the philosophical journals.

Philosophers have always seen at least part of their job to be social criticism, where by that I mean not necessarily negative assessment of existing social practices, but rather the attempt to understand them, to see existing local ones against a background of other possibilities. Included among these surveyed practices are, or should be, practices of justification and criticism, our own included. Socrates set the standard when, in the Apology and Crito he turned his method on his own activity, both defending it and also showing understanding and acceptance of the judgment of those who condemned it. Most of us, after Socrates, have tried to emulate his self-conscious attention to philosophical method, but usually only to intellectual methods of reasoning, rarely following him in consciousness of the social role we play, and its relation to the whole network of roles in which it is embedded. Yet if our own activity is to justify itself, that justification surely depends upon the relation between what we are doing and the work done by others, including those who support us in the crude economic sense. It is not easy to survey the whole scheme of social roles and to consider alternative ways of dividing the social labor, but philosophers have often claimed to have synoptic vision. No greater hubris is involved in trying synoptically to survey a society's array of social roles, and its alternatives, than in purporting to produce moral principles valid in all conditions, or truths for all possible worlds.

At the end of part 3 of Book 1 of his Treatise,1 Hume had given a touchstone by which to judge any account of the human mind, namely that, where other animals appear to display the same cognitive operation that we do, our account applies as well to them as to us.2 He tests his own account of causal inference this way and finds that it comes through with flying colors, since the effects of experience of constant conjunctions on animal minds is just as he has claimed it to be on ours. Some of their actions, such as nest building and sitting on their eggs till they hatch, are "extraordinary instances of sagacity", but on other matters, they, like us, learn from experience, so that the older one.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:133. HUME ON RESENTMENT In his Enquiry version of the conditions of justice, Hume adds a third modified Hobbesian condition to the two, moderate scarcity and moderate selfishness, which he had listed in the Treatise. The new condition is a certain measure of equality, or limit ±o inequality—justice is owed, he says, only if there is a society of more-or-less equals; and only to those who are members of it. The equality in question concerns the ability of candidate societymembers to make us feel the effects of their resentment (E190). If such ability is lacking, then, Hume says, the relationships between "us" and "them" will be those of absolute command on the one side and servile obedience on the other. Whatever we covet, they must instantly resign: Our permission is the only tenure, by which they hold their possessions : Our compassion and kindness the only check, by which they curb our lawless will (Ibid. ). This passage is interesting because Hume describes the position of such powerless creatures intermingled with men in terms which appear to be social —command, obedience, possession, tenure, the act of "resigning" coveted goods. But he says that our intercourse with them could not be called society, which supposes a degree of equality (Ibid. ). True society is, then, restricted to those who are roughly equal, whose interests help to determine the conventions which give rise to duties of justice. But intermingled with the members of such a real society there might be, were or are, a species of creatures, who, though rational, were possessed of such inferior strength, both of body and mind, that they were incapable of all resistance, and could never, upon the highest provocation, make us feel the effects of their resentment (Ibid. ). They are "rational", so can obey, can resign possessions, and can resent their inferior status. They have quasi-social relations with their masters, but not fully social ones, since they are neither parties to nor bene- 134. ficiaries of the social conventions which create rights and duties. Hume seems to assume that because they are not parties to the artifice-creating conventions, those conventions will not cover relations with them, so that the conveners' "laws" are limited, and allow them a sphere of "lawless will" in their dealings with the inferior creatures. But children, for example, while not legislators, may be both right holders and beneficiaries of the laws which adults agree on. Hume is most charitably read here to mean that the conventions which serve the interests of the superior creatures might not, cannot be depended on, to regulate in any way the dealings of the superiors with the inferiors. They are left at the mercy of their superiors, resent that fact, and yet may be powerless to alter the situation. It is very clear from what follows that Hume has in mind in this passage the relations of males to females, and that it is his thoughts about male-female relationships which led to his emendation of his Treatise account of the conditions of justice. The Treatise had not mentioned equality of power as a condition for justice, but had devoted a chapter to the extra obligations, of chastity and modesty, which social conventions imposed on the female sex. It was therefore a natural question to arise for Hume whether women really could be parties to conventions which imposed these obligations on them. Were their interests served, or did these obligations arise from "the voluntary conventions of men, " (T510, emphasis added) who asked themselves What restraint, therefore, shall we impose upon women, in order to counter-balance so strong a temptation as they have to infidelity? (T571). Hume had argued that female fidelity was needed for male paternal obligations to be properly assigned, so that it was in the interests of children, of fathers, and of society in general, that fatherhood be determinable, and so that wives be chaste. Now, in the Enquiry, he considers the possibility of a class of slaves whose interests, like those of animals, need not be considered 135, in the conventions which generate duties of justice. The great superiority of civilized Europeans above barbarous Indians, tempted us to imagine ourselves on...