Reason, slave of the passions

Hume: “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.”

’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. ’Tis not contrary to reason for me to choose my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. ’Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledg’d lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter. (Treatise, 2.3.3.6 / 267)

Mel Brooks: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

What do you think?

Is this deal irrational?

The European Enlightenment and new social justifications

Popular thinkers in the Enlightenment occupied themselves with developing justifications for the emerging social order of the time.

Most famous product: social contract theory (Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke).

See also: “invisible hand” theory (Smith 1776).

And (today’s class): foundational theories like Smith and Hume’s that explain where morality comes from.

Kant, “What is enlightenment?” (1784)

• People (Europeans) are beginning to leave their “self-incurred minority” and enter rational adulthood.

  “Minority”: “inability to make use of one’s own understanding without direction from another”

• That is: in all past ages, people simply believed whatever they were told without taking up the responsibility of thinking for themselves. It is now that they are beginning to think for themselves that all the new possibilities are arising.

  • Understanding the universe through science instead of dogma.
  • Understanding that social and political forms are not decreed by god or nature, and thus that they can be chosen.

• Kant is wrong that the European Enlightenment is a unique historical dawning – people thinking and choosing for themselves occur in many cultures and times and places.

• But he may be right that it is a new dawning in Europe.

Why were they needed?

1. Social arrangements were changing: industrialization, science, successful rebellions against monarchies and the spread of republican governance.
2. Colonialism was bringing Europeans into contact with very different ways of life.

Choosing ways of life

American founder Ben Franklin wrote:

When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language, and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them there is no persuading him ever to return, and that this is not natural merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. (Letter to Peter Collinson, 9 May 1753, see [https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-04-02-0173])

Questions about difference

The encounter with the different way of life raises questions like:

• Can we justify our way of life? Or should we change it?
• What explains the commonalities, or differences, between our way of life and other ways?

As Hume notes, if morals are derived from reason, they must be necessary: true for all times and places. In contrast, perhaps sentimentalism better accounts for the differences that we find.

Negative and positive arguments in sentimentalism

• Hume argues against the idea that morals derive from reason. This is the negative part of the sentimentalist argument.
• Smith and Hume argue for the idea that morals derive from sentiments, and aim to lay out how exactly this works. The is the positive part.
• Do both of these matter for thinking about AI?

Hume’s case in a nutshell

Morals can’t be derived from reason, because morals motivate us to action, and only passions can motivate us to action. Reason involves evaluating things as true or false, but no such conclusion by itself moves us to action.

Hume’s psychology

Everything in our experience is a perception. There are two kinds of perception.

Impressions.

Impressions are “stronger perceptions, such as our sensations, affections, and sentiments.” They are feelings that are given to us, whether from outside (perceptions of the world) or the inside (emotions).

Ideas.

Ideas are “fainter perceptions, or the copies of [impressions] in the memory and imagination.” Ideas are formed by recollecting, imagining, or abstracting from impressions. For example, the idea of a triangle is a copy formed from impressions of triangles.

Passions.

are impressions. To be moved to action, we must have a passion that moves us to act.

Reason.

operates on ideas. It can judge whether they are factual, or how they relate to each other. (Does a triangle have three sides? Is the Earth round?)

Belief-desire psychology

Contemporary philosophers often use a streamlined version of Hume’s psychology, called belief-desire psychology.

Beliefs.

Mental states that represent how things are.

Desires.

Mental states that represent how we want (or don’t want) things to be.

We can restate Hume’s negative argument in these terms: morals always involve desires as well as beliefs. For example, my belief that “meat is murder” doesn’t have moral content unless I also have an accompanying desire, “I don’t want to do murder.” Cf. the case of psychopaths.

Be aware that this is a simplification of what Hume says and may be a distortion.

Are moral mistakes factual mistakes?

If morality is derived from reason, moral mistakes must be factual mistakes or mistakes about relations between ideas.

But we don’t morally blame someone for a pure factual mistake:

A person may be affected with passion, by supposing a pain or pleasure to lie in an object, which has no tendency to produce either of these sensations, or which produces the contrary to what is imagin’d. A person may also take false measures for the attaining his end, and may retard, by his foolish conduct, instead of forwarding the execution of any project.

A fruit, for instance, that is really disagreeable, appears to me at a distance, and thro’ mistake I fancy it to be pleasant and delicious. Here is one error. I choose certain means of reaching this fruit, which are not proper for my end. Here is a second error; nor is there any third one, which can ever possibly enter into our reasonings con- cerning actions. I ask, therefore, if a man, in this situation, and guilty of these two errors, is to be regarded as vicious and criminal, however unavoidable they might have been? Or if it be possible to imagine, that such errors are the sources of all immorality?

Are morals relations between ideas? The parricidal tree

If moral judgments are derived from reason, and are not factual judgments, then they are judgments of relations between ideas. But we see that such relations are not enough to trigger moral judgment!

Of all crimes that human creatures are capable of committing, the most horrid and unnatural is ingratitude, especially when it is committed against parents, and appears in the more flagrant instances of wounds and death. To put the affair, therefore, to this trial, let us choose any inanimate object, such as an oak or elm; and let us suppose, that by the dropping of its seed, it produces a sapling below it, which springing up by degrees, at last overtops and destroys the parent tree: I ask, if in this instance there be wanting any relation, which is discoverable in parricide or ingratitude? Is not the one tree the cause of the other’s existence; and the latter the cause of the destruction of the former, in the same manner as when a child murders his parent?

The argument against morals being relations between ideas

1. Ingratitude is a paradigm moral wrong. (Exemplified by parricide.)
2. A sapling that outgrows and kills its parent tree has, in relevant part, the same relation to its parent that a human parricide does.
3. But there is no moral wrong in what the sapling does.
4. Therefore, the moral wrong of ingratitude does not derive merely from the relation of ideas.

How would you oppose this argument?

Two ways to deny that the sapling is like the parricide – and why they’re both circular

’Tis not sufficient to reply, that a choice or will is wanting. For in the case of parricide, a will does not give rise to any different relations, but is only the cause from which the action is deriv’d; and conse- quently produces the same relations, that in the oak or elm arise from some other principles.

If it be answer’d, that this action is innocent in animals, because they have not reason sufficient to discover its turpitude; but that man, being endow’d with that faculty, which ought to restrain him to his duty, the same action instantly becomes criminal to him; shou’d this be said, I wou’d reply, that this is evidently arguing in a circle. For before reason can perceive this turpitude, the turpitude must exist; and consequently is independent of the decisions of our reason, and is their object more properly than their effect.

Julie and Mark

Julie and Mark, who are sister and brother, are traveling together in France. They are both on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie is already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy it, but they decide not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret between them, which makes them feel even closer to each other. So what do you think about this? Was it wrong for them to have sex? (Haidt 2001)

Deriving an ought from an is

You read Hume saying this is impossible:

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason shou’d be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.

I also showed you Hume saying this:

Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.

Are these in conflict?