20. During the interval between the publication of Locke’s essay and the ‘Treatise on Human Nature’ there had been much writing on ethical questions in English. The effect of this on Hume is plain enough. He writes with reference to current controversy, and in the moral part of the treatise probably had the views of Clarke, Shaftesbury, Butler, and Hutcheson more consciously before him than Locke’s. This does not interfere, however, with the propriety of affiliating him in respect of his views on morals, no less than on knowledge, directly to Locke, whose principles and method were in the main accepted by all the moralists of that age. His characteristic lies in his more consistent application of these, and the effect of current controversy upon him was chiefly to show him the line which this application must take. It was a controversy which turned almost wholly on two points; (a) the distinction between ‘interested and disinterested,’ selfish and unselfish affections; (b) the origin and nature of that ‘law,’ relation to which, according to Locke, constitutes our action ‘virtuous or vicious.’ In the absence of any notion of thought but as a faculty which puts together simple ideas into complex ones, of reason but as a faculty which calculates means and perceives the agreement of ideas mediately, it could have but one end.
Hobbes’ answer to first question,
21. By the generation in which Hume was bred the issue as to the possible disinterestedness of action was supposed to lie between the view of Hobbes and that of Shaftesbury. Hobbes’ moral doctrine had not been essentially different from Locke’s, but he had been offensively explicit on questions which Locke left open to more genial views than his doctrine logically justified. Each started from the position that the ultimate motive to every action can only be the imagination of one’s own pleasure or pain, and neither properly left room for the determination of desire by a conceived object as distinct from remembered pleasure. But while Locke, as we have seen, illogically took for granted desires so determined, and thus made it possible for a disciple to admit any benevolent desires as motives on the strength of the pleasure which they produce when satisfied, Hobbes had been more severe in his method, and had explained every desire, of which the direct motive could not be taken to be the renewal of some animal pleasure, as desire either for the power in oneself to command such pleasure at will or for the pleasure incidental to the contemplation of the signs of such power. Hence his peculiar treatment of compassion and the other ‘social affections,’ which it is easier to show to be untrue to the facts of the case than to be other than the proper consequence of principles which Locke had rendered orthodox. [1] The counter-doctrine of Shaftesbury holds water just so far as it involves the rejection of the doctrine that pleasure is the sole ultimate motive. It becomes confused just because its author had no definite theory of reason, as constitutive of objects, that could justify this rejection.
[1] See ‘Leviathan,’ part 1, chap. 6.
Counter-doctrine of Shaftesbury. Vice is selfishness: But no clear account of selfishness.
22. He begins with a doctrine that directly contradicts Locke’s identification of the good with pleasure, and of the morally good with pleasure occurring in a particular way, ‘In a sensible creature that which is not done through any affection at all makes neither good nor ill in the nature of that creature; who then only is supposed good, when the good or ill of the system to which he has relation is the immediate object of some passion or affection moving him.’ [1] This, it will be seen, as against Locke, implies that the good of a man’s action lies not in any pleasure sequent upon it to him, but in the nature of the affection from which it proceeds; and that the goodness of this affection depends on its being determined by an object wholly different from imagined pleasure—the conceived good of a system to which the man has relation, i.e., of human society, which in Shaftesbury’s language is the ‘public’ as distinct from the ‘private’ system. It is not enough that an action should result in good to this system; it must proceed from affection for it. ‘Whatever is done which happens to be advantageous to the species through an affection merely towards self-good does not imply any more goodness in the creature than as the affection itself is good. Let him in any particular act ever so well; if at the bottom it be that selfish affection alone which moves him, he is in himself still vicious.’ [2] Here, then, we seem to have a clear theory of moral evil as consisting in selfish, of moral good as consisting in unselfish affections. But what exactly constitutes a selfish affection, according to Shaftesbury? The answer that first suggests itself, is that as the unselfish affection is an affection for public good, so a selfish one is an affection for ‘self-good,’ the good of the ‘private system.’ Shaftesbury, however, does not give this answer. ‘Affection for private good’ with him is not, as such, selfish; it is so only when ‘excessive’ and ‘inconsistent with the interest of the species or public.’ [3] This qualification seems at once to efface the clear line of distinction previously drawn. It puts ‘self-affection’ on a level with public affection which, according to Shaftesbury, may equally err on the side of excess. It implies that an affection for self-good, if only it be advantageous to the species, may be good; which is just what had been previously denied. And not only so; although, when the self-affections are under view, they are only allowed a qualified goodness in virtue of their indirect contribution to the good of the species, yet conversely, the superiority of the affections, which have this latter good for their object, is urged specially on the ground of the greater amount of happiness or ‘self-good’ which they produce.
[1] ‘Inquiry concerning Virtue,’ Book I. part 2, sec. 1.
[2] Ibid., Book I., part 2, sec. 2.
[3] Ibid., Book II., part 1, sec. 3.
Confusion in his notions of self-good and public good: Is all living for pleasure, or only too much of it, selfish?