50. It was a necessary incident of this process that Locke’s notion of a Law of God, conformity to which rendered actions ‘in their own nature right and wrong,’ should disappear. The existence of such a law cannot be explained as a result of any desire for pleasure, nor conformity to it as a mode of pleasure. Locke, indeed, tries to bring the goodness, consisting in such conformity, under his general definition by treating it as equivalent to the production of pleasure in another world. This, however, is to seek refuge from the contradictory in the unmeaning. The question—Is it the pleasure it produces, or its conformity to law, that constitutes the goodness of an act?—remains unanswered, while the further one is suggested—What meaning has pleasure except as the pleasure we experience? [1] Between pleasure, then, and a ‘conformity’ irreducible to pleasure, as the moral standard, the reader of Locke had to choose. Clarke, supported by Locke’s occasional assimilation of moral to mathematical truth, had elaborated the notion of conformity. To him an action was ‘in its own nature right’ when it conformed to the ‘reason of things’—i.e. to certain ‘eternal proportions,’ by which God, ‘qui omnia numero, ordine, mensurâ posuit,’ obliges Himself to govern the world, and of which reason in us is ‘the appearance.’ [2] Thus reason, as an eternal ‘agreement or disagreement of ideas,’ was the standard to which action ought to conform, and, as our consciousness of such agreement, at once the judge of and motive to conformity. To this Hume’s reply is in effect the challenge to instance any act, of which the morality consists either in any of those four relations, ‘depending on the nature of the ideas related,’ which he regarded as alone admitting of demonstration, or in any other of those relations (contiguity, identity, and cause and effect) which, as ‘matters of fact,’ can be ‘discovered by the understanding.’ [3] Such a challenge admits of no reply, and no other function but the perception of such relations being allowed to reason or understanding in the school of Locke, it follows that it is not this faculty which either constitutes, or gives the consciousness of, the morally good. Reason excluded, feeling remains. No action, then, can be called ‘right in its own nature,’ if that is taken to imply (as ‘conformity to divine law’ must be), relation to something else than our feeling. It could only be so called with propriety in the sense of exciting some pleasure immediately, as distinct from an act which may be a condition of the attainment of pleasure, but does not directly convey it.
[1] Above, sec. 14.
[2] Boyle Lectures, Vol. II, prop. 1. secs. 1-4.
[3] Book III. part 1, sec. 1. (Cf. Book I part 3, sec. 1, and Introduction to Vol. I, secs. 283 and ff.) It will be observed that throughout the polemic against Clarke and his congeners Hume writes as if there were a difference between objects of reason and feeling, which he could not consistently admit. He begins by putting the question thus (page 234), ‘whether ‘tis by means of our ideas or impressions we distinguish betwixt vice and virtue:’ but if, as he tells us, ‘the idea is merely the weaker impression, and the impression the stronger idea,’ such a question has no meaning. In like manner he concludes by saying (page 245) that ‘vice and virtue may be compared to sounds, colours, heat and cold, which are not qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind.’ But, since the whole drift of Book I. is to show that all ‘objective relations’ are such ‘perceptions’ or their succession, this still leaves us without any distinction between science and morality that shall be tenable according to his own doctrine.
With Hume, moral good is pleasure excited in a particular way, viz.: in the spectator of the ‘good’ act and by the view of its tendency to produce pleasure.
51. So far, however, there is nothing to distinguish the moral act either from any ‘inanimate object,’ which may equally excite immediate pleasure, or from actions which have no character, as virtuous or vicious, at all. Some further limitation, then, must be found for the immediate pleasure which constitutes the goodness called ‘moral,’ and of which praise is the expression. This Hume finds in the exciting object which must be (a) ‘considered in general and without reference to our particular interest,’ and (b) an object so ‘related’ (in the sense above [1] explained) to oneself or to another as that the pleasure which it excites shall cause the further pleasure either of pride or love. [2] The precise effect of such limitation he does not explain in detail. A man’s pictures, gardens, and clothes, we have been told, tend to excite pride in himself and love in others. If then we can ‘consider them in general and without reference to our particular interest,’ and in such ‘mere survey’ find pleasure, this pleasure, according to Hume’s showing, will constitute them morally good. [3] He usually takes for granted, however, a further limitation of the pleasure in question, as excited only by ‘actions, sentiments, and characters,’ and thus finds virtue to consist in the ‘satisfaction produced to the spectator of an act or character by the mere view of it.’ [4] Virtues and vices then mean, as Locke well said, the usual likes and dislikes of society. If we choose with him to call that virtue of an act, which really consists in the pleasure experienced by the spectator of it, ‘conformity to the law of their opinion,’ we may do so, provided we do not suppose that there is some other law, which this imperfectly reflects, and that the virtue is something other than the pleasure, but to be inferred from it. ‘We do not infer a character to be virtuous, because it pleases; but in feeling that it pleases after such a particular manner, we in effect feel that it is virtuous.’ [5]
[1] Sec. 33.
[2] Vol. II. pp. 247 and 248. [Book III., part I., sec. II.]
[3] Hume treats them as such in Book III. part 3, sec. 5.
[4] Vol. II. p. 251. Cf. p. 225. [Book III., part I., sec. II.; Book II., part III., sec. X.]