[5] Vol. II. p. 247. [Book III., part I., sec. II.]
52. Some further explanation, however, of the ‘particular manner’ of this pleasure was clearly needed in order at once to adjust it to the doctrine previously given of the passions (of which this, as a pleasant emotion, must be one), and to account for our speaking of the actions which excite it—at least of some of them—as actions which we ought to do. If we revert to the account of the passions, we can have no difficulty in fixing on that of which this peculiar pleasure, excited by the ‘mere survey’ of an action without reference to the spectator’s ‘particular interest,’ must be a mode. It must be a kind of sympathy—pleasure felt by the spectator in the pleasure of another, as distinct from what might be felt in the prospect of pleasure to himself. [1] On the other hand, there seem to be certain discrepancies between pleasure and moral sentiment. We sympathise where we neither approve nor disapprove; and, conversely, we express approbation where it would seem there was no pleasure to sympathise with, e.g., in regard to an act of simple justice, or where the person experiencing it was one with whom we could have no fellow-feeling—an enemy, a stranger, a character in history—or where the experience, being one not of pleasure but of pain (say, that of a martyr at the stake), should excite the reverse of approbation in the spectator, if approbation means pleasure sympathised with. Our sympathies, moreover, are highly variable, but our moral sentiments on the whole constant. How must ‘sympathy’ be qualified, in order that, when we identify moral sentiment with it, these objections may be avoided?
[1] Vol. II. pp. 335-337. [Book III., part III., sec. I.]
Moral sense is thus sympathy with pleasure qualified by consideration of general tendencies.
53. Hume’s answer, in brief, is that the sympathy, which constitutes moral sentiment, is sympathy qualified by the consideration of ‘general tendencies.’ Thus we sympathise with the pleasure arising from any casual action, but the sympathy does not become moral approbation unless the act is regarded as a sign of some quality or character, generally permanently agreeable or useful (sc. and productive of pleasure directly or indirectly) to the agent or others. An act of justice may not be productive of any immediate pleasure with which we can sympathise; nay, taken singly, it may cause pain both in itself and in its results, as when a judge ‘takes from the poor to give to the rich, or bestows on the dissolute the labour of the industrious; ‘but we sympathise with the general satisfaction resulting to society from ‘the whole scheme of law and justice,’ to which the act in question belongs, and approve it accordingly. The constancy which leads to a dungeon is a painful commodity to its possessor, but sympathy with his pain need not incapacitate a spectator for that other sympathy with the general pleasure caused by such a character to others, which constitutes it virtuous. Again, though remote situation or the state of one’s temper may at any time modify or suppress sympathy with the pleasure caused by the good qualities of any particular person, we may still apply to him terms expressive of our liking. ‘External beauty is determined merely by pleasure; and ‘tis evident a beautiful countenance cannot give so much pleasure, when seen at a distance of twenty paces, as when it is brought nearer to us. We say not, however, that it appears to us less beautiful; because we know what effect it will have in such a position, and by that reflection we correct its momentary appearance.’ As with the beautiful, so with the morally good. ‘In order to correct the continual contradictions’ in our judgment of it, that would arise from changes in personal temper or situation, ‘we fix on some steady and general points of view, and always in our thoughts place ourselves in them, whatever may be our present situation.’ Such a point of view is furnished by the consideration of ‘the interest or pleasure of the person himself whose character is examined, and of the persons who have a connection with him,’ as distinct from the spectator’s own. The imagination in time learns to ‘adhere to these general views, and distinguishes the feelings they produce from those which arise from our particular and momentary situation.’ Thus a certain constancy is introduced into sentiments of blame and praise, and the variations, to which they continue subject, do not appear in language, which ‘experience teaches us to correct, even where our sentiments are more stubborn and unalterable.’ [1]
[1] Book III. Vol. II. part 3, sec. 1. Specially pp. 339, 342, 346, 349.
In order to account for the facts it has to become sympathy with unfelt feelings.
54. It thus appears that though the virtue of an act means the pleasure which it causes to a spectator, and though this again arises from sympathy with imagined pleasure of the doer or others, yet the former may be a pleasure which no particular spectator at any given time does actually feel—he need only know that under other conditions on his part he would feel it—and the latter pleasure may be one either not felt at all by any existing person, or only felt as the opposite of the uneasiness with which society witnesses a departure from its general rules. Of the essential distinction between a feeling of pleasure or pain and a knowledge of the conditions under which a pleasure or pain is generally felt, Hume shows no suspicion; nor, while he admits that without substitution of the knowledge for the feeling there could be no general standard of praise or blame, does he ask himself what the quest for such a standard implies. As little does he trouble himself to explain how there can be such sympathy with an unfelt feeling—with a pleasure which no one actually feels but which is possible for posterity—as will explain our approval of the virtue which defies the world, and which is only assumed, for the credit of a theory, to bring pleasure to its possessor, because it certainly brings pleasure to no one else. For the ‘artificial’ virtue, however, of acts done in conformity with the ‘general scheme of justice,’ or other social conventions, he accounts at length in part II. of his Second Book—that entitled ‘Of Justice and Injustice.’
Can the distinction between the ‘moral’ and ‘natural’ be maintained by Hume? What is ‘artificial virtue’?
55. To a generation which has sufficiently freed itself from all ‘mystical’ views of law—which is aware that ‘natural right,’ if it means a right that existed in a ‘state of nature,’ is a contradiction in terms; that, since contracts could not be made, or property exist apart from social convention, any question about a primitive obligation to respect them is unmeaning—the negative side of this part of the treatise can have little interest. That all rights and obligations are in some sense ‘artificial,’ we are as much agreed as that without experience there can be no knowledge. The question is, how the artifice, which constitutes them, is to be understood, and what are its conditions. If we ask what Hume understood by it, we can get no other answer than that the artificial is the opposite of the natural. If we go on to ask for the meaning of the natural, we only learn that we must distinguish the senses in which it is opposed to the miraculous and to the unusual from that in which it is opposed to the artificial, [1] but not what the latter sense is. The truth is that, if the first book of Hume’s treatise has fulfilled its purpose, the only conception of the natural, which can give meaning to the doctrine that the obligation to observe contracts and respect property is artificial, must disappear. There are, we shall find, two different negations which in different contexts this doctrine conveys. Sometimes it means that such an obligation did not exist for man in a ‘state of nature,’ i.e., as man was to begin with. But in that sense the law of cause and effect, without which there would be no nature at all, is, according to Hume, not natural, for it—not merely our recognition of it, but the law itself—is a habit of imagination, gradually formed. Sometimes it conveys an opposition to Clarke’s doctrine of obligation as constituted by certain ‘eternal relations and proportions,’ which also form the order of nature, and are other than, though regulative of, the succession of our feelings. Nature, however, having been reduced by Hume to the succession of our feelings, the ‘artifice,’ by which he supposes obligations to be formed, cannot be determined by opposition to it, unless the operation of motives, which explains the artifice, is something else than a succession of feelings. But that it is nothing else is just what it is one great object of the moral part of his treatise to show.