Exploring Hume’s Philosophy: Impressions, Ethics, Religion, and Justice
Critical to the Concept of “External World”
Impressions of a supposed reality (the world) are beyond our minds and do not have any print or experience. No impressions can come from an alleged cause or origin of the prints. This is phenomenism and skepticism. Descartes said that the foundation of knowledge is innate ideas. Hume says that the criterion of truth is the beginning of the copy: truth is only an idea that comes from a print. “Substance” is not a certain idea because we do not have any impression of it. Perceptions appear associated with each other, without it being possible to find real connections between them, but only the succession and continuity of space-matched temporal leads. We can never be absolutely sure of our impressions; to the contrary, a matter of facts is always possible. This skepticism has moderate adopts Hume, according to him, a double advantage: we care about the dogmatism of metaphysics and abstruse issues, preventing us from addressing the most abstruse, which is referred to the problem of substance (corporeal: the subject-perceived qualities, and spiritual: the self, the subject of mental activity). From now on, however, a problem appears: if science cannot use the concept of “causality” and, furthermore, the inductive method is invalid, then it seems that science is unauthorized to make necessary and universal laws.
Ethics
Ethics intends to perform a task similar to that made by Newton in connection with Nature: the establishment of an experimental method based on science.
Critical Rationalism Moral
- Reason alone can never motivate an act of will. Hence it follows that neither is capable of preventing volition or preference to any dispute or emotion.
- Passion: Reason can never oppose passion in the way of freedom.
- Reason is, and should only be, the slave of passions, and cannot claim any other work than to use them and obey them.
- It is not right, but the propensity aversion, guided by the experience of pain or pleasure, is the main source of human action.
- Opposed to Socratic intellectualism, but this is what has always been quirky and always has attacked his opponents as opposed to experience. Hume realized not only that man is a calculating machine, but also that, without appetite and emotional aspects of their nature, would be a home.
- His assertion of psychological determinism pushed to minimize so exaggerated the role played by practical reason in human conduct.
- When any object causes pleasure or pain, we feel an emotion of attraction or aversion, and we are pushed towards the object in question or to avoid it.
Passions: Direct and Indirect
The word “passion” is used so widely that it contains all slopes that can provide some reason for doing or not doing an action. For example, even the serene contemplation of a demonstration of set theory may be another example of why we are enslaved by passion, although this is only the quiet and harmless pleasure of mathematics.
Direct Passions
They arise immediately from the experience of pleasure or pain. We find, among others, desire, aversion, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, despair, security, the desire to punish our enemies, the desire for happiness for our friends, hunger, lust, and other bodily appetites.
Indirect Passions
They do not come simply from feelings of pleasure or pain, but from what Hume calls “a double relation of impressions and ideas.” They are, for example, pride, humility, ambition, vanity, love, hate, envy, pity, malignancy, generosity, and all others derived from these.
Religion
Hume pursues a radical critique of the evidence for the existence of God. Namely: You cannot prove that there is a contradiction in asserting that “God does not exist” (against the ontological argument of Anselm). Neither the principle of causality—that Hume’s criticism reveals—nor the existence of a unique and personal God (cosmological test). And considering the “natural history of religion,” he claims that monotheism preceded polytheism, and this has led to the danger of intolerance. “Being skeptical is the first and most essential step to becoming a sincere Christian believer. This is the proposition that I recommend” (Dialogues on Natural Religion). Thus, Hume returned to the couple’s constant thought: a moderate who wants to save skepticism from dogmatism and superstition.
Justice
Public utility is the only source of justice. By nature, society is beneficial to human beings. One alone could not meet their needs as humans. So self-interest impels humans to become part of society. But this desire is not enough, because fights and conflicts inevitably arise if there are no conventions that establish and regulate the right of ownership. Then there is the need for “a convention agreed to by all members of society to achieve stability in the possession of goods and ensure that everyone can peacefully enjoy all you can acquire by his fortune and industry.” Once this convention to refrain from taking the property of others is adopted, the idea of justice and injustice immediately arises. Therefore, justice is based on common interest within the meaning of utility. But what gives moral obligation or sense of right and wrong? In other words, why associate justice with the idea of virtue and vice and iniquity? The explanation we have to look at the concept of sympathy. Even when injustice affects us personally as victims, we are disappointed because we consider it harmful to society. We share the anger of other people through sympathy. And as what causes disappointment and disapproval of human actions is called “vice,” while the satisfaction produced is called “virtue,” we consider justice as a moral virtue and injustice as a moral vice. “Therefore, interest is the motivation for the establishment of justice, but the feeling of sympathy due to public interest is the approval that accompanies moral virtue.” Justice will be an “artificial virtue” because it presupposes a convention based on human self-interest. It produces pleasure and approval “by an artifice arising from circumstances and the need of mankind.” The sense of justice emerged as an agreement to remedy certain disadvantages of human life. The remedy, therefore, is not derived from nature, but from artifice. Justice is artificial because it is an invention to remedy our human selfishness and desire to take the properties of others, defects that join the shortcomings of human nature in satisfying our needs. If these conditions exist, there would be the virtue of justice. However, “when an invention is clearly and absolutely necessary, it can be said with propriety that it is as natural as if coming from the beginning immediately, without the intervention of thought or reflection. Although the rules of justice are artificial, they are not arbitrary.”