EARLY MODERN MORAL THEORY: Hobbes, Spinoza, and Hume
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was a British ethics thinker who maintained that since material reality is all there is, our moral behavior should be directed by physiological drives to avoid pain and maximize pleasure. This psycho-physical view of human life led him to conclude that what we call “moral” decisions are really simply choices based on what course of action would seem to bring the greatest amount of happiness, or pleasure, and helps us avoid the greatest amount of pain. This view is called “psychological egoism.” According to this view “good” and “bad”, “right” and “wrong” are merely names for what brings us the greatest amount of pleasure or helps us avoid the most pain.
According to Hobbes, then, the value judgments we make simply reflect our individual self-interests. When it came to deciding group, or social, policies, Hobbes was quite straight forward about advocating a dictatorship wherein the ruler promises to rule in a way that seeks the greatest amount of peace and quiet and the citizens agree to obey absolutely the judgments made by the ruler/king. Above all else, Hobbes maintained, a country must have peace and harmony, the confidence that over the long haul the ruler will behave in a manner that maximizes the peace and security of the people, of the “commonwealth.” There are, to be sure, many serious questions that can be raised about how such a dictatorial society would and could function without leading to a revolution.
Baruch Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677) as an ostracized Jew lived in Holland and there developed a spectacle grinding business and wrote philosophy at night so as not to be beholden to any “official” powers that might curtail his life and thought. Spinoza was a pantheist and developed his views in his book Ethics. He very much disagreed with the official dictates of the Jewish religion and was at odds its teachings. Specifically, for instance, Spinoza wondered why the first five books of the Old Testament are said to have been written by Moses, when its final chapters tell of Moses’s death.
Since he believed that God and the world are really just two sides of the same coin, there can be no conflicts about what will take place in the world. All that matters is that we learn to be comfortable with whatever happens since it must be for the best. In other words, our choices about our attitudes and behavior can either be harmonious with or in conflict with what God has chosen to happen. It is up to us to decide to co-operate with the turns of events, or not, and take the necessary consequences. Surely, he argued, it is the better side of wisdom to merely accept whatever happens as the will of God. It was and is the “will of God.”
Daivid Hume (1711-1776) was a Scott and is perhaps the most well-known Scottish thinker. Hume’s views on morality are best had serious reservations about the veracity of the doctrines of the Christian religion, he pretty much kept them to himself. His more radical religious views were revealed posthumously in his most famous work Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Therein he questioned the veracity of the biblical accounts of miracles as well as the logic of the traditional “proofs” of God’s existence. He also, however, confessed that “Our religion is based on faith not reason.” Hume never held an academic position, spending his life as a “civil servant” and in writing a good many well-thought of books, especially his six volume History of England.
Hume’s views on morality are based in his empiricist theories concerning human experience. Briefly, Hume held that all of our so-called knowledge is derived from the sensory input from physical experience into the brain. The world comes to us through our senses, and we must simply “take what we get” from them. Thus, we have no way to be sure about what sensory data will be given to us next. Granted, our past experience has had certain patterns, but we have no way to “know” if these patterns will persist. In short, Hume was a skeptic when it came to making any claims about future experiences. Our so-called “knowledge” is nothing but a memory book concerning the past and no predictor of the future.
When it came to ethics, Hume argued that our individual moral views are strictly a function of our memories of past experiences in which we have either felt approval or disapproval for our behavior. In short, our ethical commitments and judgements are basically the result of whether or not certain actions and behaviors have in the past resulted in favorable or unfavorable emotional results for us. We are praised for certain actions and blame for others. The former results in the development of positive judgements, namely “good” or “right”, while the latter result in negative judgements, namely “bad” or “wrong”. These experiences form the basis of our morality.
Fortunately, over time the vast number of people have come to the same conclusions about which behaviors are “good” and which are “wrong.” Hume, then, argued that morality is strictly “subjective”, period. Ethical judgements are then, for Hume, strictly “subjective”. Strictly a matter of feeling. Hopefully, he said, we can continue to agree on which “feelings” are most productive to human happiness and which are not. Hume’s term for this basis of morality was simply “sentiment.” He argued that morality is in the end a matter of “group think”, and we have so far been fortunate that humankind on the whole has agreed alike.
One response to “”
Two thoughts.
One: What value do you take from, or what evaluation do you make of, these fine thinkers?!
Two: I hope we can derive more from Hume if we take his empiricism as pointing the way to a more-than-empiricist grounding. In section 1 of the *Enquiry Concerning Principles of Morals*, Hume writes,
“The final sentence, it is probable, which pronounces characters and actions amiable or odious, praise-worthy or blameable; that which stamps on them the mark of honour or infamy, approbation or censure; that which renders morality an active principle and constitutes virtue our happiness, and vice our misery; it is probable, I say, that this final sentence depends on some internal sense or feeling, which nature has made universal in the whole species.”
Don’t focus on the FEELING part so much as on the MADE UNIVERSAL part.
If (after admitting limits to universality in judgments) we dare to consider what might underly such universal judgments as remain, I think we could defend more than just “group think” and hoping for continued agreement. As Merleau-Ponty identifies the BODY as a kind of transcendental precondition of experience, might post-Humeans look to it as a transcendental precondition of moral experience?