The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics by Kenan Malik

Author:Kenan Malik [Malik, Kenan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd
Published: 2014-04-30T20:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Passion, duty and consequence

1

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning … when all of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence.1

So wrote David Hume almost as an afterthought in his Treatise of Human Nature. An afterthought it may have been, but there is arguably no single paragraph that has more resonated through modern ethics. Hume’s famous distinction between is and ought – between the world as it exists and the world as we would wish it to be – and his wrenching apart of the realm of facts and the realm of values has indelibly stamped itself upon modern ethical debates and established one of the key distinctions between modern and ancient ethics. Many have come to read Hume as meaning that ought cannot be derived from is, that values do not derive from the facts of the world. That was neither likely to have been Hume’s intention nor the necessary consequence of his argument. Nevertheless, from Hume comes one of the defining features of modern ethics: the separation of facts and values.

David Hume was born in 1711 into minor Scottish nobility. At twelve he went to Edinburgh University to study literature and philosophy. He trained as a lawyer before trying his hand in commerce with a sugar company. Neither life suited him. So he took himself off to France where, for three years, he lived in La Flèche. There, in the library of the Jesuit college at which Descartes had been educated, Hume wrote his first work, A Treatise of Human Nature. He published the book on his return to England, but was so dissatisfied with its reception and with what he regarded as the defects of his own style of writing, that he rewrote parts of the Treatise in a more popular fashion, publishing them as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. He even took out a newspaper advertisement beseeching readers to ignore the original and read the later works. But whatever the immediate reaction, the Treatise came in subsequent centuries to be seen as perhaps Hume’s most important work, and one that helped define his approach to knowledge and to morality.

Like Spinoza’s Ethics, the Treatise opens with a discussion of the character of reality and of mind, moves on to explore the psychology of the passions, and concludes with a consideration of morality derived from his understanding of reality, mind and the passions. But whereas for Spinoza reason, will and the structure of the cosmos were the keys to comprehending morality, for Hume it was the structure of the mind and the nature of the passions.

Traditional moral philosophy, Hume wrote, had depended ‘more upon Invention than Experience’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.