Hume on Moral Taste and Secondary Qualities

Hume on Moral Taste and Secondary Qualities
Comments on John Corvino’s “Hume and the Secondary-Quality Analogy”

by
GeoffSayre-McCord
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
USA

John Corvino has two primary aims in his paper. The first is to show that Hume not only meant to, but that he could legitimately, rely on Modern Philosophy’s characterization of secondary qualities to explain his own account of moral qualities. The second is to explore the implications of the analogy, with an eye, especially, to identifying a difficulty that comes with then with making sense of Hume’s claim that as along as our own sentiments of pleasure and uneasiness are “favorable to virtue, and unfavourable to vice, no more can be requisite to the regulation of our conduct and behavior.” Specifically, Corvino is at least worried that, contra Hume’s claim, it should give umbrage to moralists.

Defending the Analogy

In service of his first aim, Corvino rightly identifies a number of places where Hume explicitly draws the comparison between moral qualities and sensible qualities as they are understood by Modern Philosophy. These can be found in later work, as well as earlier, and in essays that indisputably express Hume’s own views, as well as those that might be thought merely to reflect a pose taken in the service of making some point.

With Corvino, I think there is really no doubt that Hume intended the analogy to be taken seriously and relied upon in understanding his own view of moral qualities.

Yet, of course, saying that is compatible with thinking that Hume meant only to stress one element of the analogy: the clear candidate being that both sorts of qualities are in some way dependent upon perceptions. As Simon Blackburn would have it, Hume must have meant only that, since – given Hume’s views of Modern Philosophy’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities – he could not legitimately have meant anything more. I won’t go into the details of Corvino’s argument here, since I think they are clear and right. The main point is that the complaints Hume has against Modern Philosophy (when it comes to the primary/secondary quality distinction) all have to do with our inability to form an adequate idea of primary qualities and that raises no problem at all for Modern Philosophy’s understanding of secondary qualities.[1] And that means there is no problem is using that understanding to articulate Hume’s view of moral qualities.

So I think it is fair and right to say that Hume both meant to and could legitimately rely on the analogy with secondary qualities to explain his own view of moral qualities. Unfortunately, saying that doesn’t by itself tell us how the analogy should be understood.

Pursuing the Analogy

Hume is, in fact, some help. Looking just at the first of the passages quoted by Corvino, Hume identifies several respects in which sensible qualities and moral qualities are supposed to be the same.[2]For our purposes, the important respects are that both moral qualities and secondary qualities depend upon the constitution of our nature and the feelings we consequently have; that both areperception dependent; and that both are, despite this, real in whatever way matters to practice.

Corvino adds to these by identifying two more respects (that he acknowledges are not in the passages he quotes) in which moral qualities (as Hume understands them) seem to be analogous to secondary qualities.

The first is that, like our perceptions of secondary qualities, our moral sentiments are responses to, and caused by, “specific features of the world.” In the case of the secondary qualities the causes of our perceptions are (as Modern Philosophy would have it) certain primary qualities. In the case of the moral qualities, the causes of our moral sentiments are certain traits of character. (Of course, in both cases the effects are acknowledged to be dependent not only on the features of the world but also the constitution of the person in which they are caused.)

The second is that there is, on Modern Philosophy’s view of secondary qualities and Hume’s view of moral qualities, no reason to think there are features of the world that perceptions or the sentiments in question, respectively, resemble.

Later in the paper, Corvino turns to “Of the Standard of Taste” and finds in that essay confirmation of his suggestion that Hume thinks that moral sentiment are caused by specific features of the world and, indeed, that moral sentiments “can be correct or incorrect, in virtue of their ‘fit’ with relevant external qualities.”

The view that emerges, if I understand it, goes like this. People have character traits of certain sorts (they are kind or cruel, generous or selfish, etc, where these traits are supposed to be characterizable in some value neutral way). A person’s moral sentiments, felt as a result of the idea of this trait, can “go wrong” (as Corvino puts it) in either of two ways. They will have gone wrong if the person “lacks relevant facts or incorrectly perceives the facts.” And they will have gone wrong if they differ from the sentiments that a “impartial, experiences, informed moral judges would feel in such circumstances.”

Corvino goes on to note how Hume uses a story adapted from Don Quixote to drive home the point that not everyone is equally good at discovering the relevant facts. A discriminating palate, when it comes to wine, is a necessary condition for having one’s reactions to the wine count. Of course, as Corvino notes, that one is better able to discern various qualities is no guarantee at all that one’s taste will be appropriately responsive to those qualities. Similarly, Corvino notes, if we run across someone who is especially good at determining the long range consequences of various things we “might come to trust that person’s ‘moral sense’ even when we find her predictions of consequences unconvincing, since we know from past experience that she has a more acute sense of the relevant details than most.” Of course, we might not, too. Trusting a person’s ability to detect various consequences is different from trusting their moral reactions to those consequences. Just as trusting that someone can tell that some wine contained a key on a piece of leather is different from trusting their taste in wine. In any case, there are importantly two factors in play, a person’s ability to discern the facts and a person’s reaction (perceptual or sentimental) to those facts. Hume has no real problem accounting for either sort of difference. But he has real trouble, it seems, when it comes to discriminating among the various different tastes and sentiments people might have to the facts, if he wants to claim some are true or right or correct and others not.

A hollow reassurance?

And this brings us to the problem Corvino introduces at the end of his paper. Recall that according to Hume, as long as our moral sentiments “be favourable to virtue, and unfavorable to vice, no more can be requisite to the regulation of our conduct and behavior.” As Corvino reads this passage, it is meant to reassure us that Hume’s own view of morality is no practical threat because, as it would have it, the sentiments will line up appropriately with the virtues and against the vices, leaving us needing nothing else for “the regulation of our conduct and behavior.”

This is small consolation, Corvino notes, if it turns out to be trivially true (on Hume’s view) that the moral sentiments are favourable to virtue and unfavourable to vice. To avoid this trivializing result, Hume must be (Corvino points out) thinking that the virtues and vices are distinct from the sentiments. That means we should not (contrary to some things Hume implies) simply identify virtue with the feeling or sentiment one feels on contemplating some character. The right thing to do in this case, Corvino notes, is to distinguish between the feeling or sentiment caused, on the one hand, and the trait that causes that feeling, identifying the virtue with the latter, not the former.

Fair enough, Corvino says. But that leaves an important difficulty. Even if we distinguish the sentiment from the trait that causes it, it seems as if moral sentiment will always (on Hume’s account) inevitably and trivially be favourable to virtue and unfovourable to vice. Or at least that is how it seems on the (so called) Standard View of Hume, according to which what traits get counted as virtues and what traits get counted as vice is determined simply by whether we approve or disapprove of them. For then again Hume’s assurance that sentiments will line up appropriately with virtue seems hollow, at best. “It would be,” Corvino writes, “as if Hume had said, “Don’t worry. People will approve of whatever they approve of and disapprove of whatever they disapprove of.”

Some (not fully satisfying) Responses

Corvino then moves through, and rejects, three possibilities and then lands on a fourth that would work to make sense of the reassurance, but does not fit well with the Standard View. I will run through all four quickly:

1. Radical subjectivism that identifies virtues with whatever the observer approves of. Corvino points out that this fits neither with Hume’s emphasis on the social role of moral thinking nor with his suggestion that the view he is developing will work well for the regulation of our conduct and behavior.

2. Intersubjectivism that identifies virtues with whatever humankind as a whole (or perhaps in general or usually or on average) approves of. Corvino points out that this view has trouble making sense of what we think of the moral upshot of people changing in a way that would lead all or most people approving of torturing children for fun. That would not mean the disposition to torture was a virtue; it would mean people had become morally reprehensible. Corvino considers responding to this by dismissing it as a pointless hypothetical that might show that were people different virtues too would be different but that is otherwise not to the point. Corvino rightly guesses that not everyone would be satisfied. The main reason not to be satisfied is not found in the (really implausible) idea that what the virtues and vices are depends, to some extent, on what people are like. Rather, the problem is that we think the change in question would not turn the disposition to torture into a virtue, and unless we have reason to reject that view, we have reason to reject any view that implies otherwise.

3. A version of quasi-realism that treats the counting of something as a virtue as the expressing of ones’s approval of it and not the reporting of one’s own, or others’, approval of it. Corvino moves away from this suggestion on the grounds that it fits uncomfortably with aspects of Hume’s view that appeal, quite explicitly, to the shared sentiments of humankind as essential.

4. A version of realism that treats the standing of various traits as virtues and vices as wholly independent of our sentiments, even as it acknowledges, and perhaps emphasizes the epistemological role those sentiments have in discovering the relevant qualities. This view, of course, fits poorly not only with the Standard View but also I think with any interpretation that does justice to the text.

Corvino’s own reaction to these four proposals is, I think, to acknowledge that each (or maybe all but the first) has something to be said in its favor and to note that finding a way to reconcile or choose among them may not have been of much importance to Hume. I myself think the fourth view, as Corvino sets it out, really is implausible as a reading of Hume and suspect that Hume would care a fair amount to reject it. But I agree that the other views each capture a theme that can be found in Hume. Moreover, I think that Hume would embraces something that many attracted by 4 would endorse: that our actual reactions to various characters play an epistemological role in discovering virtues (as our visual experience plays an epistemological role in discovering colors) and there is nothing incoherent in thinking we might either get everything wrong when it comes to judging virtues or go virtue-blind (ourselves feeling no moral sentiments at all or feeling them in a haphazard manner).

Another Response, pursuing the analogy further

What I will do in the remainder of these comments is sketch briefly a fifth proposal that I think is closer to Hume’s own view that the four I just ran through, and in any case, builds directly on the secondary quality analogy that Corvino rightly argues is appropriately appealed to in understanding Hume.

To that end, let me remind you that Hume has the resources to distinguish between our various perceptions of sensible qualities – our seeing things as red, or feeling them as hot or hearing them as loud – and our judging things to have the qualities in question. And he has the resources as well to distinguish between someone making that judgment, to the effect that something has a certain sensible quality and the judgment being true.

The first distinction is made possible, and comes on the scene, once people acquire the ability to mark a difference between seeming a certain way, and being that way. In other words, they need to have available a criterion or standard that can mark the difference between appearance and reality. In the case of colors, it is “the appearance of objects in day-light, to the eye of a man in health.” Thus, while a number of things under a range of circumstances, to different people, may appear red, only those things that would appear that way in day-light, to the eye of a man in health” are actually red.

The second distinction is then immediately available and marks the difference between someone who mistakenly thinks something meets the criterion or lives up to the standard and someone who correctly thinks something meets the criterion or standard. Thus, once someone has the capacity not merely to have visual experiences (which presumably animals and young children have) but also the capacity to judge of things that they satisfy some criterion, they can make color judgments that are true or false.

These distinctions need not and donot suppose that nature demands one or another criterion or standard be introduced. Which criterion or standard is introduced (if any) will determine which particular concept is constituted, with different possible standards offering the possibility of different (albeit potentially related) concepts. Different communities can, for instance, have different color concepts, each one able to make judgments (some true, others not) about the colors of things, even as the judgments available to one might not be available to the other.

At the same time, though, nature does shape which ones, if any, will work. Unless certain conditions hold and people share certain capacities and reactions, no stable standard can be introduced and so no concept can be constituted. For this reason, the possibility of things counting as truly red depends on certain perceptions.

This means that while our concepts of sensible qualities may not be of perception dependent qualities, they are perception dependent concepts of qualities. We might not think of red things as being red because of our perceptions, but if we did not have the perceptions we do, we would not be able to think of them as red.[3]And if there was no concept of redness, nothing would count as satisfying it (since it would not exist).

Thinking these distinctions are available is perfectly compatible with thinking (as Hume does) that the qualities in question cannot be discover by reason alone and that impressions of the right sort are essential not only to our capacity to discover, but even our capacity to think about, the existence of various qualities.

All of this, I think, carries over without change to Hume’s understanding of morality. Of course the perceptions involved different; they are moral sentiments of approbation and disapprobation, rather than perceptions of sensible qualities. And this difference introduces some other interesting complexities. But these differences do not in any way undermine Hume’s ability to draw the same distinctions in the moral case as he does in the case of secondary qualities. In fact, he extends the account explicitly in the context of discussing the criterion or standard for taste writing

In each creature, there is a sound and a defective state; and the former alone can be supposed to afford us a true standard of taste and sentiment. If, in the sound state of the organ, there be an entire or a considerable uniformity of sentiment among men, we may thence derive an idea of the perfect beauty; in like manner as the appearance of objects in day-light, to the eye of a man in health, is denominated their true and real colour, even while colour is allowed to be merely a phantasm of the senses.

Hume takes exactly the same line, I think, with respect to morality. Beauty and virtue, no less than color or temperature, are, on the one hand, phantasms of the sense (remove the perceptions and they disappear) and, on the other hand, such that people judge of them in ways that we can mark as true or false, as capturing or not their “true and real” nature.