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Title: Of Hume, Greed, and Passions
Date Submitted:November 1, 2004
Of Hume, Greed, and Passions
Abstract
In this era of Enron, Worldcom, and Oil-for-food scandals greed is a topic of major concern throughout the world. In the modern era greed is one of many vices used to illustrate discussions of character and motivation. However, greed is rarely defined or given a full treatment as to its nature and moral psychology. David Hume discusses the value of wealth and “riches” in his moral system. He also uses greed in the form of “avarice” in a list of vices and virtues when expounding on his theory of the passions. It is only in an essay “Of Avarice” that he attempts to treat acquisitive avarice and retentive avarice (miserliness) at some length. However, Hume never formally categorizes either avarice or miserliness into one of his passions. This paper looks at Hume’s discussion of avarice in his various major texts and attempts to assess where Hume might have placed it within his system of passions, recognizing that Hume has two types of passions, “inferior” and “mixt,” which he doesn’t sufficiently explicate. Ultimately I conclude that acquisitive avarice is a type of mixt passion and miserliness is an indirect passion. At the same time broader questions of Hume’s understanding of “mixt” and “inferior” passions are explored.
Of Hume, Greed, and Passions
It is through the hustle of commerceand the arts, through the greedy self-interest of profit, and through softness and love of amenities that personal services are replaced by money payments. Men surrender a part of their profits in order to have time to increase them at leisure. Make gifts of money, and you will not be long without chains.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Social Contract, Book III, Chapter 15
Greed is prominent in today’s headlines. From Enron to Worldcom to Alan Greenspan’s “infectious greed,” everyone is talking about it. Given the currency of this topic, it’s only natural to ask, “How does David Hume assess this vice?” For Hume greed is a core moral passion for the basis of society related to property rights, central to his discussion of the origin of justice and the state, and a critical component of his defense of commercialism. Yet Hume’s use of the term “avarice” makes it difficult for the reader to understand what Hume means by avarice, where it comes from, and how to cure it when it becomes excessive. Hume calls avarice a vice and a passion, but never tells us what type of passion it is, or how it fits into his moral schema. In this paper I show that Hume’s notion of avarice is complex and enigmatic. He conflates and differentiates avarice from miserliness, really two passions, the first of which I assess as a type of Hume’s “mixt” passion, and the second of which is an indirect passion. Only one of these passions is a motivating passion, and therefore a true morally blameworthy vice as defined by Hume.
In the eighteenth century “greed” as we use it today was generally called “avarice.”[1] There are several forms of greed, all of which have material goods as their object of desire or control. Those goods can include money or other material possessions. Avarice always indicates a condition that is a problem of “…self-regulating [and] of disproportion.”[2] In contemporary usage the term “greed” has multiple meanings: (a) we might say someone’s action is greedy by viewing an individual’s single act that is the pursuit of some material possession unfairly. (b) We might characterize someone as greedy by watching their actions over time, observing that they have certain habits of action that are consistently oriented toward the dogged, insatiable accumulation of material goods. It is this form of greed that I will call ”avarice” in this paper. (c) We might call someone greedy because they hoard their wealth[3] and don’t use it for the pursuit of pleasure for themselves or their loved ones, what I call “miserliness” herein.. (d) Or we might say a person is greedy when they don’t share their wealth (no matter how big or small their wealth may be) in charitable ways; that is, when they lack generosity; what I will term “stinginess.”
Greed of type (a) above may be an aberration of an individual’s normal temperaments. Indeed, in a reflective moment we generally could not say that someone has a greedy character if they perform only a single, time-limited act. Hume does not address this type of greed directly. Avarice according to Hume is the rabid pursuit of the accumulation of possessions. He mentions this type of greed only sporadically in his Treatise and Enquiries, but more systematically in his essay, “Of Avarice.”[4]
Stinginess Hume only sporadically addresses, as lack of generosity or charitableness. While I will briefly address type (a) greed below (and show how I agree with Hume that this is not really greed as a vice), for the most part in this paper I shall focus on avarice and miserliness, traits that Hume sometimes considers as components of a single “avarice,” and sometimes treats separately. In order to show how avarice and miserliness are truly different types of passions, I will first discuss Hume’s view of avarice and miserliness, then discuss his system of the passions, motives, and virtues/vices, and finally showing why avarice only is a motivating, mixt passion, while miserliness is a type of indirect passion.
I.
Hume’s characterization of avarice is closely related to what he calls “riches” – the pursuit or aggregation of material goods. In order to understand the underlying concern Hume has with avarice, we first need to view his understanding of riches in ordinary human life.
Riches are something to be admired and pursued. “The very essence of riches consists in the power of procuring the pleasures and conveniencies of life.” (2.1.10.10, 205) Hume states in EPM: “riches are desired for ourselves only as the means of gratifying our appetites, either at present or in some imaginary future period”. (EPM 6.33, 129) Owning possessions has a purpose: to gratify our appetites now or in the future. Possessions are instrumental in their value. They are to be used for a purpose, not as a pursuit in and of themselves.[5]
Luxury is beneficial for the enjoyment of life; the intrinsic good of luxury is valuable and cause for increasing happiness, though “when carried a degree too far, is a quality pernicious, though perhaps not the most pernicious, to political society.” (“Of Refinement in the Arts” EPML, 269) Though Hume does claim there is an upper limit to the love of money itself, he doesn’t seem to put an upper limit on riches per se, yet he describes the point at which luxury can be pursued “a degree too far”:
No gratification, however sensual, can of itself be esteemed vicious. A gratification is only vicious, when it engrosses all a man’s expence, and leaves no ability for such acts of duty and generosity as are required by his situation and fortune. (EPML, p279)
Furthermore, we can never possess enough goods to gratify our appetites, though to the ordinary person excessively pursuing possessions is frightening, requiring internal virtuous character traits and external social traits to restrain ourselves in that pursuit:
This avidity alone, of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society. There scarce is any one, who is not actuated by it; and there is no one, who has not reason to fear from it, when it acts without any restraint, and gives way to its first and most natural movements. So that upon the whole, we are to esteem the difficulties in the establishment of society, to be greater or less, according to those we encounter in regulating and restraining this passion. (3.2.2.12, 316)
In other words, avarice type (b), the insatiable pursuit of wealth accumulation, is a natural tendency only controlled by artificial constraints imposed by society. To act on this tendency is to be human. To not act on this tendency must be a learned trait. This “avidity” to pursue wealth is the most dangerous of our tendencies, and therefore the most important purpose of society:
No one can doubt, that the convention for the distinction of property, and for the stability of possession, is of all circumstances the most necessary to the establishment of human society, and that after the agreement for the fixing and observing of this rule, there remains little or nothing to be done towards settling a perfect harmony and concord. (3.2.2.12, pp315-6)
We admire the rich and seem to take pleasure in their riches in several ways. Yet at the same time we envy them their possessions and luxuries which accrue from them. Thus from the third person perspective, riches provide conflicting emotions. If owned by others, according to Hume, we admire them. If not owned by us, we pursue them. Yet also Hume clearly states that riches, if owned by others, cause in us envy,[6] a painful passion, which may or may not motivate us to pursue riches for ourselves. When we reflect on our own condition and compare it to that of those with more than we have, whether it be wealth, power, or reputation, we feel a pleasure or pain depending on if we compare ourselves favorably or lesser off.[7] Hence envy is produced in us when we view another’s enjoyment, compare that enjoyment to our own, find our own wanting, and therefore feel the pain of our inadequacy. This can be quite useful in motivating us, if we are motivated in the right direction, in this case toward commerce.
For the most part, Hume has an entirely different take on the value of envy and avarice when it comes to commerce.[8] He states that avarice is a useful trait in commerce – perhaps even a virtue – particularly where it helps to build industry for society. In his essay “Of Commerce”[9] Hume states that commerce enhances the state by building tax revenues and egalitarianism, by improving the lot of all citizens without having to overly burden the lesser-off citizens with excessive taxes.
Every person, if possible, ought to enjoy the fruits of his labour, in a full possession of all the necessaries, and many of the conveniences of life […] an equality is most suitable to human nature, and diminishes much less from the happiness of the rich than it adds to that of the poor.” (EPML, p265)
This also makes taxation more palatable, as “[…] when the riches are dispersed among multitudes, the burthen feels light on every shoulder, and the taxes make not a very sensible difference on any one’s way of living.” (Ibid.)
As the art of agriculture improves, laborers are less needed for husbandry, freeing them up to increase the manufacturing labor pool for production of goods and services that go beyond subsistence requirements into “manufactures and commodities.” The laborer, having the ability to obtain goods beyond subsistence, is motivated to work harder, producing more goods, which can then be taxed for their value added.
One of Hume’s general tenets is that we work because of our passions: “Every thing in the world is purchased by labour; and our passions are the only causes of labour.” (EPML, 261) Rotwein points out that avarice is “linked not to the desire for pleasure but rather to the pursuit of ‘lucrative employment’ qua action.”[10] The state should use this source of motivation by using the passions “to govern men by other passions, and animate them with a spirit of avarice and industry, art and luxury.” (EPML, p263) In this regard, he is consistent with Mandeville, who goes farther than Hume and praises the vices of pride, avarice, and the avid pursuit of enjoyment as a way of helping nation-states increase their prosperity.[11] However Hume deviates from Mandeville in recommending moderation. As Frey states, “pursuit of self-interest in the marketplace is not the same as the reckless pursuit of it.”[12]
II.
The best excuse that can be made for avarice is, that it generally prevails in old men, or in men of cold tempers, where all the other affections are extinct, and the mind being incapable of remaining without some passion or pursuit, at last finds out this monstrously absurd one, which suits the coldness and inactivity of itstemper. (EPML, p571)
In his essay “Of Avarice,” his longest treatment of avarice in any of his writings, Hume characterizes avarice as the most vicious of traits, the most “irreclaimable” vice. It is a passion that is so ingrained that it cannot be cured. Hume is so dismissive of avarice that he feels the only way to deal with the avaricious is through ridicule:
I am more apt to approve of those, who attack [avarice] with wit and humour, than of those who treat it in a serious manner. There being so little hopes of doing good to the people infected with this vice, I would have the rest of mankind, at least, diverted by our manner of exposing it… (EPML, pp571-2)
While elsewhere he seems to differentiate avarice from miserliness, in this essay Hume lumps them together as a compound vice: avaricious men are stereotyped as “…men of immense fortunes, without heirs, and on the very brink of the grave, who refuse themselves the most common necessaries of life, and go on heaping possessions on possessions, under all the real pressures of the severest poverty.” (EPML, p570) Hume characterizes avarice as an “inferior passion” that somehow has become a “predominant inclination.” (EPML, p571)[13] The avaricious person has no shame in his stinginess, and has no “…regard to the sentiments of mankind.” He doesn’t care about his reputation, friendships, or personal pleasures.
At the end of this essay Hume uses a parable of an individual, Avarice, being brought to judgment in front of Jupiter after having raped the bowels of Earth. Avarice is sentenced to restore what was “feloniously robbed…by ransacking [Earth’s] bosom” to return it back to Earth “without diminution or retention.” (EPML, p573) The implication by Hume is that the greatest punishment for the avaricious person is to be brought back to earth to see how his wealth is being used in instrumental ways, ways that would pain the greedy both in being contrary to his own nature, but also giving him the epiphany of how he could have enjoyed his wealth (either personally or charitably); that is, how his wealth might have brought him pleasure rather than such great concern and pain.
In the “Enquiries” Hume clearly states that avarice is a vice: “But these virtues were infinitely overbalanced by [Alexander the sixth’s] vices; no faith, no religion, insatiable avarice, exorbitant ambition, and a more than barbarous cruelty.” (EPM, Appendix 4.18, p182) Given that avarice is an insatiable quest for wealth, “insatiable avarice” seems redundant. This emphasis by Hume is curious and raises questions about his suggestion in “Of Avarice” that avarice is an “inferior passion.” It seems difficult to conceive how one can be insatiably insatiable and still be involved in a passion that is inferior, particularly because an inferior passion will be cancelled out by a superior one:
When two passions are already produc’d by their separate causes, and are both present in the mind, they readily mingle and unite, tho’ they have but one relation, and sometimes without any. The predominant passion swallows up the inferior, and converts it into itself. (2.3.4.2, p269)
What does this mean for avarice? On the one hand Hume tells us that avarice is such an irreclaimable vice that it cannot be cured. It is a natural tendency that is so strong that it is the basis for the establishment of society. On the other hand, avarice is a passion that is easily swallowed up by stronger, predominant, or more prevailing passions. Here he must be using avarice as a single motivating passion (type (a)) related to a single propensity toward acting that gets subsumed to some other, more “violent” passion that occurs en passant.
At the same time that Hume makes such strong claims about avarice as a moral vice, he lists avarice as one of the passions that does not fit into his moral system because there is not universal agreement about whether it is a blameworthy vice:
Avarice, ambition, vanity, and all passions vulgarly, though improperly, comprized under the denomination of self-love, are here excluded from our theory concerning the origin of morals, not because they are too weak, but because they have not a proper direction, for that purpose… The other passions produce, in every breast, many strong sentiments of desire and aversion, affection and hatred; but these neither are felt so much in common, nor are so comprehensive, as to be the foundation of any general system and established theory of blame or approbation. (EPM 9.5, p147-8)
Why is avarice, like ambition, not easily categorized as a vice in Hume’s system? Because avarice is something that only pleases the avaricious, not affecting the spectator.
…what serves my avarice or ambition pleases these passions in me alone, and affects not the avarice and ambition of the rest of mankind…But every man, so far removed as neither to cross nor serve my avarice and ambition, is regarded as wholly indifferent by those passions. (EPM 9.8, p149)
This is somewhat peculiar, because according to Hume’s moral system something cannot be a vice if it does not create a disagreeable feeling in the impartial third person observer, and clearly we do feel that excessive accumulation (or the pursuit of accumulation) of wealth with or without the enjoyment of it is a disagreeable sense in the average person. We tend to pity the unsuccessful avaricious person, and envy the successful one.[14]