Reason the slave

According to Hume, human behavior is subject to passion, rather than reason. Our desired ends are determined by our passions. The means we undertake to attain our desired ends is done by way of reason. Reason allows us to make sense of the relations between cause and effect. This kind of reasoning Hume calls inductive reasoning. The other kind he calls deductive reasoning, which allows us to comprehend contradictions in mathematical problem-solving.  In everyday life, it is the former kind of reasoning that we make use of. According to Hume, deductive reasoning has very little practical application.

The relation between reason and passion can be summed up in Hume’s words “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” A passion is an original existence, whether it is strong, weak, calm, or violent; it does not represent any idea, it is not “a copy of any other existence”. According to Hume, contradiction from reason is only in the disagreement in these copies of “other existence”, that is, in the ideas of the passions, and not in the passions themselves, since each passion is a truth in its own, the basic ingredient from which all ideas are formed. Therefore, it follows, reason can never contradict passion itself, but can contradict only the ideas of that passion.

John Rawls takes it that Hume is trying to say that passions cannot be contradicted by reason because passions do not assert anything. But I feel that that is beside the point, that passions do not necessarily have to ‘not assert anything’ in order for them not to be contradicted by reason – in fact it is because passions do not represent anything, that they cannot be contradicted by reason. Some passions represent and assert and others represent and do not assert anything at all. In both cases, passions cannot be contradicted. Therefore I feel Rawls should be emphasizing on the representational structure of the passions rather than on their assertions.

Hume thinks passion can be contrary to reason only in the event that a certain judgment that led us to develop a particular passion in the first place later proves false or insufficient. For example, we are filled with the passion of grief when we are informed of a relative’s death, but as soon as we are told that it was a joke and that the relative is alive, our grief vanishes. Therefore in this manner, our reason, our judgment (our understanding of the falseness in the information) contradicts our passion and directs it to a more tranquil nature. But in every other case, besides in these two, reason cannot contradict our passions.

‘Ought’ from ‘is’

John Searle thinks it is possible to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is.’ In his example, someone who promises to pay back a certain borrowed amount places himself under an obligation to fulfill that promise. Therefore, he ought to pay back the borrowed amount, because he under an obligation. However, Hume does not think it is not possible to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is.’ Hume would say that Searle is pre-supposing that someone who promises to pay back a certain borrowed amount obligates himself to that promise.

Searle’s idea that an obligation to fulfill a promise goes hand in hand with the idea of promising is an ethical one, and also a factual one. It is factual because it describes a certain situation, a mental state, which is conducive to the keeping of the promise. Therefore, we can say that Searle is correct in that his example is only a factual account. If the person borrowing the sum of money does obligate himself to pay it back, than factually, Searle is correct. However, Searle’s statement is also an ethical one. It tells us what to do, that we ought to fulfill the promise. To Hume, there is no way of discovering any ought.

Why Searle thinks it is possible to derive ought from is, is because he sees the concept of promising inclusive of the concept of obligation in its definition. According to such a view, the “ought” is very much knowable, and not something which we have to discover to attach to something; obligation is a part of promising.

Hume: liberty of indifference & spontaneity

The liberty of indifference is the freedom to act against one’s own will, or contrary to it. For Hume, such freedom does not exist; a person’s will, once set in, determines the subsequent action. The will and its subsequent action are bound to one another. Hume argues it is not possible for one to negate such inevitability, to act contrary to their will. The liberty of indifference is therefore only a theory and can never be exercised in reality.

However, Hume says one can have the liberty of spontaneity. For example, if one is running late for work, one might walk at a brisk pace to ensure that they reach on time. However, if along the way they happen to bump into an old friend and are insisted to spare a few minutes for a cup of coffee at a nearby café, they will lose their liberty of spontaneity; they will no longer be able to successfully fulfill their will. The liberty of spontaneity therefore consists in unconstrained behavior; the unconstrained behavior is the liberty.

One may easily get confused between the Liberty of Indifference and the Liberty of Spontaneity. The Liberty of Indifference is the negation of causal necessity; the Liberty of Spontaneity facilitates causal necessity. It keeps one free from any constraint that may otherwise restrict them from acting upon the will in the necessitated manner.

 

Bentham’s principle of utility: an outline

Jeremy Bentham argues that the approval or disapproval of human action depends on the tendency it has to produce pleasure or pain. He calls this the Principle of Utility, and according to this principle, a person or a body of people always acts in a way so as to gain some kind of pleasure or to diminish pain. In fact, Bentham argues that human action is right only when it is aimed to produce pleasure. Human action that entails pain is undesirable and wrong. Furthermore, human action is right only if it produces the maximum amount of pleasure or happiness out of all other possible alternative actions. He sees all of human action, whether it be individual or collective, guided by this pleasure maximizing principle.

Bentham argues against other views that propose alternatives to his principle. The principle of asceticism maintains the opposite, that pain is good and pleasure is bad. Bentham says proponents of this view do not really understand the essence of the principle of utility and are misapplying it, that they in fact believe in the principle of utility without knowing it. On the other hand, princples of sympathy and antipathy, according to Bentham, never reach any truth about morality because it is subjectivist, that is, based on feeling, rather than being objective in its approach – based on facts. Bentham’s psychological hedonism is about determining moral rights and wrongs objectively and indiscriminately.

The weakness in Bentham’s argument here however lies in the fact that he doesn’t give any account of moral motivation, or reasons why we even bother to determine moral rights and wrongs objectively in the first place.

According to Bentham, the most important features of pleasure associated with human action are its duration and its intensity. Bentham thinks we can calculate the amount of pleasure or pain of human action by taking into account the duration and intensity of that pleasure or pain. However, Bentham argues that calculating pain and pleasure in such a way can only tell us of what to expect of a particular action. The rightness of our actions depends upon our expectations of pain and pleasure. If I act in a way I expect to yield me the greatest amount of pleasure or happiness out of all other possible alternatives, than my action is right. Bentham sees this as how people really behave and make decisions in everyday life.

 

 

Is suicide immoral?

Immanuel Kant certainly thought so. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Kant considers the case of a person wanting to commit suicide in order to alleviate his suffering. Kant admits that a man in a state of depression may very naturally will that everybody else killed themselves too. However, he thinks it is irrational to will suicide because it is an unnatural act. According to Kant, the purpose of the human organism, just like any living organism, is to sustain growth; killing it would be to defy its natural course.

However, the root of the weakness in Kant’s moral assessment of this case lies in his absolute reliance on pure reason. It strikes me how conveniently Kant can suppose logical contradictions in the maxim of suicide without making use of any prior experience. Logical contradiction in mathematics I see as the only possible kind of contradiction conceivable by pure reason. But logical contradictions concerning suicide for instance, must require a basis in empiricism. I feel this way because it seems obvious to me that one cannot know what is natural or what is unnatural without first experiencing it. I’ll show you how:

Imagine a little boy, hitherto to have been raised by wolves, suddenly taken to a remote island, and left there, all alone. He has had no human contact, except for in his brief flight in the helicopter to the island. The little boy somehow survives into adolescence, and the only form of death that he has until now seen is that of wild animals. It never occurs to him that the same will one day happen with him also. The concept of death he sees only in the wild animals about him, and not in himself, until one day, when he is in his late fifties, he has a sudden heart attack. Only then does he come to realize that what had befallen the wild animals may indeed befall him too. The concept of death in a human being, therefore, he was unaware of until the time he had a heart attack. It is because he had no human contact that he learned this so late in his life, and eventually only through his own firsthand experience.

Lastly, the biological nature of the assumption that Kant makes about the purpose of the human organism cannot stand true for everyone. According to Kant, in fact to be fair, according to most people in the world, the basic natural function of the human organism is parallel to that of any other living organism, which is to survive.  However, a radical Muslim may have a completely different view. The Muslim may see the natural function of the human organism as not to survive, but rather to give it up in the name of their Allah. They see no contradiction in committing suicide with the function of survival, because the function of the human organism that they understand is not one of survival, but of committing suicide in the name of their Allah anyway. Their view on the function of the human organism is spiritual, rather than biological.