Revue de
la B.P.C. THÈMES 7/2001
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Hume and Reid On
Promises
Luca Parisoli *
(Université Paris X,
Nanterre)
1. If we compare Hume’s philosophical sentiments about the nature of the
promise with those of Thomas Reid we can see that Reid’s criticism of Hume is not founded on the rejection of
the thesis we can find in the is-ought passage. On the contrary,
Reid can accept this thesis, even if there are lots of people who think that
Reid founds the kingdom of values on the natural order of human things. The
critics of Reid to Hume are not in fact linked to his conception of common
sense, but they are rather linked to Reid’s philosophical conception of
language which is very close to the contemporary philosophy of common language.
In this sense, Reid cannot accept the more general thesis about language
according to which human language is either descriptive or prescriptive. In
fact, according to Reid there is a social and common sphere of mind
interactions where values are expressed by language: propositions cannot be
reduced to the truth-values of the empirical language, nor to normative values.
Reid does not accept any project of a philosophy of mind which could be
assimilated to mathematics or to any empirical science (as we read in fact in his An Essay on
Quantity, “applying of measures to things that properly have not quantity,
is only a fiction or artifice of the mind”; and here we have a clear reference
to “all the affections and appetites of the mind”, Complete Works, II).
According to Reid the
human language is able to allow communication because of its intrinsic nature.
In this sense the humean thesis of the is-ought passage is able to validly express the idea that
duty cannot be founded on existence. But if we refer to human language the real
difference between Hume’s and Reid’s conception is not about the is-ought
relation, but it is rather about the operations of the mind: according to Reid,
in fact, there are not only solitary operations but also social operations of
the mind which human language is able to express. On the other hand Hume, as
well as many other philosophers, is only able to give an account of solitary operations
of the mind: Hume is in fact not only the first philosopher of convention (as
F. Snare, Morals, Motivations and Conventions, Cambridge 1991) has
pointed out in his analysis of Hume’s political thought), but he is also a very
radical philosopher of imagination, as D. Garrett (Cognition and Commitement,
Oxford 1997) points out in his analysis
of Hume’s epistemology. In this sense Reid’s rejection of the
philosophical heritage of the way of ideas is linked to his attempt to found
the same naturality of justice, by means either of the renewal of the same
primacy of Morality towards Law established by Hutcheson, or of the radical
refusal of the exclusive way of imagination.
This is why according to Reid there are not only solitary operations,
but also some other operations of the mind (and then of the language) which
take place when people think and speak inside a society. And if we consider a
verb like “to promise” we can immediately
understand that the promise is one of these other operations of the mind
(a social operation): promise is in fact a natural (and not a conventional)
convention. This is why according to Reid Hume is not wrong when he asserts
that the sense of duty is not related to the promise as a mental act, but he is
wrong when he denies that the promise is a social act of the mind; in this
sense his mistake precedes his analysis of the promise and it is directly
linked to his own theory of language which is, according to Reid, a very narrow
and poor one. If we follow Hume’s
theory of language, we are in fact obliged to accept that the promise is just a
convention and that it has a purely subjective existence. On the contrary, if
we accept Reid’s theory of language, then we can also accept the fact that the
promise has an extra-mental existence.
2. The humean
architecture of the promise’s argument is a very clear one(Treatise,
III, II, v). In fact the thesis which Hume wants to demonstrate is about the
moral rule of the promise: the moral rule, on the ground of which we are
obliged to honour our promises, is not a natural one. According to Hume, if we
don’t accept the idea that the obligation related to the promise is a natural
one, then we have to accept the idea that this obligation is not different from
the sense of duty. It is in fact the
sense of duty which can explain the expectation that a behaviour is conform to some natural and common attitudes.
But in order to understand such a position we have also to remember that
according to Hume the human nature is a uniform nature so that “human action
generally follows certain patterns” (Treatise, III, II, i): if an
individual does not follow these patterns, then our expectation is not
satisfied and we blame this individual. In fact: “the individual who is blamed
has failed to act rightly or has failed to do his duty” because according to
Hume “our sense of duty always follows the common and natural course of our
passions” (Treatise, III, II, i).
Nevertheless, if we
accept the idea that according to Hume the human nature is a uniform one, then
we are also obliged to note that we cannot find in Hume’s works an analytical
description of the linguistic standards even if we can find “several references to general and
unalterable standards fixed in our language” (M.F. Cohen, “Philosophical Quarterly”
1990).
I know that usually
philosophers think that their positions are the best way to explain vulgar
men’s beliefs. Nevertheless, only philosophers who appeal to common language
really think that their ideas are founded on vulgar men’s beliefs. Now, I know
that some scholars (and in particular F. Restaino and D. Schulthess) have analysed British philosophy in order to prove
that the appeal to common language has been a constant of the XVIIIth century
British philosophy. But I also know that if Austin is a model for the use of
the appeal to common language, then Hume has never appealed to common
language. In this sense, even if we can
easily find some passages in Hume’s works where human nature’s uniformity is
proved by means of some signs present in ordinary language, we can also easily
find some other passages where ordinary language (that is to say the vulgar
men’s language) is not able to become a metaphysical guide.
So, on one hand we can
read a passage such as: “There are certain terms in every language, which
import blame, and others praise; and all men, who use the same tongue, must
agree in their application of them ...
But we must also allow that some part of the seeming harmony in morals may be
accounted for from the very nature of language. The word virtue, with its
equivalent in every tongue, implies praise; as that of vice does blame: And no
one, without the most obvious and grossest impropriety, could affix reproach to
a term, which in general acceptation is understood in a good sense; or bestow
applause, where the idiom requires disapprobation” (Of the Standard of Taste,
E.T., I, 23); or we can also read: “in general, all sentiments of blame and
praise are variable .. but these variations we regard not in our general
decisions, but still apply the terms expressive of our liking or dislike, in
the same manner, as if we remained in one point of view. Experience soon
teaches us this method of correcting our sentiments, or at least, of correcting
our language, where the sentiments are more stubborn and inalterable” (Treatise,
III, III, i). But on the other hand we can read: “common language has seldom
made any very nice distinctions among them [the operations of mind], but has
generally call’d by the same term all such as nearly resemble each other” (Treatise,
I, III, viii).
And this third passage
is a really important one because it let us understand that one of Reid’s
criticism to Hume is based on this Hume’s reductionist conception of language:
Reid has in fact always tried to identify some linguistic standards in order to
show that there are some metaphysical evidences in the language. But of course
Reid couldn’t convince Hume of this evidence; he could only show that there are
some repugnant consequences linked to the humean system by means of an analysis
of Hume’s theses. Nevertheless, if we are not able to see these repugnant
consequences linked to the humean conception of language and closely connected
to his theory of imagination, then we cannot think that the position of Reid in
favour of common language is a persuasive one.
But which is according
to Reid such a repugnant conclusion of Hume’s system? According to Reid one
repugnant consequence is the idea that the promise is not a natural operation,
but it is rather a conventional one. But in order to understand this
dissatisfaction of Reid I need first of all to examine Hume’s argumentation.
Hume tries to find the
operation of the mind related to the words “I promise” and able to oblige
somebody to keep his promise. This act of the mind is not a resolution to perform anything, because if we decide to
perform something then we are not obliged to perform it (that is to say that
this act never imposes us any obligation). But this act is not even a desire of an action, because we could bind
ourselves by means of a promise without such a desire, nor it is a willing of a performance, because the will refers
only to the present while the action of the promise regards the future. Then we
have to speak of the willing of an obligation : but according to Hume
this willing is founded on the
sense of duty and never on an act of the mind. According to Hume, in fact, all
the acts of the mind are solitary operations whose sense is never linked to
social relations.
Then, according to Hume
there isn’t any sentiment linked to the promise and the willing of the
promise is not a natural willing
because it is only a sense of obligation which can perform the fact of keeping
a promise (Of the Original Contract, Essays and Treatises, II,
xii). In this sense the promise is not an instinctive moral obligation as it is
the case of the parents’ love; it is an obligation linked to the interest of
human society and founded, as well as all other obligations of this type, just
on our sense of duty. We can in fact limit our desire of absolute power and of
absolute freedom only if we consider the importance of peace and the necessity
of public order. In this sense the notion of convention is an instrument to
deny ontological reality to institutional facts.
In this way Hume
postulates (and elsewhere demonstrates) that morality is bound to our
sentiments: if we like an action of the mind or a quality of this action, then
we call it a virtuous one; and if such
an action is not performed and we suffer because of this non-performation, then
we say that we have to perform it. But even if we say “I promise” we never
change our sentiment, because human will is not able to make some new
sentiments, nor it is able to change the qualities of an action of the mind: if
we don’t have new sentiments of pain and pleasure, then we don’t have new
obligations.
But here I need some
considerations about the thesis that human will is not able to make some new
sentiments. Of course, the will is not
able to oblige us to believe something, because each belief is surely an
involuntary act of mind: in this sense our will is not able to make us love a
person we detest. But there are also some situations in which our will can
influence us and can also influence our sentiments. In this sense Hume is only
using his thesis according to which our reason is always slave of our passions
because our passions are something which we can never control.
On the contrary, Reid
thinks that our passions are only able to influence our reason (obviously our
practical reason) and so he also thinks that our will can sometimes influence
our passions. According to Reid, in fact, human reason is a calm passion
(E.A.P. III, 3, i-ii; V, vii). And it is a calm passion for two reasons: 1)
because common sense let us understand such a truth; 2) because Reid thinks
that there is a distinction between animal and rational principles
of action. In this sense in Reid
we can find some signs of a voluntaristic philosophy so that when we say “I
promise” we also change our sentiments, as well as when we say “I love you” we
change our sentiments: we can lie, or we can say the truth, but if we say
something about our sentiments, then we give a public dimension to our
interiority and we modify it. The
immediate object of the will is an action of our own (E.A.P., II, i); so if we
make a promise, the immediate object of the will is the utterance of the social
act, that is to say the utterance of the action we have to make.
Finally, Hume accepts
to reject his thesis (as he usually does in the Treatise) if somebody
succeeds in demonstrating two propositions: 1. there is a specific act of the
mind annex to the promise; 2. the consequence of this act is the inclination to
keep the promise and this inclination does not coincide with the sense of duty.
But according to Hume it is not possible to give a proof of these two
propositions. The promise (one of the most essential parts of morality -Of
the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences, E.T., II, xiv - ) is in
fact a human creation: it has the fundamental role to safeguard social
interests and social necessities; it is necessary to avoid the dangerous
consequences of an uncontrollable self-love (E.T., II, xii).
This is why in the Enquiry
(III, ii, note) Hume does not accept the possibility of any mental act linked
to the promise. Somebody has written that according to Hume the promise, even
if it is not a natural obligation, is the proof of the existence of a “natural
obligation to accept and participate in artifice itself” (W. Vitek, “Hume
Studies” 1986). In this sense the
obligation of the promise is a natural one in that our imagination naturally
forces us to accept social and cultural relations as obligations. But I cannot
understand why this natural obligation is different from the sense of duty,
that is the way in which Hume qualifies the promise in order to deny that the
promise is a natural obligation. In fact if the promise is linked to our
participation in social artifice, it is
also linked to any other social duty. And we all know that according to Hume
men are not “social animals”, that is to say men are not naturally social
beings. Hume is not in fact an Aristotelian political thinker, but he is rather
a political theorician of selfishness.
When Hume analyses the question of the promise, in fact, he tries to
point out all needs and interests which can justify the “sense of duty”. But if
this is true, then the interpretation of the promise as a “natural obligation
to accept and participate in artifice itself”
is not only a feeble but also a wrong one. All in all, lots of Reid’s criticisms are linked to this
artificiality of the humean promise. According to Reid, in fact, common utility (or social interest) is not
the real source of the obligation of
the promise. According to Reid the obligation of the promise is rather linked
to the will of communicating
something and to the will to accept
this communication. In this sense the one who breaks his own promise is not
only a dishonest man - as Hume writes - , but he is also a man not able to use
language: the communicative nature of man
wants in fact that everybody keeps his promise. Reid wants to defend the fact that justice
is a natural thing: he wants to defend the idea of Hutcheson according to which
Morality always precedes Law.
3. Reid stands firm to
announce the importance of ordinary language for philosophical inquiry. His
work, the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (E.I.P., 1785, I, i), has in fact a
beginning chapter in which ordinary language is called for tutor of the meaning
of the words that Reid uses in his philosophical inquiry. According to Reid
words are not defined a priori, but their meaning derives from their
common use. In particular, in his Essays on the Active Powers of Man (E.A.P., 1788, I, ii), Reid fixes five topics in order to demonstrate that Hume’s position
inTreatise is not a correct one.
In particular, we have to stress that two topics send directly back to the authority of
common language, while the conclusion of Reid’s argumentation is that in each
language there exist some distinctions which surely everybody who speaks (or
spoke) this language knows very well.
Words like
"mind", "operations" (acts of the mind),
"faculty", "consciousness", as well as all the other words
commonly used, cannot (and must not) be defined: each definition has to consist
of words, but these definienda
words have a very simple and self-evident meaning for those who speak.
According to Reid the position of Hume is in fact a ridiculous one, even if
it’s not easy to strictly and strongly confute it because of the confusion that
it can cause. First, each language has certain words which mean power or
which can imply the idea of power; second, in each language we can find certain
verbs which have whether an active or a
passive power and we can explicate this different power only if we distinguish
between action and passion.
Then Reid applies to everybody who is able to understand English and the
English distinctions: in English the power exists and it exists also with some
qualities.
This attitude does not
send back to the idea that a language corresponds to a certain valid vision of
the world, but it rather sends back to all beliefs of those men who created
this language; among these beliefs, some are fundamental as well as they are
common and universal because they directly derive from human constitution.
Philosophy has to individualize and separate them from the other beliefs which
are not true and which are a bad result of not valid inferences.
In this sense we can
say that Reid appeals to common language without any ambiguity in order to
prove his theses. Reid adds worth to the evidence of language as a proof of
those natural truths that everybody can reach by means of his own conscience’s
examination. According to Reid, in fact, the appeal to ordinary language is the
proof of the truth of common sense (but it is always an auxiliary argument - S.
A. Grave, The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense, Oxford 1960, 104-107)
while the distinction between solitary and social operations of the mind is the
base of the metaphysical foundation of the appeal to common language. This
distinction is fixed by Reid in the chapter entitled Of Social Operations of
Mind (E.I.P., I, viii): social operations are those operations which
necessarily need some human relations such as asking or having informations,
witnessing, asking a favour, ordering, making a promise.
All these operations
cannot be performed in seclusion: on the contrary those operations which we
perform in seclusion such as understanding, willing, learning, judging and
reasoning are called solitary operations. If we ask a question we perform an
operation which is not more complicate than that of judging, but it is a very
different operation. Everybody is able to understand what does imply the
operation of witnessing or that of making a promise: in each language (E.I.P., I, v) there are in fact some
speech’s modalities which allow us to express social operations such as that of
accepting or refusing, threatening or imploring.
Then Reid (E.A.P. V,
vi) defines social operations: each human being, which we are in relation
to, must have a role in performing the social operation. On the
contrary, solitary operations are those which we can perform in seclusion. In
particular, Reid asserts that we are philosophically wrong if we believe that
we can perfectly bring social operations of the mind (that everybody knows very
well) back to a compositions of solitary operations: solitary and social
operations, in fact, are not qualitative
identical (but Reid is also conscious that philosophers are usually
wrong if they try to explicate what the promise consists in). According to
Reid, in fact, social operations can never be brought back to solitary
operations: they verbally express natural language of face and hands, that is
to say mute language. Natural signs (the pre-linguistic ones) of acceptance or
non-acceptance are understood before the use of rational faculties (the
solitary ones); the words which express acceptance or non-acceptance bring back
to those natural signs and cannot be confused with judging or learning.
This is why according
to Reid each man who makes a promise without the intention of keeping it
performs two different operations: he makes a promise which needs to be kept
because human constitution imposes him this feature of that social
operation; he expresses a purpose which
is a solitary operation of his mind. Each honest person, as well as each person
who is not an honest one, is bound by his promise, because everybody is bound
by a social act which is not just the result of his particular will, but which
is rather determined by the conformity to the standards of the social act of
the promise. In fact, according to Reid language is not only linked to the will
of the man who speaks, but it is also linked to all the community, so that
linguistic rules are not private rules, but they are rather social and common
rules. In this sense the obligation of the promise is a language obligation.
This is why we may (we have the right to) blame those who break a promise if
they break the promise because of some solitary operations of their mind. But there is also another thesis of Reid,
linked to this first thesis, that is to say the fact that the language’s rules of a community are linked
to some acts of the human mind: these rules are not conventional, but they are
rather natural rules.
It is very interesting
that in these observations of Reid we can find the first condemnation of that
descriptive fallacy which John L. Austin condemns almost two century after. But
even if we don’t want to be anachronistic, we have to note that Reid is the
first in asserting that there exists two different classes of operations of the
mind which have their particular language
expressions; this is why we cannot bring one class back to the other:
the operations of the mind of both classes are simple and they find their
meaning in the structure of human nature which is the base of universal
human consent about the truth of common
sense. Reid really refuses the way of ideas and so he refuses the philosophy of
imagination and convention of Hume: Reid’s gnoseology is a theory of immediate
knowledge, as well as his ethics is a theory of self-evident principles. But if
this is true, then we can also define his theory as an ontology of language in
which all acts are things. Language acts are ontological realities as well as
moral truths or common sense empirical informations are ontological entities.
And in this sense we can say that Reid’s ontological world is a very rich one.
So the objections of
Reid to Hume are not about Hume’s logical law, but they are rather linked to
the position of Hume according to which the acts of the mind are only acts of
the empirical knowledge or acts of the individual will. According to Reid, in
fact, this position cannot be able to take an account of the complexity of
human language and of human communication. And this is why according to Reid
the “ought” category cannot be deduced: this category is a self-evident and an intuitive one and it
constitutes the patrimony of human and moral common sense.
Hume thinks that
Morality is constituted by assertions which are never true or false; on the
contrary Reid thinks that we cannot evaluate moral judgements by means of the
truth-values of propositions because their values have a different foundation.
According to Reid in fact, there is a difference between moral truths and
empirical truths, as well as there is a real difference and a real gap between
solitary acts of mind and social acts of mind: a natural obligation is not an
inference, it is an immediate reality. For this reason according to Reid we
cannot really find an obligation linked to the promise: the same promise (which
is a social act of mind) makes us to
keep it. We have in fact to keep a promise because if we make a promise we are
obliged to keep it by its same utterance. And in this case we are in front of
an analytical truth of the human nature: everybody is able to understand that
if he makes a promise he has to keep it not because of a rule of the promise,
but because each promise is linked to the human nature.
In fact, the first
moral principles are never deductions: they are self-evident and their truth
(as well as the truth of some other axioms) is known without reasoning or
deductions. As to moral truths which we
can deduce, they are obtained by the first moral principles; but we are
completely wrong if we assert that moral propositions are neither true, nor
false propositions. Our moral intuition
assures us that some moral axioms are true and that our reason is able
to deduce a true ethical system.
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* Conférence
présentée à la 26th Hume Society Conference, University College Cork
(Ireland), 19 – 23 juillet 1999.