Is the General Point of View the Moral Point of View?

International Phenomenological Society

Is the General Point of View the Moral Point of View?Cognition and Commitment in Hume's Philosophy by Don GarrettReview by: Charlotte BrownPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Jan., 2001), pp. 197-203Published by: International Phenomenological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2653599 .

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Philosophy and Phenomenological Resear-ch Vol. LXII, No. 1, January 2001

Is the General Point of View the Moral Point of View?

CHARLO7TE BROWN

Illinois Wesleyan University

I focus on Garrett's account of Hume's theory of moral evaluation, which Garrett calls "a cognitive history." Before turning to his account, however, I

briefly outline my own alternative reading of Hume's theory of moral evaluation. One way in which my account differs from Garrett's is that I follow Ardal, among others, in thinking that Hume takes the moral sentiments to be calm forms of love and hatred. Thus Hume says that approval and disapproval are "nothing but a fainter and more imperceptible love or hatred."' Morality, for Hume, is about what we love or hate, praise or blame, in people.

Hume develops his theory of moral evaluation in response to two objec- tions to his claim that the moral sentiments spring from sympathy. The first

objection is that moral approval can't be based on sympathy because our

moral approvals don't vary, but sympathy and the loves and hatreds resulting from sympathy do vary. (T 580-81) When Hume first explains the sympathy mechanism, he traces it to the more fundamental associative principles of

resemblance, contiguity, and causation. Our ability to respond sympatheti-

cally to others varies with these variations in our relations. Thus I sympathize more easily and strongly with my friends and fellow citizens than with

strangers and foreigners. The other objection is that "virtue in rags" is still esteemed. Sympathy, as Hume initially explains it, works by looking at the actual effects of a person's character traits, but "virtue in rags is still virtue; and the love which it procures attends a man into a dungeon or desart, where the virtue can no longer be exerted in action, and is lost to the world." (T 584)

David Hume, A Treatise of Humnan Natur-e, edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P.H. Nidditch (London: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 614. Hereafter references to the Treati~se will be noted in the text. There is some debate about how to interpret these passages. Hume repeatedly says that approval is a pleasant sentiment. (T 470, 471, and 574, among other places) He also claims that it is a calm sentiment. (T 473) The debate concerns whether approval is a unique pleasure which causes love or whether approval is to be identified as a species of love-a calm sort of love. I do not think that this issue can be resolved on textual grounds alone.

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On Hume's view, moral love and hatred arise from sympathy, but only when sympathy is regulated by fixing on "some steady and general points of view." There are two regulative components of the general point of view. The first is that we survey a person's character from the perspective of that person's narrow circle-those with whom she regularly interacts. We sympathize with the people who make up a person's narrow circle, and judge character traits to be virtuous or vicious in terms of whether they are good or bad for all the people in the person's narrow circle. The second feature is that we regulate sympathy further by relying on general rules that specify the general effects and tendencies of character traits, not their actual effects. (T 584-85)

The two regulative features of the general point of view define a point of view we can share with everyone, and from which we may survey a person's character. We sympathize with the person herself and with her narrow circle, and come to love the person for those traits which under normal circum- stances are useful and pleasant for those in her narrow circle. Thus the general point of view constitutes the moral perspective, the point of view that gives rise to the moral sentiments.

On Hume's view, our moral loves and hates may be opposed to the more personal loves and hates that arise from unregulated sympathy. From the latter perspective, the more someone resembles me, is contiguous to me, or is related to me by causation, the stronger my love for them will be. Thus my love for the perseverance of a female philosopher will be stronger and more lively than my esteem for General Jackson's perseverance. But by sympathizing with the general's narrow circle and by relying on general rules, I will be constrained to morally admire his good qualities.2

The fact that I think that Hume takes the moral sentiments to be calm forms of love and hate reflects a much more crucial difference between my reading of Hume and Garrett's. On my view, we can't experience the moral sentiments or have moral concepts unless we have already taken up the general point of view and regulated our sympathetic loves and hatreds. The moral sentiments and moral concepts that are derived from them are products of our having taken up the general point of view. Hume starts with our more

personal, irregular, and violent loves and hatred-feelings that aren't themselves moral-and describes the process by which we transform these non- moral feelings into moral loves and hates. The effect of taking up the general point of view and regulating our sympathetic responses is to make these violent and irregular loves and hatreds more calm and more regular. Hume thus provides a naturalistic account of moral evaluation that sees us as mov-

2 See my "From Spectator to Agent: Hume's Theory of Obligation," Hume Studies, May 1994, pp. 19-35 for a fuller account of Hume's theory of evaluation and the general point of view. With respect to the artificial virtues it seems more appropriate to say that we survey a person's character from the standpoint of a fellow citizen.

198 CHARLOTrE BROWN



ing from our initial non-moral evaluations of people to moral evaluations of

them. On Garrett's interpretation, however, the moral sentiments are not

products of the general point of view. For his Hume, the general point of

view isn't the moral point of view-the point of view that gives rise to the moral sentiments and moral concepts. Rather, it is the point of view from

which we correct the distinctively moral sentiments that we experience at the

first stage of our cognitive history, hone our abstract ideas of virtue and vice, and stabilize our use of moral terms. Garrett insists that all of the activities

associated with the general point of view-correcting, honing and stabiliz-

ing-presuppose that we have already experienced the uniquely moral impressions of approval and disapproval.

Garrett thinks that Hume's theory of cognition commits Hume to the idea that we must experience the distinctively moral impressions from the start-

before we take up the general point of view. When he examines Hume's

rejection of moral rationalism, Garrett argues that Hume's theory of cognition shapes the way in which he frames the issue of whether moral distinctions are derived from reason or from sentiment. He claims that here as else- where Hume is using the term 'reason' as a technical term in his cognitive psychology to designate the inferential faculty-the faculty that produces demonstrable or probable inferences. Thus, as a cognitive scientist, Hume is

asking whether the occurrence of moral distinctions

can be explained as a product of inference operating on representations of the objects of evaluation, or whether we must instead recognize the occurrence of some specifically moral non- inferential element. (Cognition and Commitment in Hume's Philosophy, 193. Hereafter abbre- viated 'CC'.)

According to Garrett, there are two possibilities. One is that our ideas of

moral good and evil are products of reason alone. If they were, then by

comparing, inspecting, and manipulating our ideas of people's character

traits, we would be able to infer that they are morally good or evil. In so

doing we would arrive at the ideas of moral goodness and evil. If we reject this option, as Hume does, then Garrett thinks the only other possibility is

that there must be "some specifically moral non-inferential element in human nature." (CC 193) This follows, he says, from Hume's commitment to the

Copy Principle. "Given his Copy Principle-that ideas must be copied from

impressions-he (Hume) thinks that such a non-inferential element would

require the existence of distinctively moral impressions." (CC 193) These are

the feelings of moral approval and moral disapproval that, for Garrett's

Hume, we experience at the first stage of our cognitive history. I agree with Garrett that if we reject the rationalist option, there must be

some non-inferential element in human nature from which our moral ideas are

derived. I also agree that moral ideas are ultimately derived from the moral

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sentiments of approval and disapproval, love and hate. But why must there be a specifically moral element in human nature from the start? Hume argues that our idea of necessary connection couldn't be a product of reason and so

isn't something we arrive at inferentially. But in rejecting that option he doesn't conclude that there must be a distinctive impression of necessary connection from the start. Hume traces our idea of necessary connection to an

internal impression that results from the workings of the mind-the determi- nation of the mind in passing from a present impression to the idea of its usual attendant. In a similar way Hume traces our moral ideas to the workings of the mind-the way in which our non-moral loves and hatreds are transformed into moral loves and hatreds when we regulate our sympathetic responses by taking up the general point of view.

How, on Garrett's view, would we distinguish the moral loves and hatreds that we experience at the first stage of our cognitive history (before we take

up the general point of view and correct our initial, immediate responses to

people) from our more personal and irregular loves and hatreds? If, as Garrett maintains, we must experience the uniquely moral sentiments before taking up the general point of view, the general point of view can't be what distin-

guishes them. I realize that Garrett wouldn't agree that moral approval and disapproval

are calm species of love and hatred. However, he does agree that moral

approval is a pleasant sort of feeling and disapproval is an unpleasant sort of feeling. Furthermore, he believes that the moral approval and disapproval we experience at the first stage of our cognitive history springs from unregulated sympathy. Thus Garrett says that one reason we take up the general point of view is to correct the variability in our moral sentiments that results from the

workings of unregulated sympathy. But our personal loves and hates are also

pleasant and painful sorts of feelings, and in many cases they spring from

unregulated sympathy. On Garrett's account both our moral and non-moral reactions towards people are pleasant or painful feelings. Both are based on

unregulated sympathy. So how would he distinguish them? Garrett says that for Hume the moral "sentiments consist of a particular

species of pleasure (moral approbation) and a particular species of pain (moral

disapprobation or blame)." (CC 194) He may also hold that our non-moral loves and hatreds consist of different particular species of pleasure and pain. On this reading, we don't confuse our moral reactions with our non-moral reactions because they have a different phenomenological feel. Unfortunately, this line of response makes Hume's view of the moral sentiments look much more like Francis Hutcheson's than it is. Hutcheson claimed that we possess, in addition to our other senses, a special moral sense that naturally disposes us to feel the distinctive moral sentiments of approbation and disapprobation when we contemplate people's characters. God implanted the moral sense in

us, annexing our approbation to the kind affections of agents. Thus we judge

200 CHARLOTTE BROWN



benevolence to be morally good because God gave us a moral sense that disposes us to approve of it. In the Treatise, however, Hume explicitly opposes Hutcheson's idea of an original moral sense.(T 473)3

Another way in which Garrett's Hume is like Hutcheson is that he doesn't have Hume explaining how we come to evaluate people's characters in moral

terms. On Hutcheson's view we make moral evaluations because God gave us a moral sense that disposes us to feel moral approbation and disapprobation. Garrett says that our ability to make moral distinctions parallels what Hume

would say about our ability to make color or shape distinctions. Our ability

to make color or spatial discriminations and to understand them "depends on

our capacity to have colored or spatial impressions." (CC 200) It is because we possess the relevant senses that we are able to feel "specific kinds of

impressions." In a similar way, Garrett thinks that we make and understand moral distinctions because we possess the relevant moral 'sense'. Instead of

explaining how we come to morally evaluate people in the first place, Garrett

has Hume explaining how we come to correct our moral impressions, acquire distinctive moral concepts and terms, and then hone and stabilize them. But

according to Garrett, all of these activities necessitate that we naturally feel

the distinctively moral impressions from the start. Garrett believes that at the first stage in our cognitive history we don't

need to possess language-or at least moral language-in order to feel the moral sentiments. He claims that the first non-propositional kind of moral

evaluation consists simply in feeling a moral sentiment. Thus for Garrett's Hume someone may make a moral evaluation in this first way even if she

can't express her evaluation because she doesn't have the required command of

language or moral language. If this is correct, then does Garrett' s Hume think

it is possible for someone to morally evaluate people's character traits even if

she has no moral concepts and isn't thinking any moral thoughts?4 This

would seem to follow because, according to Hume, we can't form general

Darwall argues in his "Hume and the Invention of Utilitarianism" that Hume accepts (or sounds like he accepts) Hutcheson's theory of approval in his arguments against moral rationalism (Treatise, III i), but that by the end of section II of Book III Hume departs from Hutcheson's theory in significant ways. Garrett tends to focus on Section I and the early parts of Section II in his discussion of Hume's theory of moral evaluation. This

paper of Darwall is in Huime and Hume Connexions, M.A. Stewart and John P. Wright, eds. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 1995. Hume does hold that in the case of the natural virtues, the morally best person acts not from the motive of duty or virtue but from spontaneous and natural affections-affec-

tions such as benevolence, kindness, generosity, and pity. With respect to the natural

virtues, people may have morally good character traits and may act on them without having the thought that what they are doing is morally good. But this is quite a different matter from claiming that it is possible for someone to morally evaluate people's character traits even if she has no moral concepts and isn't thinking moral thoughts. I defend this point in my "Is Hume an Internalist?" Journal of the History of Philosophy, January, 1988, pp. 69-87.

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ideas without having some linguistic competence, and since moral terms are general, if we don't have moral terms, we can't form moral ideas.

Likewise, does Garrett's Hume think higher animals may experience the moral sentiments and make moral evaluations of the non-propositional sort?5 Notice that if Garrett believes that Hume holds that animals don't have moral reactions, he can't explain this fact by saying that animals can't take up the general point of view. On his view, taking up the general point of view isn't a necessary condition for experiencing the moral sentiments. Garrett might claim that one way in which animals are psychologically different from us is that they can't feel (but we can) the distinctive moral impressions of approval and disapproval. If Garrett takes this tack, then he has Hume just asserting a brute fact rather than providing an explanation of why this is the case.

One final issue about why we take up the general point of view. As Gar- rett sees it, the general point of view, along with its process of sentiment correction, is a solution to a problem about the application of moral terms

and concepts. There are, he says, two related pressures giving rise to this

problem. One is that at first different people will have different revival sets of the abstract ideas of virtue and vice and so will apply them to different character traits. The other is that the same person's revival sets will differ at

different times and so that person will apply moral terms to different instances at different times. By taking up the general point of view and 'honing' our moral concepts, we "create a revival set of ideas of persons.. that all have something in common... .their virtue or their vice." (CC 202) In this way we arrive at standards of virtue and vice that govern the

application of moral concepts in particular cases and so (presumably) govern what we find virtuous or vicious.

Garrett describes the process of stabilizing our use of moral terms as one that involves honing the set of particular ideas associated with a moral term's revival set. The metaphors of honing and stabilizing suggest that we have at least some core instances in common in our revival sets. If there were no common core, what would we be collectively honing? Moreover, if there were no common core, the idea that "conversational and reflective pressures"

5 Hume, more than most philosophers of his day, stresses the deep similarities between human beings and the higher animals. He argues that the higher animals feel pride and humility toward themselves and they feel love and hatred towards members of their own species and towards us. They have the same capacity for responding sympathetically as we do, and they may sympathize with members of their own species and with us. Animals thus have many of the prerequisites of a moral 'sense'. They respond sympathetically to others and since they experience love and hatred, we might even think they possess moral concepts. But this isn't Hume's considered view. Animals are almost certainly incapable of forming the conception of a person's narrow circle. They can't form general rules about the usual effects of character traits and so can't regulate their sympathetic loves and hates in terms of these general rules. Animals are thus incapable of taking up the general point of view. I defend this view in an unpublished paper, "Humean Animals".

202 CHARLOTrE BROWN



move us to stabilize our use of moral terms makes no sense. If there is no common core, what are we talking about that needs to be stabilized?

But why do we need to apply moral terms to the same sorts of instances and not just core instances? Why shouldn't our use of moral terms be like our use of the term 'yummy'? We don't need to find all the same foods yummy to understand each other when we use that term. Or why shouldn't our use of

moral terms be like our use of terms such as 'painful'? We don't need to find

all the same sorts of things painful in order to understand each other, only a common core. Perhaps there are cases where we expect more agreement. But why do we need complete (or near complete) agreement about what sorts of character traits are virtuous or vicious?

Garrett follows Hume in saying that the process of sentiment correction is

"essential to the use of moral language," and that moral conversation would be impossible if we didn't correct our moral feelings. (CC 195) There are two ways of understanding the claim that moral conversation is impossible unless we take up the general point of view and correct our initial, immediate moral

feelings. The first is that the revival sets among persons (and for the same person over time), for the abstract terms 'virtue' and 'vice,' don't even

contain similar core instances. However, this option clashes with Garrett's earlier suggestion that we are honing our abstract concepts of virtue and vice and stabilizing our use of moral terms. We have to have at least some core instances in common in our revival sets-otherwise there wouldn't be anything that we were collectively honing. Moreover, we need some core instances in our revival sets-otherwise there wouldn't be anything that we

understood each other to be talking about, and so pressuring us to stabilize our use of moral terms. The second option is that moral conversation is

possible only if the revival sets associated with our ideas of virtue and vice

come to contain (all of) the same sorts of instances and not just a core set of

instances, so that we come to agree about the application of moral terms. But

this brings us back to the original question: why do we need to agree about

what character traits are virtuous and vicious and so apply the terms 'virtue' and 'vice' to the same sorts of character traits?6

6 My account faces the same sort of difficulty that I am arguing Garrett's account faces. The problem is that all of the explicit reasons Hume gives for why we take up the general point of view-like the idea that we couldn't have conversations about virtue and vice- presuppose what they are supposed to be explaining. Christine Korsgaard provides the best account of this problem in "The General Point of View: Love and Moral Approval in Hume's Ethics," Hurne Studies, April/November, 1999, pp. 3-41.

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Is the General Point of View the Moral Point of View?