Treatise on Human Nature Book II

Hume declares “reason is the slave of the passions”, meaning the only source of moral action is our feelings and desires. These come from pleasure and pain. This is n direct contrast to Kant, and Hume should be used as a contrasting/evaluative source for criticising Kant.

Pleasure   ⇒   Passion  ⇒  Desire  ⇒  Choice

This argument is contained in Treatise on Human Nature Book II.  Here’s a summary of the argument. We cannot be criticized rationally for our feelings (As Hume remarks, it is “not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger” (p 416)).

For example, an act of cruelty will cause in us a feeling of injustice, and that feeling (sentiment/passion) will be the reason why we pass an unfavourable judgement on an act of cruelty. The passions are the raw materials of our reasoning; the feeling comes before the judgement “cruelty is wrong”.  

Hume wrote: “When I am angry, I am actually possessed with the passion, and in that emotion have no more a reference to any other object, than when I am thirsty, or sick, or more than five foot high. It is impossible, therefore, that this passion can be opposed by, or be contradictory to truth and reason”. Only passions can motivate us to act.This is the polar opposite of a Kantian view of ethical judgements arrived at by pure a priori reasoning with the motivation “duty for duty’s sake”.

For Hume, morals come from feelings: this is not a fact we should lament (as rationalists do) but a basic fact about our psychology.

Hume describes both direct passions, such as desire, aversion, grief, joy, hope, and fear, and indirect passions, such as pride, humility, love, and hatred.  Specifically, Part 1 is about the self-directed passions of pride and humility and Part 2 is about the other-directed passions of love and hate. Pride and love are positive feelings, humility and hate are negative.  These positive and negative feelings drive our moral opinions.  We condemn what we hate and approve what we love.

Humility might be a little difficult for us to understand since we tend to regard it as a good thing but that is clearly not what Hume meant. Think “humiliation” rather than the virtue of “Christian humility.” Actually, come to think of it, Hume might have had both in mind (see 2.1.7).

The objects of the indirect passions (self, others) are different from their causes (good character, nice clothes, nice relatives, etc.). So explaining why we have them has to involve the psychological association of the causes and the object.

Hume argues that reasoning about things is not what makes us act. Instead, pleasure and pain, which give rise to passions, motivate us. Hume also says we cannot claim that actions are the result of passions that are reasonable or unreasonable, because passions themselves have nothing to do with reason. They are feelings that cause actions. Our feelings may be influenced by reasoning, but reason is and should be the “slave” of passions.

This conclusion presents a dilemma for rationalists who view morality as the result of God-given reason. In fact, reason influences our actions in only two ways: by directing passions to focus on appropriate things, and by discovering connections between events that will create passions. For the moral process to complete itself, the judgments about ideas must incite passions, or feelings, which then lead us to act.

For Hume, morality is not a matter of fact derived from experience ( a posteriori). To prove his point, he suggests we examine ourselves with regard to any supposed moral wrong, such as murder. If we examine the act of murder, we can discover no idea of that quality of immorality, or “vice.” Rather, we will discover only the strong feeling of dislike we have for murder. This supports the idea that morality resides in passions, or “sentiment,” not in reason. Although reason does help us explain those feelings, it is not their origin.

Hume connects moral decisions to our feelings for several reasons. First, passion appears to be the only viable alternative to reason, which he has already ruled out. Second, Hume’s examination of his own feelings about murder reveals that while he can isolate his own feelings about such behavior, he cannot isolate clear and distinct ideas about it. Therefore, moral decisions must arise from or in some way be the same as our passions. Hume’s connection of moral decisions to feelings, which leads him to the separation of morality from reason, put him at odds with religious leaders and philosophers of his time, such as Kant. Hume effectively dethroned reason, removed God from a place of necessity, and robbed religious theorists of a foundation for religious belief.

Want more?  Try this: http://carneades.pomona.edu/1998-2006/2005-Hume/Notes/Passions.shtml

Or this? http://www.humesociety.org/hs/issues/v10n1/nuyen/nuyen-v10n1.pdf

Source: http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/hume/section3.rhtml