Hume 02

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Actions are driven by the feeling side of human beings

David Hume in the 18th Century argued that reason, on its own, never tells you anything about how you should or should not behave. It is your feeling side that does this.

I say ‘feeling side’: Hume uses the old-fashioned-sounding words ‘passion’ and ‘the passions’. At a first approximation your passions are your feelings. What Hume says is that all your motivations are given you by your feelings.

We are hungry, are inclined to eat: reason will very likely then tell us how best to achieve this goal. The prospect of a holiday is attractive to us (we anticipate that it will cause us pleasure): reason will advise us that The Traveller or LastMinute.com should then be our next port of call.

What reason won’t do, on its own, is motivate us to eat, or to have a holiday. Hume is saying the initiative as it were has to come from elsewhere – from our emotional side.

The thesis is that reason on its own doesn’t incline us to action. Hume is not saying that reason has nothing to do with what actions we engage in. On the contrary, reason is almost always in play as we pick our way across the minefield of life. It’s just that on its own reason doesn’t point us in any direction.

Hume: the basic motivators are pain and pleasure

Hume's picture is that when we think of something that might happen often we have an emotional reaction – we feel it is something we want to happen, or we feel it is something we don’t want to happen.

Aversion by Melissa Morton, With thanks.

These two reactions, ‘propensity’ or ‘aversion’ (Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Part III Section 3) are produced in us by our awareness that such and such a happening will give us pleasure, or pain. If we think such and such will cause us pleasure, we will have an inclination to make that happening happen. If we think that something else will cause us pain we will have an inclination to avoid it.

I think a meal at il Morino’s will cause me pleasure and that motivates me to go there. You think that a work out will cause you distress and that motivates you to stay put on the sofa.

Hume is saying all motivation is like this – it comes from ‘the prospect of pain or pleasure’ (Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Part III Section 3).

“’Tis obvious that when we have the prospect of pain or pleasure from any object, we feel a consequent emotion of aversion or propensity, and are carry’d to avoid or embrace what will give us this uneasiness or satisfaction.” Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Part III Section 3.

Prompt: Can you come up with an example from your own experience where you were motivated to do something, but not by the promise of either pleasure or pain?

Feelings might drive behaviour without involving pleasure/pain.

Isn't it possible to think that feelings might drive behaviour but not always via pleasure and pain?

I think myself that we don’t know what motivates us, and that we would need to understand how the brain works and what state it was in at any particular time to find out. Hume’s discussion assumes that we are steered by conscious thought and feeling – by what is going on in the mind. This is a something we would completely reject today, when we make the assumption that all sorts of behaviour control is accomplished by brain processes some or most of which don’t rise into consciousness at all. Some of us – not me! – also assume that some of our behaviour is controlled by processes that go on in a sort of mind each of us have, but which isn’t our conscious mind. This they call ‘the unconscious’, following one of the formulations of Freud.

This point isn't necessarily against Hume. He is speaking about 'motivation' and has no reason to deny that some of our actions - some of our behaviour at any rate - might be brought about by something other than 'motivation'. If I blink that isn't necessarily an action that is motivated. Hume is saying that if there is motivation, it is a matter of having a propensity for things that you think are likely to bring pleasure, and an aversion for things that threaten pain.

For Hume, what we do is governed some of the time by thoughts and feelings of which we are conscious. And then it is the prospect of pain or pleasure that guides us.

How pursuing pleasure/avoiding pain can lead to altruism

Hume’s theory begins therefore with this: we act as the prospect of pleasure and pain guides us - we do what promises to give us pleasure, and we eschew that which stands to cause us grief.

But then if this is so, how does it sometimes come about that I act to relieve the pain of others?

It comes about because of the capacity I have for sympathy. When I encounter the signs of suffering in another, the ideal form of that distress transmutes inside my mind into a feeling of the kind whose effects I am observing. That is to say, I myself feel the distress. Sympathy (as Hume means it) involves you feeling what another person is feeling.

But because this distress that I feel is a form of pain, the prospect of such a feeling will lead me to attempt to avoid it. That is, I will seek to help others to avoid getting into distressing situations.

That is Hume's theory of morality.

Hume's rooting all motivation in pleasure and pain feeds the perceived problem of altruism

Hume's account of how feelings drive action - his view that whatever the feelings are, they guide action via pain and pleasure - helps generate a problem with which thought on ethics often gets embroiled - the problem of how unselfish action is ever possible.

Morality is often thought to have to do with acting ‘selflessly’ – acting in a way which ignores or deprioritises what’s good for you.

Sometimes people assume it is a very puzzling fact about human action, this fact that sometimes they appear to act unselfishly.

Surely one of the things that drive us into action is what we feel – and why shouldn’t our feelings drive us, sometimes, into selflessness?

It seems obvious in fact that they do. A mother as a regular thing will put first the well-being of her child, acting in response to a feeling which can be overwhelmingly intense, particularly towards the new born.

Even men report promptings of the same kind - they too will often act in the interests of their partners and children even when that conflicts with their own. And both men and women are quite capable of putting others first, risking or even sacrificing their own lives to rescue others.

Why shouldn’t we say then that ‘morality’ arises because some of our actions are prompted by feelings which do not serve our own individual interest?

From this perspective, the human being is equipped with a range of different feelings which on their own or in combination drive us into action of various sorts. Some of these feelings prompt actions which help the person as an individual to survive, some prompt actions which help other individuals.

There is no reason in fact why we shouldn’t have feelings which drive us into actions which harm us. Those who work at building theories as to how evolutionary processes might have equipped us with our feelings might have special difficulties with this kind of feeling, but we cannot surely argue a priori that such difficulties will prove insuperable. We need scientific study don’t we to make progress with the question.

For example, if the spread of genes is what drives evolution, it wouldn’t be surprising if some of our feelings led to actions which had nothing to do with advancing the interest of an individual human being who experiences them.

So it is not difficult to see how people might end up behaving 'unselfishly' as a result of feelings. You can be swept away by the emotion of the moment. But this is not 'motivated' action in the way Hume means it. It is not action you choose to do.

What Hume says is that whenever you do actually choose to perform an action then you always act on what you see as the balance of pleasure and pain - for you - in prospect. So if you decided to kill your lover's lover it would be because you judged that the outcome would mean less suffering for you.

How then, let us remind ourselves, does Hume account for unselfish actions? In a way he says there aren't any. But sometimes you will try and prevent someone suffering because sympathy will make you suffer if they suffer.

Justice

Hume starts his theory with the point that we act as the prospect of pleasure and pain guides us - we do what promises to give us pleasure, and we eschew that which stands to cause us grief.

Often, the fact that a certain feeling is pleasurable is a fact of nature. We are born feeling that way and enjoying it.

Similarly for feelings we don't like: the unpleasantness is something we are born with.

Sometimes we act in ways that seem to go against the promptings of the inclinations and aversions that we are born with.

For example, we respect the property of a complete stranger. Here if it really is a stranger, we don't feel much in the way of sympathy should their property be threatened. It's not that which makes us hold back.

Yet hold back we do. We uphold 'justice', more or less.

How does Hume account for this?

Hume accounts for it on the supposition that in a complex society it is sometimes in an individual’s long-term interest to follow rules which in the short term appear purely altruistic.

Hume uses 'justice' to refer to rules safeguarding property. No such rules would be needed were human beings to live in a non-social state: but community living makes them necessary. (It is not that property has no need of protection unless there is communal living: it is that rules protecting 'property' create property - property is constituted by the rules governing people's behaviour with regard to the things around them.)

As far as communities are concerned, the institution of property is essential for secure and peacable living. This is something human beings can understand theoretically, but they don't have any strong natural feelings to support it. That is to say, they have feeling for themselves, and feeling for their immediate family, but no strong feeling for people they don't know. When occasion demands, they will much sooner steal to keep themselves and their family in food than respect other peoples' property.

And yet respect for property is absolutely key to communal living.

So what is it then that establishes respect and so make society possible?

Human understanding comes to the rescue. We understand that respect is key, even though we don't feel much for it, and because people know this they use their intelligence to establish a convention.

"The remedy ... is not derived from nature, but from artifice; or more properly speaking, nature provides a remedy in the judgment and understanding, for what is irregular and incommodious in the affections. For when men, from their early education in society, have become sensible of the infinite advantages that result from it, and have besides acquired a new affection to company and conversation; and when they have observed, that the principal disturbance in society arises from those goods, which we call external, and from their looseness and easy transition from one person to another; they must seek for a remedy by putting these goods, as far as possible, on the same footing with the fixed and constant advantages of the mind and body. This can be done after no other manner, than by a convention entered into by all the members of the society to bestow stability on the possession of those external goods, and leave every one in the peaceable enjoyment of what he may acquire by his fortune and industry. By this means, every one knows what he may safely possess..." Hume, Treatise, Book III Part II Sect II, 'The remedy' )

The convention is to respect other people's property in the expectation that their restraint will be reciprocated.

Hume's thesis is that the members of society, realizing intellectually how important respecting other people's property is, elect to behave with restraint, believing that others will see the point of this as well and will respect your property if you respect theirs. So respect for property becomes established because people (a) accept that it is in their long-term interest to behave with restraint so long as others will broadly do the same and (b) they think others will indeed broadly do the same.

So far this argument shows that it is in a person's interest to respect the property of others, even strangers. The reason is: a world in which property is respected is likely to be more pleasurable to the individual in the long run.

But why do we think of a person who respects property as virtuous?

The next question is: why does behaving like this become categorised as a virtue, and behaving 'unjustly' a vice? ("Why we annex the idea of virtue to justice, and of vice to injustice?" Hume, Treatise, Book III Part II Sect II, 'Why we' )

Remember, a way of acting is 'virtuous', according to Hume's general theory, if it gives rise to welcome feelings, 'vicious' if it gives rise to feelings that are unpleasant.

Sometimes, when we see that an unjust act will directly harm our own interests, the prospect of it will indeed give us negative feelings. But what about the vast swathe of unjust actions which have nothing directly to do with us, taking place outside our immediate circle? These actions will not be seen as directly affecting our own interests and so won't be felt negatively on that account.

They will however, we know, be directly affecting the interests of others, who themselves will certainly have negative feelings about them. What happens is that through sympathy we will pick up on those negative feelings ourselves. So by this indirect route the unjust actions of others have a negative affect on us, so that in general unjust actions do generate negative feelings and do therefore fall under the catgeory of 'vice'.

"But though, in our own actions, we may frequently lose sight of that interest, which we have in maintaining order, and may follow a lesser and more present interest, we never fail to observe the prejudice we receive, either mediately or immediately, from the injustice of others; as not being in that case either blinded by passion, or byassed by any contrary temptation. Nay when the injustice is so distant from us, as no way to affect our interest, it still displeases us; because we consider it as prejudicial to human society, and pernicious to every one that approaches the person guilty of it. We partake of their uneasiness by sympathy; and as every thing, which gives uneasiness in human actions, upon the general survey, is called Vice, and whatever produces satisfaction, in the same manner, is denominated Virtue; "

Hume, Treatise, Book III Part II Sect II, 'But, though ...'

Hume and the 'function' of morality

Hume’s attempt to show how morality is a function of the psychological make-up we are born with is echoed by modern thinkers, writing unlike Hume of course after Darwin and the acceptance of evolutionary theory. The evolutionary biologists asks: what is the function of ‘morality’? How does moral behaviour, or the institution of ‘morality’ help the individual - or perhaps the species - towards survival? Here we bump into the issue encountered earlier: the idea that a society needs morality to perform a function that is vital to its continued working.

Hume and environmental philosophy

Hume’s thesis that our motivation for acting in others’ interests lies in the sympathies that are built into human nature has been taken up by modern environmentalists. If sympathy is what prompts us to act in the interest of others what we must do is somehow learn to extend our sympathies so that they embrace not human beings only but animals, plants and ecosystems as well.