Hume believed that all morality was the product of habit or custom. He also claimed that it was our sentiments that was influencing human moral and actions. We use these sentiments, or feelings, to find a conjunction between the motive, not the reason, behind an action and actually performing the action itself. Hume believed that our sentiments had the power to result in specific actions. At a certain point, this means we are predetermined to act as we do.
These sentiments control our actions to the degree of casual need, or the habitual expectation that what happen today will happen again the next day and so on unless given reason to believe otherwise. Hume was not a rationalist, therefore, rationality served no purpose in his account of morality. He does recognize that reason could possibly cause us to make judgements between relation of ideas and matters of fact. This just means that our most vivid of outcomes can’t cause us to act in the same way as even our weakest feelings may do.
No amount of facts, no matter how reliable, will ever produce a moral obligation or result in an action. Hume’s says, “Reason is, and ought to be, only the slave of the passions. ” All actions we do come naturally due to human sentiments and lack any interference from reason. He points out that not all actions are equal. Traditional morality is not, of course, derived from reason, but rather a moral sense. Hume defines virtue as a straightforward matter of fact which can be discovered through experience. Virtue is also always accompanied with hedonism, or a sense of pleasure or pain from an action.
Therefore, we praise a virtuous action since it causes us a feeling of pleasure and we avoid things such as vices since they produce a negative (painful) feeling or at least we anticipate it to do so. Hume believed that this provided a natural guide (inclinations) for us in terms of moral conduct. He also mentions ideas of utility, benevolence, and justice awaken deep, persuasive sentiments within us that in turn motivate us in terms of moral worth. We give assistance to people in need because we feel good in return and we remain fair when dealing with others because we’d feel bad to do so otherwise.
Overall, Hume believed we did things based off self-interest. He said we do these action because of four sanctions: physical, political, moral, and religious. Our motivations are driven by social, semi-social, dissocial, or self-regarding reasons, which often end a “moral” act, but then there’s the issue of if the end really justifies the means. If you’re not doing an act for the right reasons then it’s likely the act itself isn’t moral. Hume, as said before, held an agnostic belief. He was very skeptical about most things in life, but ultimately he would never claim to know something as fact.
This being true, he was often referred to as an enemy to organized religion. One of his arguments about God, is derived from the theory that the universe, in all its greatness, is a reflection of its ultimate cause. Hume was quick to point out that inferring a cause from a presumed effects has to be derived from a matter of fact based on experience and constant conjunction. Being only human, however, means we don’t live enough lives to be able to have had observed repetitive instances where gods have created other universes.
This means we are unable to develop a causal relationship between the two because we don’t have the habit formation based on experience of this event. Our universe is merely a unique example. Even if we could use causal reasoning here, we still wouldn’t be able to reach an intended conclusion. We must always suppose the presumed cause to be proportional to the observed effect. The imperfections in our world could never truly support the claim of a perfect creator. Hume also wasn’t a big believer in miracles and said that they too couldn’t be used to support the idea of God.
Bentham was influenced by Hume’s account of social utility. He also believed in hedonism, where we seek things that give us pleasure and avoid things that cause us pain. Although he did use the principle of utility as a standard of moral actions of a government and its individuals. Actions are acceptable when they promote pleasure or happiness, but disapproved of when they create pain or unhappiness. This in conjunction to the idea that we should be promoting overall happiness, according to Bentham, is incompatible with psychological egotism.
This is the whole problem with the “ought-is” theory that we previously discussed. A given ‘ought’ implies you can do it, but there isn’t any real obligation to act and promote something that conflicts with one’s personal well-being. Bentham pretty much takes this theory and says if you can do something that promotes happiness even against your own well-being that you should do so. He tried to empirically justify this by saying that when people promote happiness, the good for others then they would really be helping themselves as well.
The only real problem is that this still insinuates that people would be acting in self-interest. He finally just accepted the fact people will sometimes act benevolently with the overall benefit of humanity in mind. Bentham’s approach to moral philosophy was completely different from Hume’s. Hume rejected human egotism and focus more on people’s characters. Actions, to Hume, were a significant factor to a person’s character. Bentham focused way more on social reform and its relation to act-evaluations.
He does however take from Hume the idea that utility is the standard measurement of virtue. Hume made the distinction between pleasure and pain and how we perceived virtue from those experiences, but this is created differently by each individual observer. Although, Bentham focuses more on Hume’s social utility which states that there are certain traits that generate tangible benefits for society which might or might not create pleasure for a person. Bentham isn’t really echoing Hume’s ideas, but rather significantly influenced by his ideas of pleasure being a moral standard or value.
Bentham really wanted to transition from pleasure just being a response of certain traits to more of a consequence that are in relation to actions that are either right or wrong morally. He believed that any action should be considered morally good if the consequences it produces are good for humanity despite, or rather are independent of, the response we have personally in result of the action. This is where Hume lacks because his utility indicates a perfect observer and makes it harder to account for mistakes made by people in respect to virtue or vice.
Bentham thought a big issue for people was the fact that some people may not be able to perceive the good effects of an action. He basically thought as long as the effects of an action were good and better than all other alternatives then that action is the right one. He noticed over time that people’s responses to certain actions, whether of pleasure or disgust, didn’t always reflect the actual morality of the action itself. He saw this when studying the morality of homosexuality and observed people’s response to it versus the actual morality of the act itself.
For this reason, he came up with a qualitative scale to determine the moral value of an action in respect to pleasure and pain. He measured this by finding the intensity, duration, certainty, proximity, fecundity, purity of that action. He also mentions that people should consider the extent, which is really how many people does the action affect. This is an interesting idea at the very least, but again we run into the problem that everybody’s scale of measurement would be different based on how they felt about the action.