Hume's Moving from "Is" to "Ought"

Although Hume is a naturalist who seeks to compare human actions as those that are governed by natural laws, he is not completely mechanistic about this idea. Hume still has many explanations that focus on human rationalization and consciousness, and due to these flexible understandings, Hume is also best known for subjectivism which establishes many good grounds for morality. That is why he says that when moving from 'is' to 'ought' "a reason should be given... "To see whether he contradicts himself when jumping from natural laws to human laws and reasoning which at first to him seem not to be primary motivations to act morally, I need to summarize some of his main ideas and concepts and also his arguments presented in the Treatise as well as to provide my own assessment for this issue.


First of all, we know that Hume asserts in the Treatise that reason has no capacity to motivate people to act, and that only feelings, desires and passions motivate people to act. These ideas, I think, don't assist finally in concluding by Hume that we should not use reasoning to assist in our moral actions. In contrary, Hume thinks that the rules of morality are not conclusions of our reason, but morality is another term to represent for our moral sentiments that are the results from our reasoning. In another word, the reasoning process provides us to have sentiments or feelings about what is right and what is wrong, and these feelings in turn become our moral senses. More specifically speaking, reason cannot cause us to act morally, but give us the necessary senses and feelings that urge and motivate us to do the right actions. From reasoning, we create our special feelings of whether to do something is right or wrong, and from these feelings we proceed to act accordingly and righteously. In short, Hume still doesn't deny that it is feelings or moral senses that motivate us to act virtuously not reason.


To understand better how Hume's moving from 'is' to 'ought' is the result in reason, we need to understand that 'what is' means what naturally is or what we feel according to our natural contacts with the environment around us. For example, the proposition 'he is thirsty' describes the natural state of a person who is longing for a drink of water, and describes him in natural senses. There is no reason why the man is thirsty because it is a natural or physical state that every living thing can experience since when someone is thirsty, he is thirsty. There is no reason why he must be thirsty because drinking and eating are natural demands for living things not because there is a reason why he has to be thirsty. For the proposition such as 'he ought not kill', we see that there is a reason why he 'ought not' rather than why he 'does not kill'; it is because the statement: 'he doesn't kill' does not has any moral meaning or sense while there is a reason for why he ought not kill in the 'ought' statement; that is, killing causes pain or serious injure to another person. Thus, when one hears the word 'killing', he will have an impression of a person who is seriously injured and is dying, and thus he feels terrible or feels the same pains that the dying person is having. These painful feelings will give him a moral sense that he ought not kill because he doesn't want to do something that causes terrible pains to someone with the exchange or the hope that the other person will not do the same terrible pains to him. Hume takes after Hobbes in this silent mutual agreement that can cause benefit to everyone in order to establish mutual laws that can bring equal benefit between two persons to be moral grounds to motivate moral senses. Thus, now, we understand the distinction between a moral sense and a reason that is just a rationalizing statement that cannot cause feelings or senses. To Hume, "reasoning become a tool, the use of which will allow us to determine the most effective means to whatever aims our sentiments and other passions lead us to desire." (Hurley 296)


Hume writes in the Treatise that "moral excites passions, and produces or prevents actions." What he means is that when one recognizes that a particular action violates a moral rule, one is not motivated to perform the action. And how one recognizes what particular action is right or wrong is what I just gave out as an example in the above paragraph that a man knows the terrible feelings given from a seriously injured person would probably avoid the act of killing by doing the same seriously injuring action to someone. Thus, we see that a reason statement such as "you ought not kill because that is against morality", or "it is reasonable not to kill someone in order for not to be killed by someone else" has no stronger motivation for us in order to prevent us from killing than a statement that says "killing means thrusting or stabbing someone to dead", obviously, the last sentence really describes how painful and how terrified it is if we have to commit a murder, and this would prevent us immediately from having even killing thoughts. Therefore, now, we know that why Hume thinks moral sense is the primary ground for acting morally and that the 'ought' that is to direct us what we should do or should not do is not from the effect of a reasoning statement but from the effect of a moral sense or feeling. Thus, Hume doesn't jump from 'is' to 'ought' without sufficient explanations as to what moral sense means and what ground is primary for morality.


Since reason cannot motivate, and morality can, Hume concludes that the rules of morality are not conclusions of our reason, but are conclusions from our moral senses, and moral sense conduces moral duty. Thus, "when moral duty motivates a person to act contrary to his selfish desires, what occurs is a conflict ultimately between certain moral sentiments that lead the person to desire to act morally and certain feelings that lead the person to desire to act contrary to the dictates of morality." (Hurley 297). Here we see that only feelings are acting against feelings; there is not a feeling that is acting against something that is not a feeling such as a reason, nor is there any reason acting against feelings or actions because as Hume already says that "reason can never immediately prevent or produce any action by contradicting or approving of it, it cannot be the source of the distinction between moral good and evil, which are found to have that influence." (Hume 3.1.1)


In conclusion, morality is grounded in certain particular feelings that people have, sentiments that generate the desire to act morally. In another word, moral goodness and virtue are manifested by the occurrence of a feeling of satisfaction or pleasure, and moral depravity and vice are manifested by the occurrence of a pain or a feeling of disapprobation. That means whether we approve an action to be a moral or an immoral one is because the feelings or sentiments we have for it not because we understand just the conception that is a result of a reason or an abstract reasoning. From feelings that cause pain and dissatisfied mental states, we are driven in an 'ought' way to act towards morality, and thus our morality is learned through sense and feeling rather than from reasoning.





References


Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Ed. David and Mary Norton. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.


Hurley et al. History of Philosophy. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993.