Mind and Morality: An Examination of Hume's Moral Philosophy.

Cunningham, Andrew

BRICKE, John. Mind and Morality: An Examination of Hume's Moral Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. x + 263 pp. Cloth, $45.00--The main line of argument in Bricke's stimulating and well-written interpretation of Hume's moral theory runs roughly as follows: (1) Hume holds that, in practical reasoning, beliefs are subordinate to desires, and is therefore a "conativist" (and also, by Bricke's reckoning, a noncognitivist); (2) we must attribute to Hume the view that both desires and beliefs have representational content, so that they are essentially distinguished by their opposite "directions of fit"--otherwise we cannot forestall the cognitivist from simply insisting that intrinsically motivating beliefs are possible; (3) moral sentiments are motivating and must accordingly be founded in desire, not (or not solely) in belief; (4) moral sentiments are therefore neither true nor false, but, since they arise when an impartial point of view is adopted, intersubjective agreement in moral attitude and a measure of objectivity are possible; (5) this in turn helps to explain the cognitive form of moral language; and (6) conventions underlying the artificial virtues originally arise from, and are sustained by, the natural activity and intercourse of our moral sentiments. Bricke concludes with some penetrating thoughts on the nature of Humean free will and the relation of enduring desires to personal identity.

Bricke's discussion is grounded in a profound, and profoundly interesting, understanding of Hume's theory of the passions. Chapter 4 illustrates this. There Bricke argues that Hume identifies, as the source of the distinctiveness of "specifically moral" desires, the impartial point of view that must be adopted to produce them. Hume considers sympathy to be a psychological pass-key that allows human beings, despite their incorrigible selfishness, to enter into this impartial standpoint (p. 107). However, perfect impartiality requires that our natural sympathy undergo "correction," since we most readily and fully sympathize with those to whom we are closely related by resemblance or propinquity. Bricke is at his best in these sections, skilfully advancing the Humean view that, while sympathy itself is natural, its correction is learned and motivated mainly by the desire for social stability and for the consistent and objective use of language (p. 137). The impartial and intersubjective character of sympathetically derived moral desires suggests possible conativist responses to a standard criticism of noncognitivism--that "moral discourse is redolent of cognitivity" (as Peter Glassen once put it)--and Bricke accordingly shows how Hume's theory might be revised to allow moral sentences to be, in a limited but significant sense, truth-bearing (p. 164).

Bricke's practice of revising, or "regimenting," Hume's arguments will displease some readers. He insists that it is a "methodologically sound assumption" that Hume must have had a "highly structured and systematic" theoretical understanding of moral psychology, a fact that (purportedly) justifies Bricke's allowing "the parameters set by emerging theoretical design to play a substantive part in the interpretation of passages that have shown themselves resistant to ready reading" (p. 2). Consider Bricke's attempt to establish Hume as a conativist. Hume's dictum that reason alone cannot motivate is inadequate, Bricke observes: it does not prove that moral beliefs could not be a set of beliefs with the curious defining property of being motivating (p.21). Therefore, Bricke maintains, Hume must have intended a subtler argument concerning "direction of fit": the essence of belief (according to this argument) is that it is true only if its content matches the world, as opposed to desire, which can be satisfied only if the world comes to match its content. Although Hume presents this argument in (at best) "an impressionistic, an insufficiently explicit, at places a seriously misleading fashion" (pp. 21-2), and although it is hard to square with Hume's assertion that desires lack representational content, Bricke insists that, in some sense, it can be attributed to Hume and that Hume must, therefore, have been a conativist. As Hume's supposed conativism is itself relied on throughout the book to support other rather bold interpretations of Hume's arguments, one wishes that it had been set on a firmer foundation (pp. 44, 167).

It remains that Bricke has produced a book that can be recommended without reservation to students of moral theory and to anyone with an interest in Hume.