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37 Hume, Enquiry VIII Liberty
& Necessity Over Enquiry VIII-XI Hume turned to apply
the theory of causality and necessity worked out over Enquiry II-VII to a variety of specific topics: free will,
miracles, and the design argument for the existence of a provident creator
and of an afterlife. Enquiry VIII makes a special
application of the position on the nature of necessity worked out over Enquiry VII to the dispute over free
will and determinism, or “liberty” and “necessity” to use Hume’s terms. When necessity is properly understood, Hume
claimed, it turns out that liberty is not opposed to necessity (determination
of the will), but only to “constraint” (determination of the body to move
contrary to the will). Our actions can
be both free and necessitated. The argument of Enquiry VIII is divided into two
parts. Over the first part, Hume
argued that liberty is not opposed to necessity, and that all human actions are
caused in the two senses of “cause” identified at the close of Enquiry VII: particular sorts of
actions are the regular consequences of particular sorts of motives, and when
we perceive particular sorts of motives we feel impelled to expect particular
sorts of actions. The second part of Enquiry VIII responds to the charge
that the doctrine of necessity undermines morality by making it illegitimate
for us to praise or blame people for their actions. On the contrary, Hume claimed, as he had
explained it the doctrine of necessity is “Not only consistent with morality,
but … absolutely essential to its support.” QUESTIONS ON THE
1. What does
our idea of necessity arise from?
2. What is our
idea of necessity an idea of?
3. What were
Hume’s reasons for saying that all people have always concluded that our
voluntary actions and operations of mind are necessitated? (Find two)
4. What is the
chief use of history?
5. What is the
benefit of a long life employed in a variety of occupations and company?
6. What is
required for us to be able to see through the tricks of con artists and
others who want to deceive us?
7. What
accounts for the fact that not all people behave in precisely the same manner
in the same circumstances?
8. Why is the
fact that there are some actions that seem to have no regular connection with
any known motives not an objection to the thesis that human actions are
necessitated?
9. What is the
foundation of morals? 10.
Why is it that even though people all believe
the doctrine of necessity and rely on it in their anticipations of how others
will behave, they are reluctant to acknowledge it in words and instead claim
that nothing determines human actions? 11.
What is meant by attributing liberty to
voluntary actions? 12.
What makes actions criminal? 13.
Why would denying that human actions are
necessitated by motives mean that a person must be as pure and untainted
after committing the most horrid crime, as at the first moment of birth? 14.
What opposite interests are the moral
sentiments based on? 15.
How did Hume respond to the objection that
insofar as the doctrine of necessity makes God the ultimate cause of all
human actions, it follows that no human actions can be blameworthy, because
God does nothing without a good and valid reason for doing so? Note:
“Absolute decrees” (8.36). The
doctrine of absolute decrees is the doctrine that some have been predestined
to be damned to hell for all eternity, and that there is nothing they can do
to escape this fate. It is a
consequence of the doctrines of original sin and of salvation by grace
alone. According to these doctrines we
are all born in a state of infinite corruption and so are all born deserving
to go to hell. Christ’s sacrifice on
the cross was supposed to release an infinite amount of divine grace, that
would reform us and redeem us from that fate, but since the sacrifice
obviously has not made everyone a good person, and since God’s grace is
irresistible, it follows that God has not willed that all get the grace. The sacrifice must only have been intended
to release grace for some, not all. God’s reasons for dispensing grace to
some and not to others are inscrutable and apparently arbitrary. Since we are all infinitely corrupt at
birth, it is impossible for any of us to do a truly good deed in advance of
receiving God’s grace, which alone can overcome our corruption and make us
capable of goodness. None of us can do
anything to merit receiving God’s grace prior to receiving it. But though we are all equally undeserving,
God nonetheless gives grace to some and withholds it from others, like a rich
person walking down a street full of beggars and giving a coin to one rather
than another. We are supposed to be
awed that he gave as much as he did, since he didn’t have to give anything at
all and no one deserved anything, rather than offended that he did not
distribute all he could equally. This
is the doctrine of absolute decrees.
It was affirmed by Augustine and those in the more extreme Jansenist and Calvinist wings of the Catholic and
Protestant denominations. Augustine’s
opponent, Pelagius, and the the Molinist
(Jesuit) and Arminian wings of the Catholic and Protestant denominations
tried to maintain that works could get one saved, though at risk of making
the crucifixion ridiculous. Moderates
in all Christian denominations nonetheless found absolute decrees hard to
accept. 16.
How did Hume respond to the objection that
insofar as the doctrine of necessity makes God the ultimate cause of all
human actions, it makes him responsible for their crimes? NOTES ON THE Enquiry VIII opens
with the claim that people have only disputed over the freedom of the will
because they have not bothered to carefully consider what necessitation and
liberty involve. They have supposed
that strict necessitation holds for the operations of inanimate bodies but
that there is no necessity in human choice.
But Enquiry IV and VII have
shown that all that anyone can mean when they claim that the motions and
other changes of inanimate bodies are necessitated is that they are the
regular consequences of particular antecedent events. There is no force or power that we conceive
in these antecedent events that makes the consequents follow. At best, we feel an impulse to conceive of
certain things on the occasion of perceiving other things that we confuse
with such a force or power. All anyone
can truly mean by saying that events are necessitated, therefore, is just
that they have regular antecedents and that we feel ourselves impelled to
infer those events when we contemplate those antecedents. Hume claimed that even though people deny
that human choices are necessitated, they all agree, and always have agreed,
that human behaviour is by and large predictable — as predictable, in fact,
as anything else. And in countless
instances of ordinary life they rely on that predictability and risk a great
deal on its continuing to be so. But
this means that all people have always considered human choices to be the
regular consequents of antecedent events, and have always drawn inferences
from antecedent events to which choices humans placed in those circumstances
will make. Even though they deny that
human choices are necessitated in other, unintelligible senses, they really
do believe that human choices are necessitated in the only sense of
“necessitation” that makes any sense. Enquiry
8.4-6. The
nature of necessity. According to
Hume, for human actions to be necessitated is for them to have some
cause. This cause is not something
that “necessitates” our actions in the sense of producing them or forcing them
to occur. Instead, conformably to the
two definitions of “cause” given at the close of Enquiry VII, a cause of an action is just something that
regularly happens before that event occurs, and something that impels the
mind to conceive of that event. Over
the main part of Enquiry VIII Hume
proceeded to argue that all people have always supposed that human actions
are caused in each of these senses.
They have supposed that actions of certain sorts are regularly
preceded by circumstances, motives, and character traits of certain sorts,
and when they consider people with particular motives and character traits to
be placed in particular circumstances, they expect them to behave
accordingly. Having established these
two points, Hume turned to briefly explain why an incorrect understanding of
the nature of necessity has led people to fail to recognize their own belief
in the determination of all human action and to forge an illegitimate notion
of liberty. Enquiry
8.7-16. Why we
all agree that human actions are the constant consequences of antecedent
motives. Hume’s principal reason
for concluding that we take human actions to be necessitated in the sense of
being the regular effects of antecedent motives is that we formulate general
rules concerning the behaviour of other people, and rely on these rules in
our interactions with them and in our speculations concerning them. We consider certain people, particularly
older people, to be good judges of character because their experiences have
put them in a position to tell, from people’s circumstances, expressions and
actions, what passions are motivating them, and to draw correct inferences
about their behaviour from their passions.
Were this not the case, we would be at a loss to anticipate how people
would behave next, and nothing would surprise us in their actions. Just the opposite is the case. The better we know someone, the easier it
is to tell in advance what they will do.
When we run into problems with other people, we seek out the advice of
those who know them better or are simply older than we are because we trust
that their greater experience will have revealed more to them about “what
makes people tick.” We study history
for the same reason. It gives us more
experience of how people behave and so allows us to draw generalizations
about their behaviour from a broader experiential base. We even extend these inferences to peoples
in past times and remote places, and expect them to have behaved or to behave
as those we know behave. And we carry
these judgments to our assessments of works of fiction and consider them
flawed to the extent that the characters act in ways that are too much at
variance with our experience of how people behave. Of course, not all
people behave in exactly the same way, even when placed in the same
circumstances. But that just leads us
to collect people into different sorts, and make generalizations about their
behaviour depending on the sort they belong to. We expect people to behave differently based
on their age, their gender, their upbringing, and other such factors, and we ascribe different character traits to them
and expect different actions from people we consider avaricious, ambitious,
timid, resentful, lazy, curious, and so on. It does happen that
from time to time people do things that surprise us, and go contrary to
everyone’s expectations. But these
occasions are rare. Moreover, they do
not arise any more frequently — indeed, rather less frequently — in the case
of human behaviour than in the case of natural events. We are more often surprised by the weather
than by the behaviour of those around us, yet we do not think that the
weather is undetermined. Hume maintained
that when wise people run across untoward events in nature, they immediately
assume that the anomaly must be due to the complexity of the circumstances,
which conceal some cause that has not yet been noticed. Less educated people might suppose instead
that causes are weak, and only able to bring about their effects most of the
time rather than with perfect constancy.
But even they continue to believe that most events in nature are
caused and the exceptions are due to chance, or the failure of any cause to
operate. Since the constancy of the
conjunction between circumstances, character traits, and motives, on the one
hand, and human actions, on the other, is no less than that between natural
events, we ought, by parity of example, to draw the same conclusions about
human behaviour: if it is sometimes surprising and anomalous, the most likely
reason is the operation of some hidden cause — or, failing that, pure
chance. This is a second reason for
concluding that we take human actions to be necessitated. We suppose that natural events are
necessitated. But the regularities in
human behaviour are no less extensive than those in the inanimate world. Enquiry
8.16-20. Why we all infer actions from motives. If we accept the theory of causal inference
laid out in Enquiry V.ii, then it immediately follows from the fact that we all
notice motives to be constantly conjoined with human actions that we will infer actions from a knowledge of people’s
motives. But Hume further illustrated
the point with a number of examples.
He pointed out that we cannot engage in commerce or in any other
activity involving cooperation with others if we are at a total loss to
anticipate how people will act next.
He noted that history, politics, morals, and criticism would become
impossible since we could not rely on historians or witnesses to tell the
truth, or on laws to have any influence on behaviour, or on good or bad
character traits to determine people’s actions, nor could we have any
standard for assessing whether the actions of fictional characters are
plausible or implausible. And he
argued that our inferences concerning inanimate nature are of a piece with
our inferences concerning human behaviour, so that the one is not considered
any less law-like in its operation than the other. Enquiry
8.21-22. Erroneous notions of necessity and free will. But if we all think that human actions
are necessitated by motives, why do so many of us insist that we are
free? Hume’s answer was that we are
led to do this by wrong notions of freedom and necessity. People think that natural causes are not
just regular antecedents of consequent events, but things that contain
(unintelligible) powers that make those consequent events come about. Because people don’t feel any such power in
the motives that precede their actions (which is not surprising since they
have no clear idea even of what power is), they claim that their will is free
and not determined. Indeed, they go so
far as to fancy that their will could just as easily have caused an action
contrary to the action it did cause. The error of these
opinions is easily demonstrated.
While, from a first person point of view, we don’t experience anything
in our motives that makes us act as we do, we don’t experience anything in
any cause that makes it produce its effect.
What makes us consider something to be necessitated is just that it is
regularly preceded by an event of a certain sort. And that is the case with our actions. Whenever we consider the actions and
motives of some other person, we see regularity in the succession of the one
after another. But when we consider
our own actions, and don’t feel any connection between our motives and our
will, we think the will is not determined by its motives. We forget that all that it means for the
will to be determined by its motives is for particular acts of will to be
regularly preceded by particular motives.
Others can see that this is the case with us. Even when we try to prove that our will is
undetermined by first doing one action, such as raising an arm, and then
doing the opposite and not raising it, others can say that our action is the
regular consequence of a motive to prove the fanciful freedom of the will. Enquiry 8.23-25. The
nature of liberty. Having
established that everyone really relies on the supposition that human actions
are the effects of circumstances, motives, and character traits, Hume turned
to establish that everyone also believes that we can be free agents. Even those who think that all our actions
are determined also think that most of those actions are also free. There is no contradiction in doing so, as
long as we properly understand what it means to be free. Hume claimed that when
we consider ourselves to be free we cannot mean that our actions are
uncaused. What we mean is rather that
our actions are caused by the will rather than by some factor that forces our
bodies to move independently of or contrary to the will. The will itself, however, is determined by
motives, character traits, and circumstances.
But everyone also has
to agree that the will is determined — indeed, that determination of the will
by motives is necessary for this notion of liberty to make any sense. Were we not determined by any motives, we
couldn’t tell whether our actions are in accord with or opposed to our
motives and so couldn’t say whether we are at liberty or not. The absence of all determination is not
liberty of will but chance. Anyone who
tries to operate with such a notion of liberty is working with a notion of
liberty that is, as Hume put it, either “not consistent with plain matter of
fact” (because it denies that actions are the regular consequences of motives
when plainly they are) or “not consistent with itself” (because denying that
actions are necessitated by motives removes the condition that is required
for us to be able to say that they are free in the first place — that they
are in accord with what we are motivated to do) (Enquiry 8.24). We think otherwise
only because we have confused notions of causality. We tend to think that in addition to being
the regular antecedents of subsequent events, causes are things that have a
power to make those events come about.
We further think that in some cases the power is so strong that the
causes necessitate the events whereas in other cases it is weaker so that the
causes do not always necessitate their effects. We then attach this notion to the will,
which we think of as an effect that cannot be necessitated by any cause. In fact, however, the only thing that makes
us consider one event to be a cause of another is that the one regularly
precedes the other. What makes motives
causes of the will is that they regularly precede acts of will, not that they
have some power to make the will what it is.
To really deny that the will is determined we would need to establish,
not just that motives do not contain any power to determine the will, but
that particular motives do not regularly precede particular acts of
will. But no one could do that, first,
because it is obviously false, and second because denying it would destroy
any intelligible sense of freedom at the same time that it destroys
determinism. Freedom means being able
to do what you are motivated to do.
Action without motives is not free action, but random or chance action
— which is something that no one accepts. Enquiry
8.26-31. Why determinism is required for morality. It is commonly charged that if determinism
is true then morality is impossible.
This is because morals prescribe how people ought to behave. But if all actions are necessitated, then
it makes no sense to lay down prescriptions concerning behaviour. One might as well try to prescribe how the
planets ought to move as try to prescribe how people should behave. The motions of the latter are no less the
necessitated than the former, and no more open to change in accord with our
prescriptions. We may discover the
natural laws in accord with which human beings do move, just as we may discover the natural laws in accord with
which the planets move. But to attempt
to lay down any prescriptions about how either ought to move, contrary to how they are necessitated by natural
laws to move, would be in vain. Neither does it make any sense to blame
people for failing to follow moral prescriptions. We do not hold people morally responsible
for doing what they were forced to do, and if all actions are determined then
whatever we do we were forced to do. Hume turned to address
these charges in Enquiry VIII.ii, where he argued that determinism is so far from
making morality impossible that the opposite is the case. Determinism is necessary for the
possibility of morality. To make his
case, Hume observed that actions, considered in themselves,
are morally indifferent. Even the most
unfortunate actions, resulting in the agonizing death of thousands of people,
are in themselves morally indifferent.
To be immoral, an action must not only be evil, it must have been done
with evil intent. Someone who causes some
evil because they could not avoid it (tripping and falling to knock over a
lamp that causes a fire in which hundreds are burned to death) or because
they did it inadvertently (unknowingly carrying a disease that infects
thousands and causes them to die a slow, agonizing death), is not blamed or
considered morally responsible for their action. Similarly, those who do evil things through
negligence or lack of caution are not blamed as much as those who do them
deliberately or as a consequence of premeditation. But to allow that what makes an action evil
is not just that it has evil consequences, but that it was done with evil
intent is to allow that character traits and motives make all the difference
to whether we consider actions moral or immoral. But that in turn presupposes that character
traits and motives are causes of action.
If my character and my motives did not cause my actions, I couldn’t be
considered to have done an evil act because I am an evil person, and so could
not be blamed. This argument stands
on its own, but it is further illuminated by a theory of moral psychology
that Hume alluded to in Enquiry VIII
and presented more fully in other works.
According to that theory, people’s different character traits
naturally or instinctively lead us to feel sentiments of approbation or
disapproval, depending on whether those character traits are intrinsically
pleasing or displeasing, or are good or bad for the person themselves or for
those around them. When we disapprove
of people’s actions, it is only to the extent that we take those actions to
follow from and so be signs of disagreeable character traits of the
person. Inadvertent or negligent
actions are not as offensive to us as premeditated ones because they are not
good signs of the disagreeable character traits that are really what arouse our moral sentiments. Hume also had an
answer to the charge that determinism would make it useless to attempt to
prescribe moral rules. The answer is
not one that comes out clearly in the text but that follows from his
background theory of ethics and the passions.
According to that theory, people instinctively approve of certain
character traits and disapprove of others.
These instincts can be artificially molded. One way they can be artificially molded is
by public statements of moral rules governing behaviour — the sort of
behaviour motivated by good character traits.
As long as the rules are broadly accepted and followed by others, who
evidently treat those who follow the rules with esteem and those who break
them with disapprobation, the rules can have a profound effect on people’s
behaviour and even a formative effect on their characters. Since people’s sense of pride and shame is
largely determined by what others think of them, they experience unpleasant
feelings of shame at the disapproval of others and pleasant feelings of pride
at their approval. Even if they have
bad characters, and don’t want to do the things that are prescribed by moral
rules, the fact that these things have been so publicly prescribed and are so
widely observed makes people want to behave accordingly in order to at least
pretend to have good characters (by acting as if they do), and perhaps
acquire those characters by practice.
This will earn the esteem of others, which is one of the things we prize the most. In short, Hume’s
answer to the objection was that even if all our actions are determined,
prescribing moral rules can affect how they are determined. We can’t change the motion of the planets
by telling the planets how they ought to behave. But we can change their motions by moving a
massively gravitating body into the vicinity of the solar system. Prescribing moral rules is like that. It alters the way people perceive one
another, and our altered sense of how others perceive us in turn alters how
we are disposed to behave. We end up
behaving morally not because it is the right thing to do, but because we (or
at least some of us) have been determined to want to do so, in part because
of the institution of the laws. Enquiry
8.32-35. The objection that the doctrine of necessity makes all human actions
good, as consequences of divine will.
Admittedly, not all of us can be determined to behave correctly by
these means. Some people have vicious
character traits that are just too resistant.
This renews the question of whether these people can be justly blamed
for their actions. If we don’t blame
people for doing things that were beyond their control, why should we blame
them for actions that they did deliberately, if the character traits that motivated
them to act that way in those circumstances were beyond their control? Hume set this question
in a religious context by noting that the doctrine of determinism entails
that ultimate responsibility for people’s behaviour must be ascribed to God,
who made the world and everyone in it the way they are. If we suppose that God does everything for
the best, then it would follow that people are blameless even for
deliberately committing the most horrid crimes, because God made them so as
to do it, and God must have had excellent reasons for making them that way. Hume’s answer to both
the secular and the religious version of this problem turns on his view that
moral judgments are not the consequences of reasoning but expressions of
sentiment. It is a feature of our
sentiments that they decay over distances, be those distances temporal,
spatial, or logical. Temporally, resentment
felt over injuries fades over time. Spatially,
someone on a 3 year excursion on the opposite side of the world is less
concerned over the news that their house back home was burned down than the
same person would be at the news that a window had been broken were they
living at home. Logical separation has
the same effect. When we need to
transfer a passion from its immediate cause to the cause of that cause to the
cause of that cause and so on for a great number of steps until we reach some
ultimate cause, the passion dissipates.
We naturally feel resentment for the person who immediately did a
wicked deed, as long as we think the deed was done deliberately and so take
it as a sign of a bad character. While
we might take a more remote view of things and think that that the person’s
character was determined by their circumstances, and so feel some resentment
for the parents or the politicians who played a role in creating those
circumstances, the passion does not remain as strong when it is moved to a
more remote object. And while we might
think that the ultimate cause planned it all and designed it for the best,
the contradiction between that remote thought and our proximate resentment is
not felt because we simply cannot transfer the sentiment back to the remote
object. In the end, Hume’s
answer to the secular version of the problem is that we blame people and
disapprove of them because we can’t help doing so. Because of the way we are constituted we
are naturally impelled to feel these passions when we contemplate bad
characters. The fact that people did
not make their characters what they are and so are not responsible for them
does not move us to refrain from condemning them any more than the thought
that we perceive no necessary connection between constantly conjoined objects
moves us to refrain from judging them to be connected as cause and effect. But given that this is
what we do do,
there remains a question of what we ought
to do. If people’s characters are
ultimately due to God, then do we consider God to be ultimately responsible
for their wickedness and blame him as well, or do we consider that God, being
all perfect, must have had some good reason for making things as they are and
that it is all for the best that particular people are performing the wicked
deeds we see around us? Hume did not give a
forthright answer to this question but the answer is clear from what he did
say. Since we cannot resist blaming
wicked people for their wickedness, the possibility of viewing their actions
as being all for the best is just not open to us. That means that, logically, we ought to
transfer that blame to the ultimate cause of the wickedness and consider God
to be responsible for sin. Enquiry 8.36. The
objection that the doctrine of necessity makes God responsible for human
moral evil. Of course, we do not blame God for sin. But that is only because our passions
dissipate before they reach as far back as that remote cause. All the same, why shouldn’t we blame God
for making humans deliberately do wicked things? The answer is that this is simply
inconsistent with what we understand God to be. A wicked God could not be a God. This poses a problem for Hume’s
account. If the account entails an
absurdity, that God must be responsible for sin, then does that mean that we
must reject it? Hume must have felt a
temptation to play modus ponens in
response to this modus tollens argument.
If the account is correct, then it follows that there can be no God —
at least none that would not be ultimately responsible for sin. But he refrained from taking the argument
in this direction. Instead, he
replied, legitimately enough, that the problem of how to reconcile the
existence of sin with the existence of God is a problem that infects all
accounts of free will (it is in fact a version of the problem of evil), so
the fact that his account cannot resolve the problem is no special reason for
rejecting his account. If it were, it
would by parity of example require us to reject all the others as well. It is a “mystery” why God permits evil
“which mere natural and unassisted reason is very unfit to handle.” Those who insist on free will still have
problems explaining why God would have created creatures who
would freely will to do evil, given that he has “prescience” or knowledge of
all future events. And of course those
who deny it (who were in fact the majority of Hume’s Presbyterian countrymen)
have problems reconciling God’s predestination of the many to damnation and
arbitrary election of the few for salvation with the fundamental tenets of
morality. This is just one of
the problems for religious belief that Hume proceeded to raise over the
penultimate sections of the Enquiry. ESSAY QUESTIONS AND RESEARCH PROJECTS
1. Hume
claimed that “the conjunction between motives and voluntary actions is as
regular and uniform, as that between the cause and effect in any part of
nature.” He claimed, further, that
“this regular conjunction has been universally acknowledged … and has never
been the subject of dispute, either in philosophy or common life.” Identify his reasons for making this claim
and assess their strength.
2. Hume
claimed that the notion of liberty only makes sense if it is understood as
the ability to act or not act according to how one is motivated. Is it true that there is no other way to
make sense of the term?
3. Hume
claimed that, considered in themselves, actions are morally indifferent and
are only made good or bad by a consideration of the reasons people have for
performing them. Was he right about
this? Supposing he was, was he right
to draw the conclusion that this means that actions cannot be morally good or
bad unless they are determined by motives?
Would he have an adequate response to someone who said that what makes
actions good or bad is not that they are determined by good or bad motives,
but that the person who performs them always has some motives to act one way
and other motives to act the opposite way and freely chooses to act on the
one sort of motive rather than the other?
4. Hume
claimed that we are forced by our nature to feel sentiments of moral
approbation and disapproval when we contemplate characters, dispositions, and
actions, that are useful or harmful to selves or society, and that we will
feel these sentiments whether or not we think the people involved were
determined to have the characters and dispositions they have. But we also think that it is illegitimate
to blame people for things they were forced to do and could not avoid, even
if we are psychologically compelled to do so.
Is any legitimate praise or
blame of people still possible if Hume is right? Are praise and blame, or rewards and
punishments, still legitimate?
5. Compare the
views of Hobbes, Locke, and Hume on the freedom of the will. |