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Show Chapter XIV. Hume's Metaethics We now arrive at Hume's own pronouncements about the seemingly insoluble problems about moral motivation and rational justification with which this volume began. Up to this point I have said very little of substance about the transpersonal conception of reason that Humeans disparage as motivationally impotent and that a true Kantian would valorize as both motivationally and theoretically potent. I say a great deal about that conception in Volume II. But in discussing Hume's actual analysis it is necessary to preview that longer discussion, if only in broad outline. The transpersonal conception of reason enfolds what I shall describe as a traditional view, according to which reason functions to, among other things, make inferences and categorical and hypothetical judgments, formulate hypotheses, and derive conclusions from evidential statements, deductive premises, and syllogisms. Reason on this traditional view is a logical arbiter, a calculator and discoverer of the relations between abstract concepts and states or events in the world. This is the very weak, conventional and widely accepted conception of reason to which Gewirth referred; and it is, as I have just argued in criticizing Annette Baier's interpretation of Hume, an important part of the transpersonal conception of reason on which the enterprise of Socratic metaethics, and indeed the practice of Anglo-American analytic philosophy more generally, relies. Many have taken the utility-maximization model of rationality dissected in Chapters III and IV to be a direct consequence of the traditional view of reason. As we saw there, the utility-maximization model accepts the traditional view of reason as a purely theoretical or logical capacity, and assigns it the instrumental function of ascertaining, through investigation and calculation, the most efficient means possible of achieving our desired final ends, whatever these may be. Call this the positive utility-maximization thesis. Reason on the traditional view has two tasks, according to this positive thesis. Its primary task is to maximize utility; to discover the relations among phenomena such that they can best be utilized to satisfy our desires. Its secondary task is the examination of these phenomena themselves, for the purpose of discovering those objects or states of affairs that themselves best satisfy our desires. Such examination may run the gamut from methodologically rigorous scientific inquiry in general, i.e. the discovery of what phenomena there are, to a more restricted and informal scrutiny of particular objects, in order to discern or infer whether, or to what extent they have the qualities we desire. I call this task "secondary" because on the utilitymaximization model of rationality, it is a special case of the primary task of reason, i.e. the utilization of our intellectual capacities in the service of realizing our desired final ends. Clearly the discovery of possible objects that |
