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Show Chapter XIV. Hume's Metaethics 568 claims certainly seem counterintuitive in the ways earlier described, and commentators on Hume have not been happy about taking them at face value. We are often told that Hume took a perverse pleasure in attention-getting hyperbole,2 and that we should therefore take them with a grain of salt. However, if the only evidence given for Hume's putative perversity were the passages we are instructed to disregard, it would not be evidence enough; nor would it be consistent with the honorable convention of showing respect for a thinker by assuming that she means what she says. But Annette Baier is not alone among those of Hume's commentators who have attempted the more ambitious project of finding positive and substantive evidence that Hume did not mean what he said in these passages; of fashioning a more constructive account of reason's role in constraining us to rational final ends elsewhere in the Treatise; and hence of showing that the many objections to the negative utility-maximization thesis discussed in Chapters VIII and IX are misplaced. However, I do not agree with these more charitable interpretations of Hume. I argue here that a detailed reconstruction of Hume's arguments on these matters does not support these well-intentioned defenses of Hume; that he means exactly what he says in the controversial passages, and therefore embraces the utility-maximization model of rationality wholeheartedly; and consequently, that the many objections discussed in the foregoing chapters of this volume must be allowed to stand. I begin in Section 1 by demonstrating that on the face of it at least, Hume's view of rationality is straightforwardly identifiable as the utility-maximization model. I then argue in Sections 2 and 3 that this is fully consistent with his larger project of denying the motivational efficacy of reason. Sections 4 and 5 are devoted to elaborating in considerable detail a particularly compelling version of an argument claiming to show that Hume does impose restrictions on the range of final ends identifiable as rational, and Section 6 to refuting that argument. 1. Hume's Model of Reason That Hume accepts the traditional view of reason described above is not difficult to ascertain. His conception is first introduced in Book I of the Treatise of Human Nature, where he divides reason into three kinds: (1) knowledge, See, for example, in addition to Baier's discussion in A Progress of Sentiments, Henry David Aiken, "An Interpretation of Hume's Theory of the Place of Reason in Ethics and Politics," Ethics 90 (October 1979), 68; D. D. Raphael, "Hume's Critique of Ethical Rationalism," in William B. Todd, Ed. Hume and the Enlightenment (Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh Press, 1974), 19; David Fate Norton, David Hume: CommonSense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 100; David Miller, Philosophy and Ideology in Hume's Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 40, 47. 2 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
