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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 573 to show that for Hume, there can be no conception of rational final ends, i.e. ends that conform to the prescriptions of reason. This is because Hume's utility-maximization model of rationality issues no such prescriptions. Its purview is confined solely to the discovery of means to those ends, and imposes no criteria of rationality on those ends themselves. The passages adduced so far seem clearly to point to this conclusion. But Hume's intention was more comprehensive. He wanted to show not only that reason could not determine rational ends of action, but also that it could not motivate action either. That is, Hume defended the belief-desire model of motivation. This project was fueled by an interest in refuting the position, championed by Samuel Clarke and William Wollaston, that the conclusions of theoretical reason - i.e. the capacity to analyze and to perform logical operations - concerning the meaning of moral propositions were sufficient to incite one to morally virtuous action. Samuel Clarke offered an analysis of morally right actions as those which are self-evidently fitting or suitable to the circumstances in which they occur. This suitability or fitness is generated by natural proportional relations and uniformities that obtain among natural objects and events, just as they do among geometrical and mathematical entities. Hence, he argued, it is self-contradictory to will acts that are recognized to be unsuitable to their circumstances, i.e. immoral.6 Wollaston, on the other hand, rejected Clarke's analysis of rightness as fittingness. Instead he held that moral actions are those which assert logically true propositions, while immoral actions are self-contradictory.7 Thus his conception of moral rightness is equivalent to that of truth. However, both Clarke and Wollaston concurred in the belief that these convictions were discoverable a priori by theoretical reason, i.e. that a simple examination of the nature of action and its circumstances would reveal those actions which were morally right. And significantly, both believed that mere recognition of these "moral facts" placed the agent under obligation to act in conformity with them.8 Against this view, Samuel Clarke's two foremost critics, John Clarke and Francis Hutcheson, argued that moral propositions did not analyze the nature of moral action, but rather were concerned with moral obligation. For since the mere recognition of fittingness or self-consistency had no conative force, 6 Samuel Clarke, A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion, Ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, The British Moralists, Vol. II (New York: Dover, 1965), 4-6. See the discussion of Clarke by Rachel Kydd, Reason and Conduct in Hume's Treatise (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), Chapter I. 7 William Wollaston, The Religion of Nature Delineated, in Selby-Bigge, ibid., 362-4. See Kydd, ibid. 8 Clarke, op. cit. 12-14, 16-17, 23-4, 31-3; Wollaston, ibid. 370-1; Kydd, op. cit. 28-36. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
