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Show Chapter XIV. Hume's Metaethics 580 superiority relative to others, augmenting individual abilities, and providing personal security (T 485) and protection of personal goods (T 488). But, he adds, "in order to form society, 'tis requisite not only that it be advantageous, but also that men be sensible of these advantages" (T 486), and that they gain this sensitivity from experiencing a family. On the other hand, our innate selfishness and partiality works against the cooperation with others that enables society to perform this role. "From all which it follows," Hume concludes, "that our natural uncultivated ideas of morality, instead of providing a remedy for the partiality of our affections, do rather conform themselves to that partiality, and give it an additional force and influence" (T 489). Where might we find a remedy for the partiality of our affections? Hume's answer follows: The remedy, then, is not deriv'd from nature, but from artifice; or more properly speaking, nature provides a remedy in the judgment and understanding, for what is irregular and incommodious in the affections (T 489). Some commentators 17 have taken Hume to mean here that reason compensates for the partiality of the affections, hence provides a more stable source of motivation than they alone could supply. But first, this is not what Hume means; and second, even if it were, it would not imply that reason had motivational influence. That Hume does not mean to identify reason as the remedy for our partiality is suggested by his characterization of the remedy as "deriv'd from artifice"; reason, surely, is not derived from artifice. But Hume's real meaning can be seen more clearly by his subsequent remarks in the same paragraph: He explains that the remedy for social disturbance must consist in "putting [external goods], as far as possible, on the same footing with the fix'd and constant advantages of the mind and body," so as to limit "their looseness and easy transition from one person to another." "This can be done," he avers, after no other manner, than by a convention enter'd into by all the members of the society to bestow stability on the possession of those external goods, and leave every one in the peaceable enjoyment of what he may acquire by his fortune and industry (T 489). The remedy for our partiality, then, is not reason, but rather the rules of justice, which ensures social equilibrium by enforcing the rules of private property. At most, reason is the source of the rules we devise for this purpose. Thus to say that nature provides a remedy in the judgment and understanding is not to say that nature provides the judgment and understanding as a remedy. Hume asserts the former, but not the latter. 17 For example, David Fate Norton (page 134, op. cit. Note 2). © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
