How Does David Hume Controls Morality

Morality is important for the functioning of a healthy society. David Hume would not dispute this point. It helps people control behavior that is destructive to individual and the society as whole, bring stability and peace. Adversely, during times of conflict, moral authority is often claimed, inciting a greater wish to obliterate he “evil” enemies. Claims of moral right are bandied about indiscriminately by people of all cultures and walks in life, and, often, many of these views on morality contradict each other. For example, one culture might say that suicide is never correct, that it is an affront to God. At the same time, those in another culture might find suicide to be, in certain situations, the height of honor. In this world where morality can seem so questionable and confusing, David Hume believed he had the answer. And he did. He had an answer that stripped morality of reason and made the situation even more confusing. Hume does not believe that reason controls
morality. This all links back to Hume’s beliefs about the relationship between the passions and reason. Traditionally, philosophers have view passion and reason to be in conflict with each other, and came to the conclusion that reason must control the passions. This is compared to a charioteer reigning in and controlling her wild, eager horses. David Hume contests this picture of the mind. He claims, in A Treatise of Human Nature, that, “…reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will; and secondly, that it can never oppose passion in the direction of the will.” Instead, he thinks that a better model would place passion as the master of her slaves, who are not wild or fighting for control, and directing them to carry her where she wills. Hume makes a strong case for this viewpoint. “Reason, he says, our rational understanding, can only tell us how things are in the world-it tells us what is true and what isn’t” (Francks, 241). Reason is the information that is taken in and the observations that are made; passion is the will who takes these observations, chooses the appropriate actions, and make those actions happen. There is no battle whatsoever between reason and passion; any inner battle an individual might experience is due to opposing passions. Reason does not and cannot join the fight, nor does it have any battle to wage.
This leads to Hume’s point that reason and morality are not linked.
Reason can tell how to do things, but not what to do; morality’s purpose is to tell a people what to do. Hume concludes that, therefore, morality is not under the domain of reason and must be controlled by the passions. And this is where Hume give up hope in inborn moral laws. “No matter how much you may find out about how things are…you will never by such reasoning discover anything at all about morality. Any such investigation can only ever tell you what is and is not the case; but morality is concerned, not with how things are, but with how they ought to be” (Francks, 244) Therefore, goodness and evil, right and wrong, those are not laws of nature, but a portion of the human reaction to nature. Due to this, descriptors like nice, mean, virtuous, and corrupt are words used for the sake of simplicity and to describe our emotional reaction to a situation rather than a true description of an individual and their
actions.
I almost completely agree with Hume on this concept. I definitely agree on his view of the struggle, or lack thereof, between reason and the passions. No matter what I attempt to conjure, I cannot think of an example in which reason is truly the driving motivator. Passion reigns supreme over a person’s life and there is no stopping that. Nor is there need to do so, obviously passion being in control is proper and healthy. I also agree that the passions are what controls an individual’s morality. If the passions are, as has been established, in the driver’s seat, then it would make sense that they control the moral or immoral decisions that are made and that is not a bad thing. To speak in terms that Hume would disapprove of, there is nothing that makes reason intrinsically good and nothing that makes the passions intrinsically foolish. They are both utterly dependent on the other for the full functioning of a human mind, and that includes an individual’s sense of morality. However, I do disagree with Hume in on one very important aspect. I do think that there are moral laws and I do think we can learn about those laws. The laws, though much more comprehensive, can be summed up in a few words, “Love the Lord your God with all of your heart…and Love your neighbor as yourself.” This is a very sweeping statement, so it may take all of your reason and passion to implement them into all aspect of your life, but it is of vital importance to do so.