Just Is

Dworkin's essay in the NYRB about, I think, how one ought to live, gives some attention to Hume and Hobbes, which is something of a change for philosophy in that journal.  It is usually resolute Kantins crashing into resolute Utilitarians.  It is nice to see something different mentioned.  Yet, it is not quite enough to do what should be done even in such a short essay.  Hume's moral theory is not just about feeling sympathy, Hume's "principle" is not in Hume.  "Hume's principle that no amount of empirical discovery about the state of the world can establosh conclusions about moral obligations" is not a principle found in Hume.  It is the result of an egregious misreading of a small section of Book Three of the Treatise.  A difficulty with thinking this is Hume's principle is that his theory of justice, his theory of natural and artificial virtues all suppose something rather different.  First, the section where the principle is supposed to be found is not a discussion of the nature of moral value or of ethics.  It is, instead, a discussion of existing systems of ethics (or morality, if you prefer), the point of which is that most moralists go from discussions of what social customs are to the view that they must be so.  But that is a point about social conservatism and conflation of particular arrangements with some eternal moral order.  It is not a claim that there is some great unbridgeable gap between is and ought.  That makes more sense than supposing that Hume offers up a refutation of his own theories and never notices.  And it would be a refutation because Hume's accounts of justice and ethics are based on views about how people are and how they respond to the pressures of the world.  A greater part of justice, as we confront it, is convention, which gets its patina of moral claim because of facts about how the convention operates.  Sympathy is something shaped by culture, and its demands on us are matters of fact about psychology and social forces.  There is not some special additional dimension of normativity, no magic world hovering about the physical world.  The mistake Dworkin makes is pretty common, I think because not all that much of Hume is read.  I suspect most people, to the extent they read any Hume, do so in excerpts, in anthologies.  The Treatise and Enquiries and Essays are left off for specialists.  It is a shame, because Hume, wrong in a host of matters, is a far better place to begin thinking about these issues than is Kant.

Anyway, the principle is wrong.  Language shows that.  See Searle.