The Non-Linear Dynamics of Moral Judgments: Hume’s Response to Cultural Relativism
Introduction: The challenge in ‘A Dialogue’
In Hume’s A Dialogue, the narrator’s well-traveled friend, Palamedes, describes his time in a nation called ‘Fourli’. After assuring the narrator that the people of this nation are “civilized and intelligent” he goes on to describe what he had seen. In Fourli, all manner of seemingly unconscionable conduct is praised as virtuous and good; from patricide to regicide to suicide, betrayal and pederasty. After hearing these stories, the narrator remarks that they can’t be true, especially if the people of Fourli are to be counted as civilized and intelligent. It’s here that Palamedes reveals his deceit: the stories are none other than those from the well-known histories of the ancient Greeks and Romans.1placeholder
At first the narrator feels there is nothing more to this trick than selective description. He replies with tales of his own about their native England, all judiciously selected to strike the listener as abhorrent. Palamedes replies that he takes the narrator’s morbid description of the English as further evidence of the real point he wants to drive home: that everywhere and always morals are just an arbitrary product of custom. What is praised and denigrated tracks nothing but a shifting cultural constellation; there is nothing more to these judgments of virtuous and vicious, nothing they can lay purchase to, than contingent and varied cultural circumstances:
“I had no intention of exalting the moderns over the ancients. I only meant to represent the uncertainty of all those judgments concerning characters; and to convince you, that fashion, vogue, custom, and law, were the chief foundation of all moral determinations” (Hume, Dialogue, p.333).
This is a particular worry for Hume. A Kantian or utilitarian may just write off entire cultures and epochs as being deeply confused about the moral facts, but Hume’s moral theory places the moral sentiments in a central role, with human nature then explaining the convergence of moral judgments through the universality of human sentiments and capacities. If the sentiments show such contradictory diversity, depending on the calendar and the location, it seems human nature fails in its role of explaining our moral judgments converging: if judgments can vary so greatly globally, then why do they converge locally, and if they converge locally, why do they vary globally? Arbitrary relativism seems the best answer.
Another issue we can see posed by Palamedes’ relativism is it seems that the resources we require to critically evaluate foreign moral practices are the exact same resources we require to critically evaluate, and progress beyond, our own practices.2placeholder In virtue of what do we critique widespread and normalized practices we find in the society around us? It would seem that whatever forms the basis of this critical activity can, for the same reasons, be deployed upon distant times and places. However, if the basis of morality, upon which such a critique would be based, shows irreducible variation across places and times, it would seem that the hope for any critique of a normalized practice, global or local, is undermined. That is, relativism abroad seemingly leads to conservatism at home, or, if you take Palamedes’ conclusion, moral nihilism everywhere.
So, Hume, through the Dialogue’s narrator, needs to explain the divergence of judgments globally, the convergence of them locally, and explain how moral judgments can be meaningfully turned against widespread, normalized practices (customs, fashions, laws), whether at home or abroad, and do all of this with the mere resource of human nature; its sentiments and capabilities. A tall order.
Let’s explore Hume’s response to the challenge. I’ll try to show that it involves greater complexity than is perhaps implied by the Dialogue’s easy tone. In particular, I want to draw attention to a number of feedback effects that are implied in how the sources Hume provides of difference in moral judgments across places and times interact with what Hume provides as their universal basis. Our goal is to find within the Dialogue a rich and robust explanatory framework that can explain the convergence and divergence of moral judgments, and allow for moral judgments to be turned back on the cultural conditions that modulate them.
The Universal: moral praise and approbation
Hume’s narrator begins by “examining the first principles, which each nation establishes, of blame and censure” (Dialogue, p.333). Here is a first universal: no matter how divergent the moral landscape may seem as we move across places and times, one universal of human nature is simply that we all make moral judgments. Then, Hume argues that where ever they are made (that is, everywhere) they also have a universal structure and target:
“It appears, that there never was any quality recommended by any one, as a virtue or moral excellence, but on account of its being useful, or agreeable to a man himself, or to others. For what other reason can ever be assigned for praise or approbation? Or where would be the sense of extolling a good character or action, which, at the same time, is allowed to be good for nothing?” (Dialogue, p.336).
Our moral praise tracks what is either agreeable or useful, to either the person who has this character trait or to those near them. This is a restatement of Hume’s same argument from the Treatise of Human Nature:
“Every quality of the mind is denominated virtuous, which gives pleasure by the mere survey; as every quality, which produces pain, is call’d vicious. This pleasure and this pain may arise from four different sources. For we reap a pleasure from the view of a character, which is naturally fitted to be useful to others, or to the person himself, or which is agreeable to others, or to the person himself” (Treatise, p.591).
The ‘four sources’ comprise two variables: one a spectrum from the useful to the agreeable, and another a spectrum from being self-directed to other-directed. Thus, for any virtuous character trait, we can always ask whether it is praised because the trait is more useful or because it is more agreeable, and then, asking further, to whom is the trait thus useful or agreeable: more for the one who has it, or more for others?3placeholder
But why should we feel pleasure in regarding a trait that is wholly useful only for the person that has it, if that person is not us? Hume, in the Treatise, adds one more universal: sympathy. As a basic capacity, sympathy opens us up to the pain and pleasure of others, say in the way we may wince if we see someone get injured. This capacity being in place, it then recommends an epistemic ideal: our moral judgments are ideally made from a wide survey of possible (and relevant) perspectives on the character in question, in a manner directly analogous to how we recognize that our visual judgments are more reliable the more they take into account other possible vantages on the object we are perceiving.4placeholder This is not to say that we always do adopt this more ‘general point of view’ to correct our judgments, sometimes we jump to conclusions heavily tainted by our perspective (our stronger sympathies with those near and familiar to us, our perceptions of color under current dim lighting conditions, etc). Be that as it may, it is still the case that we recognize that, with perception as well as moral judgment, our conclusions are ideally drawn by incorporating more relevant perspectives, and it is by approximating this general point of view as best we can that we can most reliably avoid contradictions (within ourselves, and with others) about the properties of objects, characters, and actions, with these contradictions being undesirable because of how they impede our understanding and communication with others.5placeholder We can praise a character trait of another which does not impact us because, in judging, we adopt the relevant point of view on it (the point of view of the bearer of the trait, and those around them).
So, the universals in play across cultures is that everyone makes moral judgments, that these moral judgments everywhere track the same effects, and that everyone hopes that their moral judgments incorporate sufficiently the relevant points of view such that they don’t result in contradictions, or hypocrisies.
However, these universals alone are not enough to dispel the worries of relativism. Ideally our judgments ascend to the general point of view. But our ability to ‘correct’ our judgments to meet this standard depends upon our experience of occupying differing points of view. Since most of my experience is determined by my time and location, judgments I make that I believe conform to the general point of view are going to be culturally tinted, especially so because the general point of view is not a view from nowhere, but the incorporation of more and more specific points of view. I need to be able to understand these specific points of view, and if they are culturally remote, my ability to do this is severely hampered, and with it my ability to adopt what my judgment ideally aims at: incorporating all relevant perspectives. If the general point of view can only take me so far as understanding and evaluating the local moral situation, in my silo of similarity, then relativism looms once more. The situation seems especially dire insofar as the reason we often find it hard to understand or predict the responses of culturally different others is quite often precisely because they make different, ‘incomprehensible’ moral judgments.
Thus, in addition to these universals of human nature, Hume also needs to give a rational account for the diversity that emerges from this common foundation. If he can explain that emergence, in a non-arbitrary way, he provides an account of how we can come to understand the differing judgments from the inside. That is to say, that such an account of the reliable causes of difference will allow us to broaden our ‘general point of view’ beyond our local silos of similarity by allowing us to grasp the factors that shape our judgments. If we can successfully do this, then we can see the possibility of turning moral judgments against widespread and normalized local practices, by successfully adopting non-local perspectives on moral issues.6placeholder
First cause of difference: differing beliefs7placeholder
Cultures may differ in their moral evaluations because of different beliefs as to what exactly is useful or agreeable. Hume uses the example of dueling in France (Dialogue, p.335). Its proponents believe it causes many beneficial effects in regards to civility.8placeholder Understanding this belief is sufficient to understand the moral judgment, whether or not we agree with the belief. We can think of a more marked example in the case of human sacrifice done for reasons of sustaining the entire community (assuring harvests from capricious gods, for example). The practice can appear useful, if certain causal beliefs are also affirmed. Then, absent those beliefs, or via a dismantling of those beliefs, the practice ceases to appear virtuous. Hume writes:
“the principles upon which men reason in morals are always the same; though the conclusions which they draw are often very different. … It is sufficient, that the original principles of censure or blame are uniform, and that erroneous conclusions can be corrected by sounder reasoning and larger experience” (Hume, Dialogue, p.336).
However, the appeal to differing empirical beliefs accounts for only surface level differences, and largely can’t explain judgments concerning the agreeable (insofar as the agreeable seems to permit of a direct empirical verification whenever it is experienced). If this was all Hume had, it would appear quite weak. Fortunately, Hume continues, and traces out much more explanatorily rich and complex factors generating difference.
Second cause of difference: material social conditions
Let’s say, across two times or places, that everyone involved is reasoning with adequate beliefs. It could still be the case that judgments of what is useful could differ, because the actual effects of an action differ across times and places. Hume gives the example of martial virtues during war time (Dialogue, p.337). Certain character traits might be destructive during peace time, but then useful during wartime. With the shifting circumstances, judgments would change too, in a way predictable from Hume’s four sources of moral judgments. Thus, when greeted with difference of moral judgments between times and places, we can look to perhaps the widespread conditions that hold, and realize that some character trait that may at first blush seemed destructive is in fact useful.
However, this perhaps overstates the simplicity of identifying these factors influencing the judgments. To know what is useful in a context will require us to know how many things are structured: what people are generally doing, what their projects are, how they go about them, what resources are at their disposal and what ones are hard to come by, what is easily done, and what is difficult. In other words, if what is useful is to be seen relative to what kinds of struggles we routinely encounter, large or small, then in order to understand moral judgments in distant times and places we need to also understand what struggles the people there routinely encounter.
It’s not enough for us to extrapolate our own struggles, nor merely to negatively imagine what struggles we might have absent some conditions we are habituated to. The ancient Greeks didn’t struggle with having too many emails to answer, but neither did they struggle with the lack of email in a way we, who have become accustomed to it, might assume. Their struggles, requiring useful virtues, had entirely different sources. This is saying nothing of radically differing social organizations and economies, and how these can deeply alter the kinds of projects people find meaningful or meaningless. Thus, the knowledge required to evaluate how the material social conditions impact moral judgments can be quite vast.
Further complicating things is the fact that a significant part of any set of social conditions are other people and their patterns of moral praise and approbation. These attitudes themselves form part of the context in which acts need to be evaluated as useful (or agreeable). For example, to understand why someone is praised for cleverness in allowing two parties to ‘both save face’, we need to understand why anyone’s face was on the line to begin with. This creates the uneasy situation where we need to already understand something of the moral judgments in a culture to understand other moral judgments. This self-reflecting complexity is not fatal to our understanding, though. It just means that we need to be sensitive to how the practices of moral praise and approbation feedback on themselves, by sometimes being the very conditions within which they operate.
The final complication here is that the direction of impact does not only travel in one direction. To understand the material conditions being what they are, we often need recourse to the common moral judgments of the people who sustain them. Certain patterns of judgments might suggest that certain institutions are worth pursuing and developing, but those institutions in turn come to form the conditions within which judgments as to what is useful are made.
Let’s examine an example of the effects of these reciprocal relations. In China, the virtue of filial piety makes many people to whom I’ve spoken9placeholder balk at the idea of placing their aging parents in a nursing home: nursing homes are terrible places, and to treat your parents like that is shameful (because of it presumably being disagreeable to them). Because of this prevalent attitude, then it could very well be the case that nursing homes are generally terrible in China, if they are being used merely as a desperate last resort. The stigma that they are poorly run, poorly staffed, poorly catered, run-down, desperate and depressing places, etc, may be self-fulfilling.10placeholder But given this set of judgments, people are drawn into all kinds of struggles around the question of how one, on their own, can care for ageing parents with ailing health.11placeholder This creates a situation ripe for the expression of all kinds of virtues – traits useful given this predicament, both for oneself and others. These virtues are, of course, praised, under the very heading of filial piety! That is, the same virtue that is called upon to overcome the routine struggle is the very one that seemingly maintains the struggle as routine, by making certain solutions untenable, both morally but also in regards to real options available (the level of development of the nursing home system).
However, this circle only appears as one to an outsider. To grasp the circle as ‘vicious’ one has to not understand what it is like ‘from the inside’. From the point of view of the people that matter, that is, those involved, there is no circle, merely a consistent set of judgments as to what is virtuous and what is shameful, and what is possible and what is inevitable. One might as well reply to an exhausted mother “If your infant is keeping you up all night with crying, why don’t you just send it to an orphanage and be done with it?” In this case, one can trace a similar circle where some single, ‘maternal’ virtue is the one that sustains the struggle of losing sleep with a crying infant and forecloses the possibility of simply turning it over to an orphanage, but is also the very same virtue that is manifested through the mother’s tolerance and self-sacrificing commitment to her child, which is praised, while at the same time sees orphanages being run as desperate places of ‘last resort’. From the perspective of someone from a (hypothetical) culture where people routinely put children up for adoption, and orphanages were thus not a place of last resort but a central social institution, this ‘maternal virtue’ would seem ill-founded, and sustaining the very problem that it itself is called upon to solve.12placeholder
So, to summarize the above, when Hume traces the influence that differing material conditions may have on judgments of what is useful, we need to understand the explanatory richness of this move. It is not just that large historical events, such as wars, may alter people’s judgments, and so a ‘broad’ sensitivity to historical moments is sufficient for analyzing differing moral judgments. Instead, we need to be sensitive to much more fine-grained detail and dynamics. Firstly, we need to know what these people take as a routine struggle worth solving. This alone is non-trivial. But, secondly, we also need to be sensitive to how judgments of the useful or agreeable may be tracking the manner in which other judgments concerning the useful and agreeable are being made, as an inseparable part of the environment the people are navigating, perhaps creating the routine struggles that need solving. Thirdly, we need to be sensitive to the way in which the material conditions that allow the routine struggles to emerge, and be recognized as such, are themselves potentially produced or sustained by judgments of what is useful and agreeable.
This all tracks with Hume’s image of the rivers, which is how he broadly characterizes his explanation for difference in moral judgments across times and places:
“The Rhine flows north, the Rhone south; yet both spring from the same mountain, and are also actuated in their opposite directions, by the same principle of gravity. The different inclinations of the ground, on which they run, cause all the difference of their courses” (Hume, Dialogue, p.333).
We see the necessary role feedback effects play here by just reflecting on how a river will tend to flow down a channel, between two raised banks, yet this channel itself was formed by the flowing of the river! River and topography interact reflexively where the course of the former and the shape of the latter need to be explained with reference to the other. The fact that the answer to the question “Why does the river flow this way?” is “Because the channel runs that way”, and vice-versa, does not mean, as Palamedes might assert, that we are trapped in an arbitrary, groundless circle. Geography as a science is possible, and is not undermined by the reciprocal relations between the topography and the elements, it’s just very complex given these relations.13placeholder
Third cause of difference: the balancing of the four sources
There is a final layer of Hume’s response; another source of potential difference. As mentioned above, for any virtue we can ask whether it is being esteemed for being more useful or more agreeable, and more to oneself or more to others. We can think of a simple xy graph, with one axis representing the useful-agreeable spectrum, and the other representing the self-other spectrum. Any individual virtue, from any culture, then, would always sit somewhere on this plane.
Hume argues that there are differing customs of balancing these spectrums, that introduces what initially appear as stark differences of judgments, until we realize that, say, the useful is being prioritized over the agreeable, or self over other, or vice versa:
“Different customs have also some influence as well as different utilities; and by giving an early bias to the mind, may produce a superior propensity, either to the useful or the agreeable qualities; to those which regard self, or those which to extend to society. These four sources of moral sentiments still subsist; but particular accidents may, at one time, make any one of them flow with greater abundance than at another” (Hume, Dialogue, p.337-338).
For example, we can imagine some sets of opposing judgments between cultures concerning the management of money. In one, thriftiness is praised (useful to self), in another, extravagance (agreeable to self), in yet another generosity (agreeable to other), and in another self-reliance (useful to other, in the sense of troubling no one). Since one can’t be both thrifty and extravagant, nor feel comfortable accepting generosity if one prioritizes self-reliance, these virtues exist in tension. In different times and different places, the tension is just resolved on the side of one of the virtues, making it “flow with greater abundance”.
Abramson (1999) has argued that here, at the deepest source of difference, is where real cultural variation emerges, which is difficult to resolve. Waldow (2020) has argued that differences at this layer, insofar as they give ‘an early bias to the mind’ deeply affect our ability to come to understand other cultures insofar as we need to factor how it may deeply augment our own understanding.
However, Hume’s account here seems unfinished, or assuming some premises. Since the graph we can construct from the two axes, forming an xy plane, describes a space within which every point is a possible virtue (insofar as it is some degree of agreeable or useful to someone or other), then it would seem odd if this would explain a diversity of different, and conflicting, moral judgments: it would seem that any character or action that is praised anywhere in the world should be praised everywhere else. If our moral evaluations for a character or action is explained merely by it being placed somewhere in the xy plane, then it is hard to see why we would have trouble assessing unfamiliar expressions of virtue.
Upon reflection, one can see that there has to be a ‘fixing’ of virtues on the plane, with their distant cousins then, post-fixing, appearing as vices, as opposed to the ‘proper’ virtue. So, in our above example, it’s not just that a culture can praise either thriftiness, or extravagance, but not both, it’s that in fixing thriftiness, extravagance then appears as wastefulness, or in fixing extravagance, thriftiness appears as stinginess. If this were the case, it is easy to see how conflicting judgments of the same behavior arise in different times and places, and why it is not often easy for us to understand judgments opposed to ours: it would require us to see a virtue in something we take to be a vice.
Hume hints at such a conclusion early in the Dialogue. Palamedes reports his trouble in trying to learn the language of Fourli, especially its virtue and vice terms. Hearing a term, and having explained to him what conduct the term denotes, he assumes it is a term of praise, that is, the name of a virtue. But, he embarrasses himself in conversation because the term actually denotes a vice among the Fourlians. Palamedes would take this as ammunition for his argument: a case of identical conduct being equally praised and vilified across two different cultures suggests these judgments are ultimately arbitrary. How could two people, with all of the relevant facts available to both, make such opposed judgments of the moral value of a single example of conduct?
One answer is to point to how virtue terms often come paired with vice terms, not only as their opposites, but also as their extremes. This is generally how Aristotle’s arguments concerning the ‘Golden Mean’ work: a virtue will have an opposed vice, but also a vice of excessiveness – the virtue sits between these two vice terms.14placeholder Palamedes, in having the conduct described to him, may have thought he was learning the words, say, ‘thrifty’, or ‘shrewd’, when in fact he was learning the words ‘stingy’, or ‘cunning’. Now, if the virtues need be fixed in the way mentioned above, we can explain this. It’s not just that Palamedes has accidentally learned the excess-vice term, it’s that in Fourli, for example, the conduct praised in England as ‘thrifty’ appears stingy and mean. Why would that be the case? Well, in this example, let’s say the virtue that has been fixed, in affairs dealing with money, is generosity. Spending lavishly and generously on one friends and family is then the virtue, with carefully saving money for one’s own utility being opposed to this on Hume’s four-fold schema, and thus appearing as a vice. So, it is not just that any conduct can be arbitrarily praised or blamed, as Palamedes implies, rather, in a particular domain (say, affairs dealing with money) in order for there to be virtues at all, it is necessary that some virtues be fixed along the xy axes of Hume’s schema, with, then, all of the other possible virtues appearing as vices, within this domain.
The specification of a domain is important, because the virtues are ‘fixed’ relative to domains.15placeholder In managing one’s own money, for example, usefulness to self (thriftiness) may be praised, but in the domain of hospitality, agreeableness to others (generosity) may be praised. Mismatching the conducts to the domain, with these settings, would result seemingly in wastefulness (in money management) and stinginess (in hospitality). Once a virtue (as a particular point on the xy schema) becomes fixed, a vice is made of all other points on the plane within that domain, all other ‘settings’, as inappropriate conduct within it, despite every point on the plane denoting a possible ‘virtue’ (agreeable or useful to self or to others). The fixed virtue acts now like a singularity or attractor.
How numerous these domains are, and how they are distinguished from each other itself seems to interact with the material social conditions. ‘Hospitality’ could just be a general domain in one culture, with a single virtue, which recommends the same conduct in all cases, or it could be numerous domains, depending on who is being hosted, and where, and why, and by whom, and for how long, and all of these subdivisions may have different virtues, calling for different fixings of points on the xy plane. This means this entire layer has a reciprocal relation with the material conditions, and all of the reciprocal relations between those conditions and moral judgments found there.
Importantly, which ‘settings’ of the four-fold graph gets fixed as the virtue within a domain may also reciprocally depend upon how other domains are fixing things, creating an overall stable configuration of settings. There’s nothing impossible about the idea of a culture wholly and only composed of virtues that are other-directed and utility based, across every domain of life. This would make any concern with one’s own sense of agreeableness always and everywhere a vice. However, this does not seem to be a sustainable moral universe. Self-sacrifice seems universally encouraged and believed good in some areas of life (which precise areas, though, change between times and places), but perhaps needs balancing by personal enjoyment in other domains being praised or generally encouraged. Thus, the way in which a domain is demarcated, and the virtue that is fixed within it, seems to takes some view of the whole constellation. This would mean that it is possible for certain domains, and the virtues fixed within them, to be ‘load-bearing’ across the entire pattern of moral judgments within a culture. If shifting material conditions (perhaps economic or technological transformations) have caused an entire domain to recede, such that the exercise of the virtue native to it has become largely uncommon, or a new domain (or distinction within one) to emerge, entailing new virtues and vices one must attend to through their conduct, this may leave the overall pattern of moral judgments in an unstable and unsustainable state. Hume gives one possible example of this, with the Spaniards and Italians “of an age ago”, whom, across the broad domains of romantic entanglements favored both “gallantry and jealousy”, the narrator calling this the “worst of any” possible combinations of fixed virtues for these domains (Hume, Dialogue, p.340). That is, in the domain of the family, extra-marital affairs were intolerable and honor and fidelity are praised, but in the domain of society, they were encouraged and praised as gallant adventures. This introduces an unsustainable situation that can be rightly critiqued both by locals, and outsiders who are able to take the adequate survey from the general point of view (incorporating all of the dynamics described above, and how the whole moral-social constellation fits together from the perspective of locals). The constellation taken as whole is neither agreeable nor useful (thus vicious), despite parts of it containing agreeable and useful conduct (virtues) when domains are observed in isolation.
We can also see this same dynamic by holding the terms constant, rather than the domains, and then seeing how the domains and conduct shift underneath them. In Of the Standard of Taste Hume points out that the virtue terms themselves, in whichever language one finds them, already contain their positive evaluation:
“Whoever recommends any moral virtues, really does no more than is implied in the terms themselves. That people who invented the word charity, and used it in a good sense, inculcated more clearly, and much more efficaciously, the precept, be charitable, than any pretended legislator or prophet, who should insert such a maxim in his writings” (Essays, ST, p.136).
However, he notes, looking at Homer, or the Koran, one can see these same virtue terms being applied to different patterns of conduct compared to their use today. The term seemingly refers to the same virtue, and is equally praised, but what counts as manifesting it shifts. Palamedes had to learn the terms from the conduct, and thus made mistakes as to the terms. However, we could imagine having an ‘English-Fourli’ translation dictionary, then our question to our Fourli instructor would not be “what do you call this conduct?” but, rather, “what conduct counts as being ‘generous’?” To learn this is to learn when and how one is called upon to be generous with others, and when and where this is not needed or excessive. In order to learn all of that, one would also need to learn the domains themselves; where are the relevant distinctions being drawn by this culture in regards to how it differentiates situations and circumstances? If we take ‘generosity’ as praising a certain other-directed agreeableness (perhaps reserving ‘charity’ for other-directed usefulness), we can ask of a culture within which domains has the virtue been ‘fixed’ on these values (mostly other directed, mostly concerning the agreeable), making vices of all other settings within the domain? Once we have that, we can understand how and where the familiar virtue of generosity operates (perhaps, now, in very unfamiliar contexts). Likewise, we can think of domains in which generosity is praised within our own culture, and then ask what virtue is praised in that domain in this different culture? That is, we suspend the assumptions that, firstly, we will find generosity where we are accustomed to finding it, and, secondly, that the domains will be governed by the same virtues we are used to.
Thus, we can explain the initial shock of finding an odd ‘virtue’ praised in a familiar domain: it couldn’t help but appear to us as a vice. In fact, we can explain Palamedes entire description of Fourli as merely him finding virtues where he felt they didn’t belong, and thus striking him as vices. Where he expected to find kindness, he found shrewdness, which appeared to him as cunning, for example.
Conclusion
Hume’s response to the challenge of meta-ethical cultural relativism can thus be seen as giving us the tools to be able to find what is constant and common beneath a varied dispersion of contradictory elements (here, moral judgments). But this is not a ‘peel back the paint a bit and everyone is the same’ account, but far more complex, allowing for a greater explanatory depth of a greater diversity.
Firstly, it is a universal that all human beings make moral judgments, and where they do so, what they praise and blame is always the same: what is either agreeable or useful, for either one’s self or for others. It is also universal that sympathy opens us up to others, and makes possible an ideal of moral judgment: that it be made from a ‘general point of view’.
Secondly, judgments of the useful depend upon empirical beliefs about what one may expect from a course of action. Thus, moral confusion may arise from just differing beliefs about how the world works.
Thirdly, what is actually useful in a given context is shaped by that context. Furthermore, moral judgments, as to the useful and agreeable, in turn shape the context in non-trivial ways. This forms a reciprocal conditioning process between moral judgments and the world in which they are made.
Lastly, the source of moral judgments contains tensions within itself that need to be resolved by fixing points. One cannot affirm all of the possible virtues at once, because, in sum, they contradict each other. Within culture, domains are defined, and virtues are fixed within them, relegating other possible virtues to being vices, as inappropriate ways of balancing the sources of moral judgment, within that domain. The demarcating of domains, and the fixing of the virtues within them, turn us back to the material context.
All of this, taken together, gives us a rich framework for explaining how diverse, and seemingly opposed, moral judgments can emerge out of a uniform foundation across different places and times. It shows us how we can rationally trace back that diversity to a common foundation, by attending to the ways in which judgments, conditions, and social ‘domains’ interact. With that in hand, we can explain why it may be difficult to extend our general point of view across different times and places (considering all of the complexity involved), yet, nonetheless we thus also have the precise resources we need to do so (having identified the relevant factors and interactions). Being able to do this allows us to extend the general point of view to a wide enough perspective to judge the deficiencies in our own cultural-social patterns. The conservatism implied by relativism is rejected along with the relativism: by understanding how our moral judgments work, and how they interact with the extant material conditions, we have the very tools we need to radically revise our judgments under a state of shifting conditions, and the promise that such revisions may themselves work to actively shift those conditions themselves.
Works Cited
Abramson, K. (1999), Hume on Cultural Conflicts of Values. Philosophical Studies, 94: 173-187.
Bohlin, H., (2013), Universal Moral Standrds and the Problem of Cultural Relativism in Hume’s ‘A Dialogue’, Philosophy, 88: 593-606.
Hume, D. (1975). A Dialogue. In L. A. (Lewis A. Selby-Bigge, P. H. Nidditch, & D. Hume (Eds.), Enquiries concerning human understanding and concerning the principles of morals (3rd ed. / with text revised and notes by P.H. Nidditch., pp. 324–343). Clarendon Press.
Hume, D., (1998), Of the Standard of Taste. In Copley, S., & Edgar, A., (eds) David Hume Selected Essays, Oxford University Press.
Hume, D., (1896) Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Nussbaum, M.C. (1988), Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach. Midwest Studies In Philosophy, 13: 32-53.
Waldow, A. (2020), Experience Embodied: Early Modern Accounts of the Human Place in Nature. Oxford University Press.
Civilizations the narrator reveres.
Some universally applicable standard, for example.
I put this self-other distinction as a spectrum, rather than a binary, because it is useful to make clear cases of things that are useful-agreeable to one, to those ‘near’ one (friends and family, etc), or to those remote from one. By seeing this as a spectrum, we can see the difference between the more parochial other-directed virtues (which may have, through the proximity, a degree of ‘self-servingness’), and the more universal ones. Likewise, with the useful-agreeable spectrum. It is not always easy to disentangle the pleasure of utility from just agreeableness generally, even if there are clear cases at the extremes. For example, a clean and tidy house is both visually pleasing, and easier to negotiate and work in.
“Such corrections are common with regard to all the senses; and indeed ‘twere impossible we cou’d ever make use of language, or communicate our sentiments to one another, did we not correct the momentary appearances of things, and overlook our present situation.” (Hume, Treatise, p.582)
“Our situation, with regard both to persons and things, is in continual fluctuation; and a man, that lies at a distance from us, may, in a little time, become a familiar acquaintance. Besides, every particular man has a peculiar position with regard to others; and ‘tis impossible we cou’d ever converse together on any reasonable terms, were each of us to consider character and persons, only as they appear from his peculiar point of view. In order, therefore, to prevent those continual contradictions, and arrive at a more stable judgment of things, we fix on some steady and general points of view; and always, in our thoughts, place ourselves in them, whatever may be our present situation.” (Hume, Treatise, p.581-582)
For a deeper discussion of this point regarding how a broader cultural perspective improves our ability to achieve a general point of view from which to question our own moral norms, see Waldow (2020, chapter 4). Bohlin (2013) also makes a similar argument, in relation to the Dialogue, but by drawing connections to Hegelian sources (Taylor and Bernstein).
Abramson (1999) has usefully divided Hume’s further responses in the dialogue into three stages, each more fundamental than the last. I’ll use her division to frame the following.
In a contemporary example, an American friend once told me, while driving around LA, that the thought that anyone might have a gun in their glove compartment does “chill people out on the road, reducing road rage”.
Having lived there some fourteen years.
Insofar as anyone with the economic means to avoid using them, does so.
This is especially exacerbated by the (now dismissed) one child policy, where a single couple today has potentially four older parents that they must look after, often in three different cities. This is locally referred to as the “4-2-1” problem, the ‘one’ being the one child of the couple who have the four parents, who inherits the responsibility to take care of their six elders.
We can also see this pattern again potentially in Hume’s own example of martial virtues in war time, by just considering that perhaps the frequency of a society being involved in war might have something to do with its estimation of the martial virtues themselves. That is, the conditions shape the usefulness of the trait, explaining the praise lavished upon it, but, with that praise being lavished upon it, military service becomes more conceivable and esteemed for the population, and perhaps further wars then become more possible, or acceptable to the populous. Something very much like this might characterize the post 9/11 United States.
On this point, one can see even that Hume, in his ‘multiplying the complexity of influences’ to explain how a uniform set of conditions (human nature) can give rise to radically different and surprising results, based on tiny initial differences, is keenly intuiting the features of non-linear, dynamic systems with chaotic regimes studied under the heading of ‘chaos theory’ in the 20th century. Hume doesn’t have the notion of ‘feedback effect’ (or ‘non-linear system’) to work with, but he is emphatically pointing, with his methodology in the Dialogue, in this direction, insofar as his response rests on showing how initial uniform parameters can produce diverse and surprising results.
For example, absence of courage is cowardice, but misplaced or overly-excessive courage is foolhardiness.
Nussbaum (1988) has presented a similar idea in her reading of Aristotle’s discussion of virtue. Her argument is that Aristotle can be read as defining the virtue terms as whatever counts as excellent conduct within a particular domain, or social situation. So, in hosting others, excellence is called generosity. Thus, it’s not the case that what generosity entails is defined independently of the domain, it just refers to excellence within the domain, whatever that might be under the circumstances. My reading of Hume here differs, though. Hume does have an independent idea of what any virtue must consist in (the four sources), and, in my reading here, he can accommodate the idea that there may be radically different kinds of conduct being praised in one domain as excellent (depending on where, in the xy plane, the ‘virtue’ has been fixed). Nussbaum’s reading of Aristotle is missing this important source of difference identified by Hume.