Hume-inations on Locke: Empiricism, Norms, and the Birds In-Hand

John Locke's empiricism is initially comforting. His concept of the tabula rasa ensures an initial purity of the mind, free from innate ideas, and his comfort in the veracity of sense perceptions allows for an empirical, self-affirming personal responsibility as regards the concept of morality. Ultimately, though, his moral philosophy is relativist, highly individual, and does not scale to the level of society with the same level of epistemological certainty. At this point, I become uneasy. Moral philosophy is only as good as its applicability to social life.

Enter Hume. Essentially in agreement with Locke up to the point of the individual, Hume diverges with a more pragmatic analysis of morality, adding cultural norms into his reasoning behind what makes an action moral or amoral. His addition of this sentiment into the equation paints a much more human picture than Locke's colder mathematics. However, with the addition of what Hume calls the "constant conjunction," also comes the introduction of significant doubt. Can Hume's epistemology provide certain knowledge of morality on a larger and more practicable level than John Locke?

This essay seeks to determine whether Hume's moral epistemology can stand up to Locke's. It will first explore the empirical foundations of Locke's moral philosophy, contrasting it then with Hume's, and will finally assess the epistemology of Hume's constant conjunction when applied to moral reasoning, ultimately deciding whose philosophy provides the stronger epistemology for moral theory.

John Locke, arguably the father of modern liberal thought, was also the father of modern empiricism. Riding on the intellectual heels of Hobbes, he further developed arguments against rationalism, asserting that there are no innate ideas and that all knowledge is acquired through sense perceptions (Modern Philosophy 272). Working from the most basic sensations and reflections, Locke holds that man combines these sensations into simple ideas, and combines simple into complex ideas, including liberty, power, will, and, our focus, morality.

To properly understand Locke's empirical basis for morality, it is necessary to walk through these steps from sensations to morals, and to help illustrate this process, we will use the following hypothetical scenario: We observe Alan (A), a starving man, steal a loaf of bread (B) from Clyde (C). As we move along, we will gradually assess the morality of Alan's theft in Lockean terms. We cannot begin from morality, though, without the proper ideas of who and what Alan, Clyde, bread, and hunger are.

Locke writes that we can only form ideas of these entities from "sensation or reflection," our ability to perceive and then reflect with our minds upon those perceptions (276). For instance, we can use our sight to detect the brownness of the bread's crust, its sweet odor, and its warmth, having just come out of the oven. We gain our perceptions of the bread, thus, "by more senses than one," and our minds cobble these senses together into the distinct idea of bread (282). As such, we are able to establish an idea of our scenario's object.

What, then, of the concepts of Alan, Clyde, starvation, and theft? In the scenario, these concepts are more complex than the simple existence of bread. Locke writes that complex ideas are formed through perception, one of the mind's two great actions- the other being volition (284). Perception, (the action of which is thinking) can combine, compare, or make abstractions of ideas. This is how all general ideas are made. Combine pain with the absence of nourishment to form an idea of hunger or starvation. Starvation is a mode, as it depends upon "affections of substances" (294). Combine Alan's appearance with his affectation of hunger to produce the idea of the substance, or continuing identity, that is Alan. Consider the bread and Clyde's relation to it as owner. Compare, now, the differences between the appearance and affectations of Alan and Clyde and we may discern them as two different entities, related in their geographic and temporal proximity to and mutual interest in the bread, Clyde in owning and Alan in obtaining.

We must add one further level in order to fully understand Locke's empirical basis for morality, that being the idea of theft. As it is dependent on the substances Alan, the bread, Clyde, and their affectations, and as it is more complex than simpler forms of mode dealing with plurals, theft falls into a category Locke defines as the mixed mode, consisting of "scattered, and independent ideas put together by the mind" which "exercises an active power in making these combinations" (310). Locke calls these mixed modes "notions," created out of the necessity of describing a group of ideas frequently used together, existing then not necessarily in substance, but in name (311). Theft thus need not be an entity, but rather a mental conglomeration of ideas pertaining to certain actions.

In our example, theft is a conglomeration of the ideas of several things: First, Clyde's power of ownership over the bread; Second, Alan's hunger, which leads to his desire for nourishment, the complex idea of which includes bread, and thus his transitive desire for bread (307). Clyde's bread, upon being perceived by Alan, is then made the object of Alan's desire. Combine Alan's desire with his other powers: his liberty, or ability to take Clyde's bread and his will power to direct his body to do so, and we now have all the constituent parts of the notion of theft, as constructed by Locke's empiricism.

The remaining question is that of morality, which is actually fairly simple for Locke. It begins with the question of what moved Alan's desire to steal Clyde's bread. Locke replies with one word: "happiness" (307). Locke would suggest that Alan sought to produce personal happiness and pleasure by ending his hunger-caused pain through the theft and subsequent ingestion of the bread. As obtaining the bread had "an aptness to produce pleasure" in Alan, it is thus "that which we call good" (ibid). Of course, for Clyde, having his bread taken away is likely to "produce pain" and is thus what "we call evil" (ibid).

What we are now left with seems to be a moral relativism on the level of the individual. As each person is his own pleasure maximizer, Clyde's perspective suggests that the theft was evil and morally reprehensible while Alan's perspective suggests the opposite. This presents several problems for Locke, who maintains that "moral knowledge is as capable of real certainty as mathematics" (357). It begs the question of how there can exist one moral truth with two different, observer-dependent outcomes.

Locke attempts to rectify this seeming fallacy by alluding to a "greatest positive good" that is perfectly demonstrable by reducing each option to its component parts, and then engaging in "suspense, deliberation, and scrutiny of each successive desire" (306, 308). The allusion leads nowhere, though, as it fails to jump out of the individual perspective. Truly enough, in a greater societal system with property laws and an effective enforcement mechanism, Alan might be dissuaded from theft as the unhappiness caused by punishment would outweigh the happiness brought by nourishment. In our closed hypothetical with no punishment or enforcement mechanisms, Clyde's ownership of the bread Alan is taking does not figure into the morality of the situation. For Locke to create a scalable moral system based on this empiricism, he would have to create an almost utilitarian accounting system of the total relative happiness and misery of the combined parties for every conceivable option. The system is absent in Essay and he suffices to ensure his confidence the ability of men to find these truths despite the difficulties of creating accurate definitions (351).

In all, Locke's empiricism works quite well for all but the ultimate step of assessing morality beyond the level of the individual. His method of empiricism gave us clear ideas of all the actors, objects, and modes in our hypothetical, and even managed to make empirically true and epistemologically sound moral statements. It failed, however, in translating these moral statements into objective truths, instead narrowing the definition of morality to exist only on the level of the individual.

Enter David Hume. Sporting a skeptical empiricism in the same tradition of Locke, he adds moral sentiment to his basis for morality, opening up the system that was so restrictive for Locke and, in the end, creating a much more complete and useful accounting of morality than Locke's mathematical aims. We will return once again to our friends Alan and Clyde, moving more quickly this time and pausing only for areas of discrepancy in method or terminology.

Both Hume and Locke are in agreement on the impossibility of innate ideas. Hume divides perception into the two categories of impressions and thoughts, roughly equivalent to Locke's sensations and reflections, respectively (497). Thus in a manner similar to Locke's, we are able to, through sense perception and reflection, establish the entities Alan, bread, and Clyde. To determine their relationships, we use our mind's power to relate their ideas through "resemblance, contiguity in time or place, and cause and effect" (499). We can reason through cause and effect that because Alan feels hungry and is desirous of food, he will most likely be inclined to desire any food set before him because in past situations resembling this one, he has felt the same. While Hume does deny the necessary connection between cause and effect, he is "as an agent... quite satisfied" with inferences (505). Indeed, as these associations are going on inside the head of the agent, they will suffice for us.

What, though, of the more complex notions of theft and morality? Alan is faced with two options- to steal or not to steal. He is at liberty to choose, though some would say that his state of starvation creates a necessity to steal out of self-preservation. Alan's theft can be reasoned through the lens of Hume's "customary transition" (527). Man performs in systems of exchange as a result of norm setting through the "constant conjunction" of one cause to a given effect (ibid). Enough of these conjunctions produces a system of exchange in which participants believe, eventually to a level of "mutual dependence of men... so great in all societies that any human action is hardly complete in itself or is performed without some reference to the actions of others" (526).

So Alan steals the bread. Rather than, in Locke's empirically constrained system, a problem of relative morality arising with Alan's good being Clyde's evil, we have a more objective framework in which to assess the theft. Clyde, having baked his bread, is through the norms of property ownership ensured "the enjoyment of the fruits of his labor" (ibid). Alan, though he is hungry and desirous of bread, is not morally justified in taking it, as it was an offense against custom. And so it is immoral: "the characters which engage our approbation are chiefly such as contribute to the peace and security of human society, as the characters which excite blame are chiefly such as tend to public detriment and disturbance" (531). Alan has disturbed the customary connections that hold together the systems of society, excites its' members ill sentiment, and thus earns their reprobation and the condemnation of his act as amoral.

It would seem that the argument ends there. Hume's moral theory trumps Locke's moral theory in terms of pragmatism, but when pragmatism is not the issue, evaluation gets murkier. Which philosopher provides the best epistemological defense of his moral theory? Can we truly know that Alan's theft of Clyde's bread is immoral under Hume's system? Custom is one thing, but objective knowledge is another. We are faced with a dilemma. Either accept Hume's uncertainty and skepticism that we can, at best, make informed guesses based on experience that attempt to discover "the internal principles" which "may operate in a uniform manner... though not easily discoverable by human sagacity and inquiry" (525). Or accept Locke's completely reducible, knowable, and inadequate moral philosophy on the basis that what principles it does provide will lead to "real certainty" (357).

Ultimately, I must side with Locke. There is too much uncertainty in Hume's moral theory. He sets up airtight skepticism for his metaphysics, but in the process establishes a binary system, one side for the philosophers, based on demonstrable reasoning and another for daily life, based on custom and probability (504). Morality being governed by the latter, uncertainty invariably creeps in and prevents a claim of sound epistemology. And so, while impractical, Locke's epistemology leaves much less room for doubt. Useful only as a relativist proof, it denies the individual's necessary moral interaction with society by redefining morality as completely subjective, dependant only on individual happiness and its maximization. Half-formed ideas of the greatest good are unconvincing as indicators of a larger perspective, but on the personal level, morality and immorality are knowable with certainty by deconstructing their component ideas.

Cited:

Ariew, Roger and Eric Watkins. Modern Philosophy. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co, 1998.