Analyzing arguments
When presented with an argument trying to convince us of something, before criticizing it, we should analyze it. Carefully. We want to make sure that the argument does not contain logical errors, hidden contradictions or even outright fallacies, incorrect arguments such as “we don’t kill animals, people who kill animals are immoral, therefore we are moral”, an example of the fallacy known as “affirmative conclusion from a negative premise”. We also need to probe whether the argument contains any implicit premises. For example, when we argue that: “since the sun has risen every day so far in the East, it will rise tomorrow in the East”, we rely on an implicit premise, namely, that Nature has a regular behavior, which allows us to extrapolate to the future. Without that premise, the conclusion does not really follow. This premise in particular, about the regularity of Nature, would definitely be worth examining critically, and therefore would need to be made explicit.
Faced with these kinds of difficulties, and looking only for knowledge and truth (let’s take those words informally for the moment), philosophers distill and purify arguments dispassionately and objectively, keeping only the essential working parts, which are presented in a semi-formal fashion. The hope is that this method would allow us to more easily spot any issue in the logical flow of the argument, and also that we would more deeply understand the structure of the argument. On top of that semi-formal method, the philosopher Daniel Dennett (in Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking, 2012, building on ideas from social psychologist Anatol Rapoport) has added the requirement that the reconstruction be as charitable as possible: the argument should be analyzed, reconstructed and presented as if we were proponents of that argument ourselves, forgetting about our own position on the question at hand, making the argument shine in the best possible light. This is proposed as an antidote to the “tendency to caricature one’s opponent” (Dennett, Ibid.). After all, we are not interested in petty squabbles, however amusing or emotionally satisfying. We want to debate the ideas and the real issues productively. But however promising as that may sound, charitable reconstruction can actually be a messy business. Let’s try to apply the method to an argument from David Hume’s “Treatise of Human Nature” (1738) in Book 3 (Of Morals), Part 1 (Of virtues and vice in general), Section 1:
But can there be any difficulty in proving, that vice and virtue are not matters of fact, whose existence we can infer by reason? Take any action allowed to be vicious: Willful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. You never can find it, till you turn your reflection into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this action. Here is a matter of fact; but it is the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the object. So that when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation of it.
Hume is making an argument about vice and virtue not being objective, but rather subjective feelings, where something is “subjective” when it lies within the subject that makes the statement - and “objective” or “object”, refers to something that lies outside the subject (an important terminology and dichotomy often used in philosophy and psychology). This is actually a sub-argument in a long series of arguments that Hume presents to convince us that the distinction between good and evil cannot be made by reason. He has already established that morality could be either in some relations of objects, or in matters of fact, and demonstrated that it does not reside in relations of objects. Here is our reconstruction of that argument:
An argument for the subjectivity of morality
When examining willful murder, we find passions, motives, volitions, and thoughts in the murderer. This is an exhaustive list of the matter of facts of the crime. We did not find “vice” in the matter of facts of the crime. We find a sentiment of disapprobation towards the crime inside ourselves, as a matter of fact, that we call “vice”. That sentiment is a feeling, not reason.
∴ Therefore, when we say that a murder is vicious, we express a subjective feeling.
We gave the argument a title that summarizes it, which is not too much of an interpretation, since right after this passage, Hume writes: “Vice and virtue, therefore, may be compared to sounds, colors, heat and cold, which, according to modern philosophy, are not qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind”. The title of Section 1 of Book 3, Part 1 is also: “Moral distinctions not derived from reason”. We tried to stay close to Hume’s language, focusing on the logical articulation of the argument. We listed one premise per line, numbered the premises for reference and drew a line before the conclusion, in a step towards a less literary and more formal presentation, where the conclusion should be logically calculated from the premises (logicians and mathematicians impeccably calculate conclusions using ironclad rules of logic). At first sight, there does not seem to be implicit premises that would be necessary to make the argument unfold correctly. The conclusion is introduced by a “therefore” (∴) sign (which was first used in the 17th century by Johann Rahn, a Swiss mathematician, in Teutsche Algebra, 1659). We have tried to make the argument our own, to be faithful and sincere advocates.
But there could be a problem with this reconstruction. How is “vice” defined? After all, premise (3) asserts that “vice” is not found in the matters of fact of willful murder, but what is it exactly that we were looking for? What is “vice”? Of course, this is a very tricky question, at the heart of morality. Defining “vice” is more or less equivalent to explaining what morality is. But because we were not given a definition of “vice”, we could claim that this argument is circular. If we are asked to ascertain that something is found, or not found, should we not know first, exactly what we are looking for? How can we say we did not find something if it is not clear what we were looking for in the first place? Shouldn’t we have a clear idea of “vice” to be able to tell if it is not present in the matter of facts of the crime? In the premises, Hume seems to assume that we have at least some idea of what constitutes “vice”. But then, “vice” seems to be defined later, as a “sentiment of disapprobation” or a “feeling or sentiment of blame”. The idea of “vice” was used before we agreed on what “vice” means! We have been swindled: we were asked to grant that “vice” was not found in the matter of facts of the crime, only to see “vice” defined to us afterwards!
Other philosophers have had similar misgivings about Hume’s arguments. Anscombe, a British philosopher, was writing in “Modern Moral Philosophy”, an article published in the journal Philosophy (vol. 33, no. 124, 1958): “The features of Hume’s philosophy … would incline me to think that Hume was a mere - brilliant - sophist; and his procedures are certainly sophistical”. That is quite a charge. Anscombe relegates Hume to the same category as those ancient Greek teachers who used subtle but often specious reasoning. In other words, Anscombe says that Hume is using tricks rather than sound reasoning to try and convince us. It can certainly feel that way in the case we are studying here. As an aside, accepting an argument because of the stature or reputation of an author, Hume or anybody else, is actually surrendering to a fallacy, known as the “argument from authority”. Whoever the author might be, we must evaluate their argument on their merits alone.
But is Hume’s argument actually sophistical? The same Anscombe writes in the next sentence: “But I am forced, not to reverse, but to add to, this judgment by a peculiarity of Hume’s philosophizing: namely that although he reaches his conclusions - with which he is in love - by sophistical methods, his considerations constantly open up very deep and important problems”. In other words, Hume makes bad or even incorrect arguments, but still presents substantive and worthwhile ideas. In this case, Hume advances the idea that evil is not defined objectively nor rationally, but subjectively, from feelings, and this is of course worth thinking about and debating. We might not have been charitable enough in our attempt to reconstruct Hume’s argument after all. Let’s see if we could do better. Here is another possible reconstruction:
An argument for the subjectivity of morality
When examining willful murder, we should look at empirical facts. In the murderer, we find passions, motives, volitions, and thoughts as empirical facts. In ourselves, we find a sentiment of disapprobation, a feeling of blame from the contemplation of the murder, as empirical facts. There are no other empirical facts.
∴Therefore, when we say that a murder is wrong, or vicious, we express only a subjective feeling.
In a sense, that reconstruction is more transparent than the argument from Hume himself, which could so easily be attacked as a sophism. But we had to seriously change the presentation of the argument, trying to charitably preserve the interesting conclusion, but changing the premises to get there. Should we be that charitable? How charitable should “charitable” be?
Evaluating arguments is clearly not easy, even with the method of charitable reconstruction. I would suggest the following improvement to this method: don’t stop at one charitable reconstruction, but propose several, from different points of view. Analyze the biases that underpin each reconstruction. Contrast the different reconstructions, juxtapose and oppose them to each other. Several reconstructions might better illuminate what the author is trying to say, and the extra effort would make you more aware of potential issues with the reconstruction itself.
Once the argument is digested through this procedure, you can start discussing it. Here, we could object from a normative perspective, defining “evil” or “vice” by a list of “vicious” acts including killing, so that, “as a matter of fact”, “vice” would immediately be found in the murderer. Such a definition of “vice”, would be completely at odds with Hume’s argument. Or we could argue from a utilitarian perspective that we might not always have a feeling of disapprobation when considering murder. Is murder not justified if killing one saves many, for example? What if somebody had killed Hitler in 1935, saving humanity from World War II? Could there be such a notion as a rationally motivated, maybe even good, murder? But those are discussions for another day and should occur only after we really tried to understand Hume’s argument, as charitably as possible.