Conventions and Traditions: Hume and Burke (I)

Readings from Chapter 30 of Sabine's History of Political Doctrine

Before introducing Hume, Sabine describes the popularity of English empiricism after Locke. Sabine argues that, in general, the natural law system was an anachronism after Rousseau, both because it did not provide the proper rational tools for the social studies being advocated at the time, and because its dogmatic claims of self-evidence did not stand up to scrutiny. The system of natural law existed in France because it was able to produce a revolutionary dissolution of the ancient political and social system.

But in England this revolutionary role of natural law no longer exists. On the one hand, the task of justifying the revolution had ended with Locke, and on the other hand, the general temperament of eighteenth-century English thought showed a decidedly conservative tendency.

Sabine argues that, before Bentham, English utilitarianism lacked the radical reformist thrust that Elvisius had given to French utilitarianism, but because of its conscious attempts to reject the idea of natural right, English utilitarianism was more systematically explicit than French utilitarianism.

The above is the background of British empiricism before Hume as discussed by Sabine.

Author's note: In fact, in a broader historical context, the 18th century Britain was marching towards the direction of the commercial empire, and the development of commerce provided the historical Beijing for the birth of modern political economy; the British in-depth understanding of the Indians in the New World inspired them to analyze the socio-political problems from a historical perspective. Because the colonists came to the New World and came into contact with peoples with different degrees of civilization, the inquiry into the causes of such a phenomenon became due, and thus the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers were mostly historically conscious, such as Adam Smith, who divided the development of society into the four phases of hunting, stockbreeding, agriculture, and commerce, and Ferguson, who divided the development of civilization into an obscurantist society, a barbaric society, and an elegant society. In such a historical context, the doctrine of natural rights has no way to cope with new problems and explain new and complex phenomena.

Sabein believed that the critique of the natural law system and the effort to gradually purge it of its views reached its zenith in Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. In fact, Sabine himself was a great admirer of Hume, and in the preface to The History of Political Doctrine, Sabine states that his own philosophical inclinations were basically in agreement with Hume's.

Sabine is a great admirer of Hume's work.

Sabine believed that the power of Hume's logical analysis lay in the fact that, once accepted, or followed, it was capable of destroying all claims to the scientific validity of natural law.

Hume clarifies the concept of reason and argues that natural law theorists have combined and confused three different elements or processes into the term, resulting in propositions that are not absolutely certain being treated as necessary truths or immutable moral laws.

First, Hume attempts to point out what exactly can properly be rational in the sense of being necessary. Hume divided knowledge into two categories, those with intuitive and deductive certainty, and those with contingent knowledge characterized by empirical reasoning. The former is typified by mathematics.

Mathematics is a relation of ideas, characterized by the fact that if a premise is true, then its conclusion follows. For such knowledge, there is no need to ask whether the premise is actually true. I think this insight should be easy to understand for anyone who has been to high school and solved math problems. The questions are hypothetical, and there is no need to ask whether what the questions say really exists.

Secondly, the above mentioned relation of ideas does not prove the factual questions, and at the same time, the relation between factual questions is never necessary. This relation between facts belongs to the latter, contingent knowledge, of Hume's classification of knowledge, mentioned earlier.

The typical feature of contingent knowledge is that the occurrence of a fact does not prove that its opposite is impossible, i.e., that both positive and negative aspects are perfectly possible. Thus two so-called opposite things do not actually constitute a contradiction. For example the sun will rise tomorrow, and the sun will not rise tomorrow, are both possible and can be understood. Thus one does not prove the truth or falsity of either of these two propositions.

One's knowledge of causality in matters of fact is not actually due to an objective, necessary connection between things, but is grounded in one's impressions. The causal connection between A and B is not actually based on the internal nature of A, but on the fact that our past experience predisposes us to think of B in terms of A. That is to say, in our past experience, A and B have always occurred one after the other, with a certain degree of regularity.

Third, rational is applicable to human behavior. Natural law has always claimed that there are various justified principles of reason and that they are necessary. Hume, on the other hand, argues that when a certain mode of behavior is said to be justified or good, it does not refer to reason, but to a certain intention, desire, or habit (propensity) of man. Reason can use knowledge of cause and effect to show what will happen if one acts in a certain way, but reason cannot require that this result be accepted by one's intentions, desires, and habits.

Reason's guide to human behavior, therefore, is only what ends will be achieved by what means.

Whether the result is difficult is neither rational nor irrational in itself.

Hume puts it this way:

Sabine argues that Hume's analysis distinguishes any study that considers value judgments, such as ethics and political science, from both deductive sciences, such as mathematics, and from purely causal or factual sciences, such as sociology.

In the second part of the paper, Hume's attempts to clarify the three elements of rationality confused with natural law theory were analyzed, summarized as:

A. There is deduction or rationality in the strict sense.

B. Empirical or causal relations can only be discovered.

C. When one speaks of justification, justice, or utilitarianism, they can be categorized as values.

At this point, the rationality of Sabine's theory of natural law falls apart for Hume. The last two of the above three elements are not strictly rational, and include some unprovable elements. Hume called these elements "conventions" (convention).

These conventions are valid because people are accustomed to using them, and they are also useful in the sense that people have established more stable rules of behavior based on them. However, these conventions do not prove to be inevitable either, because their opposite is equally likely to be true.

Finally, Hume has been trying to show that social values like justice and liberty also involve conventions, in the sense that they necessarily appeal to utility for the sake of their authority, or ultimately to their relation to human motives and habits.