Deriving Ought from Is

I agree with Fredric Jameson that we have witnessed a disturbing ‘return of traditional philosophy … beginning with its hoariest subfields, such as ethics.’ To quote another Marxist Antonio Negri’s Political Descartes, ‘every metaphysics is simultaneously a political ontology’ and this applies all the more to a field like ethics. And to those who suggest that politics is founded on ethics, I suggest they go and (carefully) read the first western work of political philosophy, Plato’s Republic.

So it might seem bizarre that after an apparently meaningless discussion of Wittgenstein last week, I am now discussing a subset of Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature where he talks about the problems of deriving ought from is. I will say now that I am totally uninterested in the general validity of the ‘naturalistic fallacy’. Instead I shall attempt to relate how Hume’s formulation related to a concrete historical situation. However, by way of commentary, it strikes me that ‘ought’ propositions are intrinsically temporal (‘ought’ has/displays modality), and the best way to attack or support Hume’s conclusions is via an engagement with his thesis on causality. The problem is then one of epistemology and not ethics. This, I believe, best explains the philosophical reasons for this somewhat interminable thinker’s influence on the brilliant Kant, who was famously ‘awoken from his dogmatic slumbers’ by the Treatise.

So, to business: the immediately apparent reading, at least to myself, if told that ‘ought’ cannot be derived from is, is that present historical situations cannot be legitimately objectified. That is to say, just because something is, that doesn’t mean it ought to be. Or in Marxian: the reification of existing social relations as an immutable object is fallacious. This is probably the most prevalent interpretation and it is, in its broadest strokes, a revolutionary thesis. It is also in somewhat direct contradiction with the position of the British bourgeoisie in the mid to late 18th century.

During the first half of the 17th century it was becoming clear that the strength of the monarchy was waning. After essentially a century of economic growth the economic slowdown was beginning to bite, while the monarch’s all too conspicuously dipped into national funds to finance wars at home and abroad. Similarly, the industrial monopolies were becoming an obvious deadweight, while parliament naturally privileged the new(ish) dynamic merchant class above the landed gentry. Add into that Charles alleged papist sympathies and the overt hostility between court and country and you get an explosive mix. This of course led to the first English Revolution, and indeed the two revolutionary decades (from the start of the long parliament to the Restoration) saw the redistribution of land, the end of industrial monopoly, aggressive government support for colonial trade and a flourishing of religious radicalism unmatched before or since. This laid a foundation that was, with a brief respite, confirmed and built upon by the second revolution in 1688. This led to a further century of modest but real economic growth until the explosive effects of the industrial revolution kicked in. In short, at the time Hume was writing, the British bourgeoisie were about as comfortable and satisfied as it ever had been or would be again. So why the revolutionary praxis?

Fortunately for us Marxists (it actually has very little bearing on Marxist theory, but whatever), the ‘revolutionary’ reading of the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ relies on a gross misreading of Hume. Anyone who knows of Hume’s extreme empiricism will intuit his hostility to anything as speculative as a moral ought: when Hume asserts that ‘ought’ is a different form of relation to ‘is’, he asserts that ‘the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects’. That is, the ‘ought’ and not the ‘is’ is brought into question. And indeed this privileging of the already-existing is shown in Book 3 (Of Morals) Part 2 (Of Justice and Injustice) – which is really nothing more than an extended discussion of private property. Thus there is no disjunction between Hume’s footnote about deriving ought from is and the panglossianism of Alexander Pope’ ‘Whatever is, is right.’

Imagine what Voltaire would have made of Alexander Pope’s quip! This explains Hume’s relative unpopularity in France: there the critical and revolutionary doctrines of Rousseau and Voltaire had currency, precisely because of the relative strength of the bourgeoisie in a period where formal power still lay in the hands of the absolutist monarchy. It is telling that Bacon was the most influential British philosopher in pre-revolutionary France; the comfortable philosophy of an already hegemonic bourgeoisie simply did not cut it. Meanwhile in Germany, Hume was a powerfully tempting voice, to be endorsed by the conservative Schopenhauer, and contradicted by the revolutionary Kant. The utter weakness of the German bourgeoisie was to blame: when a class is in no position to seize formal political power, impotence becomes a soporific.