 Well, this piece that Hume has given us, he's taken on kind of a big topic, and one of the things that he says, this is something that is interesting to all people. And that's dealing with morality. Now, morality pervades our lives, right? We ask ourselves what we should do, how we should live our life all the time, what's good, what's bad, what's right, what's wrong, what's just, what's unjust, all this goes on. We make demands upon people all the time based upon morality. We make demands about how they should behave or refrain from behaving. We make demands upon ourselves as well. Well, the question that Hume is dealing with when he's dealing with this morality, he's not trying to give us a specific moral code per se. Rather, he's asking this question, even before we get to which moral theory we ought to follow. He's asking this question, well, what is morality in the sense of where do these judgments come from? What is the importance of these judgments? And specifically, he's asking whether these judgments, these moral claims that we have, are the product of reason. In essence, Hume is asking whether these judgments, these moral claims, whether they're true or false, to begin with. So keep in mind that with these excerpts, Hume, with these excerpts, I've pulled out some very, very minimal excerpts from a very large piece of work that Hume has provided. So what that means is that it's going to kind of jump around a little bit. And we're not going to get the full picture of what Hume is trying to do and what's called the treatise of human understanding. But with these excerpts, I think we're going to get enough of a picture of what Hume is doing. So in this first section that I gave you, titled on the Influencing Motives of the Will, Hume is asking the question of what kind of role does reason have with the will, with volition? Now, as far as Hume's concerned at this point, we got just basically two parts to a person, the understanding and the passions. And the understanding has to deal with reason and the passions have to deal with volition or the will. Now, reason to give kind of a simplified answer of what it's dealing with here, reason deals with what's true or false. So there are lots of ways to talk about true or false. Hume is concerned basically with the relations of ideas, what we might call the relations of ideas, having to deal, the relations of ideas are contrary, right? So if this behind me is a tree, then it's false that this behind me is a dog. That's contrary. This is a tree is contrary to this is a dog. There's similarity, dissimilarity. This tree is much more similar to a bush than it is to a dog. We've even got implication, right? So if this is a tree, then this is a plant. So these are different kinds of relations of ideas. Matters of fact is what we discover in that experience or observation of what we might call an empirical verification. Now this is what's true or what's false. So that reason has to deal with the understanding. The understanding is what comprehends the world as it takes the world as it is, so to speak. Reason has to deal with what's true or what's false. Passions have to deal with the will. Now passions are, you know, there's lots of passions at Hume. Less anger, desire, joy, what? Sadness, right? You got some pretty basic passions there. This is what impacts the will or what the will uses to make its decisions. So the question that Hume is asking here is, well, you know, we've got reason. And reason deals with what's true or what's false. How does that impact the will? How does that impact the will? Well, I've got a fork on the road up here. I can either go to the left or I can go to the right. So what's the role of reason in this decision? Well, reason just tells me what's true or false with this, right? Reason tells me I can either go to the left or I can go to the right. But it doesn't tell me much else besides that. I can go down there and take a look at what's down each path. And reason can tell me what's down each path. So I'm going to do that real quick. I'm going to see what's down there. Well, down the left path, there's a creek bed. There's lots of shade. It's also some nice overhanging trees. It looks really cool. Down the right path, it's not down the creek bed. It's just along the edge. It's very flat and it's very smooth. Down the left, I would have shade. Down the right, I'd have a flat path. Now that's all the reason does. That's the extent of the power reason. Tells me what's true or false down the left path and down the right path. Passions come in and what, which one do I like the most or which one do I like the least? So looking down the left path, I really like to shade. Looking down the right path, I see a nice level walking surface. It'll be easier to walk down. So at this point, I got to ask myself, well, what do I want? Just looking down the path, reason doesn't tell me what I want. Reason doesn't tell me that I want the rock, the shady path versus the level path. To figure that out, I have to look towards my passions. Which one do I like the most? But reason doesn't have an influence on that. All reason tells me is what's there. The passions tell me what I want. All right, well, so that's the role of reason versus the role of passions. Now, you have said something a little curious, something that we likely don't like when we first hear it. He has this phrase that reason ought to be the slave of the passions. That seems extreme. Now, here's not what he means. He doesn't mean this, but just because you want something bad enough that whatever must be true to get it is true. That's not what he means. So suppose I really wanted a path that was both smooth and full of shade. Because I really wanted that. Reason's going to make this rocky, shady path flat. No, that's not what he means. You can't make what's true false, and you can't make what's false true simply because you want it bad enough. That's not it. Now, rather what he means is that reason helps find what the passions want. Now, in my case, I wanted, I like, I desire a shade more than pretty much anything else. So I really want a shade more than a flat path that's sunny. And so what reason does is it helps me find that path that has more shade. And in this case, though, I have to choose the shade over the flat path. And choose a shady, rocky path over a sunny, flat path. So that's what he means by that. And he says that reason is the slave of the passions. That reason helps us get what the passions want. Now, again, reason doesn't tell the passions what it wants, what they want. All reason does is discover things out in the world, and the passions say, want, don't want, want, don't want. That's it. So when we're thinking about this, when we think about what Hugh must have to say, it's really kind of interesting. The role of reason is kind of to serve the passions. The passions tell us what we want, and then reason helps us find it. See, Humus said that reason is the slave of the passions. Now, this doesn't mean that we just make true what you want to be true. Rather, that means that reason helps us find what we want. I want shade. Reason helps me find shade. I want flat. Reason helps me find flat. But if I can't find both of those, then I want shade more than flat. So reason helps me find the shade over flat. Now, this has a further consequence for him, and that is that reason can't be contrary to the passions. And I know that when we think of this, we're thinking of all kinds of unreasonable people because they're letting their emotions get away with them. I have to have coffee in the morning, so you must give me coffee. No, that's not what's going on there. That's just kind of weirdness. But reason discovers what's true or false. Passions just want things. Passions just want these two don't conflict because there's no ground upon which for them to conflict. So I don't know. To say that reason conflicts with passion in this sense is to say that the color blue conflicts with the sociopolitical environment in Venezuela. That's kind of a nonsense statement. There's no impact that the color blue has on the sociopolitical environment in Venezuela. It's like saying Venus conflicts with 2 plus 2 equals 4. No, there's no conflict there because one doesn't have an impact on the other. What's true or false is not impacted by what we want. What we want is not impacted by true or false. So the human's point here is that reason can't conflict with the desires. And the passions can't conflict with reason. Now, you might think of some example, I really want something to be true. So I love chocolate. So I really want all trees to be made of chocolate. OK, well, that's a mistake and reason to suddenly conclude that all trees are made of chocolate because they're really wanted. But that's not a conflict. That's just a mistake and reason. So just looking at what Hume has to say here. We've got reason and the understanding. We've got passions and volition or the will. Reason tells us what's true or false, and that's in the understanding. Passions direct the will. But reason doesn't direct the will. Reason can tell the will that the will wants something. Reason can tell it where it's at. But that's all the reason can do. Reason can't tell the will what to want. So reason's a slave to the passions, is a slave to the will, and reason does not conflict with the will. So we've got this distinction between reason and the passions. And so far, it kind of makes sense really. There's nothing too crazy about Hume has to say here. But we might wonder what does this have to do with morality? Well, Hume kind of plays his hand here. He tells you right up front what he thinks with the title of this next section that moral judgments, morality is not derived from reason. What does he mean by that? Well, to kind of explain that, let's take the argument that he offers. So either moral judgments are going to come from reason or moral judgments come from the passions. That's pretty straightforward. Moral judgments in this case is something like honesty is good or you should give the charity or don't steal. Or it's bad for you to smack random strangers on the street. These are all moral judgments. Now, the question is whether these are derived from reason or they're derived from the passions. Well, Hume says that if moral judgments are derived from reason, then moral judgments aren't going to have an impact on the passions. We aren't going to be moved by moral judgments. And this kind of makes sense. So if these judgments are derived from reason, there's lots of judgments derived from reason, that the anterior angles of a quadrilateral is equal to 360 degrees, not exactly moving. The chemical composition of water is dihydrogen monoxide, not exactly moving. The square root of 16 is 4. None of these have really made my day. None of these are just like, wow, that's so cool. I want 16 now. No, that doesn't do that. I want dihydrogen monoxide now. Learning that water is dihydrogen monoxide doesn't make you want dihydrogen monoxide. All right. So if moral judgments are like this, moral judgments are like these judgments from reason, they tell us what's true or false in the world, simply because something is true. It doesn't make us want it. So these moral judgments, if they're derived from reason, they work the same way, and they don't excite us. They don't move the passions. But it doesn't take very long when you're looking out into the world to figure out the moral judgments do excite the passions. It's one of the topics you really can't talk about in a dinner party, not if you want the dinner party to be fun and relaxed. Pretty soon, moral judgments, you utter a single moral judgment, such as wrong. Wow, you got passions all over the place, or such as such as right. You got passions all over the place. It doesn't take long before our own political scene. There are moral claims made by different politicians, and it divides us really quickly with these moral claims because you got passions on both them, both desire and aversion. Well, yeah, so moral judgments, they definitely excite our passions. Morality is a very exciting topic, and it moves us. Well, since these moral judgments move us since they excite the passions, they're not from reason. They're not from reason. Remember, reason just tells us what's out in the world. Passions tells us what we want. And since these moral judgments are along those lines, it's not from reason. So if moral judgments aren't from reason, then moral judgments are from the passions, what we want gives us our moral judgments. What we don't want also gives us our moral judgments. So for Hume, as we said, this doesn't come from reason. Well, that means that moral judgments, whatever they are, are not things that are true or false. So first, we might like what Hume has to say here about morality, because we say this all the time. There's a wide variety of moral opinions out there. There's a wide variety of judgments out there, ranging from what kind of clothes you should wear or what should be allowed in the public sector or how you should conduct your personal life or shoot what kinds of character traits you ought to have. There's all kinds of moral judgments around out there, and they all conflict with each other. You get lots of different answers. And so a common response that we have to this is, well, that's morality, right? It's just opinions, right? It's just opinions. It's neither true nor false. And so we like to agree with Hume on this. It's neither true nor false. It's just opinions. It's kind of like your favorite flavor of ice cream, right? My favorite flavor of ice cream, I'll see you all right now anyway, is salted caramel ice cream. I love chocolate, don't get me wrong. But salted caramel ice cream right now is fantastic. So I say, hey, salted caramel ice cream is the best ice cream. Well, that's an opinion, right? It's not true or false, right? On top of that, that's just based upon what you like the most, right? It's just based upon my favorite. But just because it's my favorite doesn't mean that it's, first of all, is it gonna be anybody else's favorite or it's the kind of ice cream that everybody ought to have. Hey, it doesn't even mean anybody else is gonna like salted caramel ice cream. So we tend to think that Hume is right here, or at least some of us, we like to think that Hume is right here, that moral judgment is neither true nor false. So saying honesty is good is like saying salted caramel ice cream is the best ice cream. Well, that Hume is making this explicit. He brings us right up to the front. Moral judgments are neither true nor false. The only thing that's happening with the moral judgment is that you are expressing a desire, a want, a favorite. Now, you might think that sounds about right. Okay. Look at the price you're gonna pay for that, though. We make all kinds of claims about murder, about what should be allowed in society, about how other people should treat us. Are you really willing to claim that that's just an opinion? You claim a fundamental right to life, right? Nobody, it is wrong for anybody else to just randomly kill you. Is that just an opinion? Well, what Hume has given us here is what's called emotivism. And emotivism is the claim that moral judgments have no truth value, they're not true nor false. All they do is express approval or disapproval. They express desire or aversion. They express what you want or what you don't want, but that's it, right? There's no more truth value to the claim. Honesty is good, then there is espresso is the best coffee. There's no more truth value to those. All that's happening there is I'm expressing my preference. Now, this comes with the price. The price is that all these claims, and we have lots of claims, right? So fundamental rights, I have a fundamental right to life. I have a fundamental right to decide how I want to live my life. I have a fundamental right for you not to steal my things. All those are just preferences. Well, like I said, this is called emotivism. And Hume is clear here, right? We are judgments, these moral judgments, he's very clear in this last section that I gave you. All these moral judgments, all they derive from are from what gives us pleasure and what gives us pain. Now, to be clear, Hume's not saying we should do what brings us the most pleasure, right? That's not what he's saying. All he's saying is your judgments about what's pleasure, about what's moral comes from what's pleasurable, comes from what's painful, but that's it. The reason why you say I have a right to live my life is because it's painful, because it's painful when somebody forces you to do something, but that's all that the moral judgments give us. There's no truth value to you should let me live my life. That's a moral claim. That's a claim about what you ought to do. But that's just expressing an opinion. That's the same thing as saying I prefer if you let me live my own life. So, Hume has given us emotivism, or at least one of the earliest forms of it. Now, you gotta ask yourself, is this right?