Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [100]
You can easily imagine all sorts of desires that might fit into the former category. The Grinch might love chocolate chip cookies, and it might just so happen that nobody could possibly beat Cindy-Lou Who’s cookies. Or the Grinch could have all sorts of terrible aches and pains, and Cindy-Lou might be just the little Who doctor to cure him. If Cindy-Lou effectively spared her own life by convincing the Grinch that it was worth his while to keep her around, we wouldn’t say that he really cared about her. In this case, he would simply see her as an instrument to satisfy his own desires. The kind of reasoning that she and the Grinch would engage in would be means-end reasoning by way of demonstrating a connection between her existence and something else that the Grinch really wants.
Of course, sometimes such discoveries about means and ends have very big effects on a life. If the Grinch really wants to make millions of dollars and finds out that teaching philosophy in a university is the best way to go, then this will be big news for him. But notice that the revelation about an effective means to his end would only induce a change in what the Grinch does, not a change in what he is, at least not in any deep sense. What he’s really all about in this case is making a whole lot of money, and philosophy is just an effective means to the same. True enough, the practice of philosophy might eventually change the Grinch in some respects since form often follows function, but the piece of practical reasoning that brings him to a new end—whether this is teaching philosophy or saving Cindy-Lou Who—will hardly be something that constitutes a watershed in who he is. In this case, he’s just a Grinch who figured out how to get what he really wanted all along.
Hume, like Kant, didn’t think that this kind of indirect (instrumental) concern for Cindy-Lou could confer any genuine moral credit on a person. Both would agree that the Grinch would have to care about Cindy-Lou for her own sake, and not just as a means to satisfy some other desire. But here is where Kant and Hume would part company. Whereas Kant would frame moral goodness in terms of a principled respect for Cindy-Lou’s intrinsic worth as a rational being, Hume would look to sympathy’s fellow-feeling, where the emphasis really is on feeling. In other words, while Kant would look to the head, Hume would look to the heart by way of what amounts to love in some form or another. As Hume says in his Treatise, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”2
When it comes to giving a person a reason to do anything in life, Hume thinks that justifications can only go so far. When accounting for what you did, you will always come to a reason for which you can give no further reason other than the sheer fact of your desire. Why did you save your pennies for so long? To buy myself a fantastic violin. Why do you want a fantastic violin? To play beautiful music. Why do you want to play beautiful music? Because I do. True enough, one might redescribe the desire in various terms (Beautiful music makes me feel so good), but the descriptions would ultimately go only so far and they, too, would be open to the very same line of questioning (Why do you want to feel so good?). In the end, you’d get to a point where you couldn’t say anything more about why you want this rather than that.
Hume thought this was so for all things, including morality. One might make all sorts of fine-tuned moral distinctions about subtle concepts and perceptive observations about moral phenomena, but in the end, morality came down to the fact that human beings were psychologically disposed to experience