The Merits of an Honest Effort (A Variety of Passion)

The fact is, there are few reasons not to study what you genuinely want to. Achieving in the subject area that appeals to you is always possible and if you don't do it, other people will. I believe you have to make the right decisions for yourself, because no argument against this will counteract your regrets when you see people of the same age and ability as you excelling in your dream job.

University is all about doing something you love, right? Choosing to study something you are passionate about might not be as beneficial as you think. When you study at university essentially you are making an investment: That's a lot of money.

Should you study something you love or a degree that will get you a job? | Education | The Guardian

You don't have to know much about investments to know that the purpose of them is to make a profit. Your degree is a long term investment in which you are profited with knowledge. However, investing money that will some day need to be paid back means that your profit needs to be financial, not just academic. So if you are naturally gifted with numbers but have a real passion for travel, opting to study geography at university might be a mistake.

You may find you aren't quite sure what to do with your degree once you graduate, and find yourself knowing you're capable of the mathematical jobs you see advertised, but have no qualification to prove it. There is a difference between your interests and your career strengths. If you think you could really crack the world of modern art then great, but if art is just something you enjoy on a weeknight, perhaps reconsider your choice to study fine art.

If you are currently choosing a course at university, or thinking of changing your course, my advice to you is simple: Play to your strengths, not your passions. If you are lucky enough to have the two overlap then great. But bear in mind that with the right job there will always be time for the things you enjoy, regardless of whether you studied them at university or not. Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Topics Students Students and employability. The will, Hume claims, is an immediate effect of pain or pleasure T 2. The will, however, is merely that impression we feel when we knowingly give rise to an action T 2. The causes of action he describes are those he has already identified: Hume famously sets himself in opposition to most moral philosophers, ancient and modern, who talk of the combat of passion and reason, and who urge human beings to regulate their actions by reason and to grant it dominion over their contrary passions.

His view is not, of course, that reason plays no role in the generation of action; he grants that reason provides information, in particular about means to our ends, which makes a difference to the direction of the will. His thesis is that reason alone cannot move us to action; the impulse to act itself must come from passion. The first is a largely empirical argument based on the two rational functions of the understanding.

David Hume

The understanding discovers the abstract relations of ideas by demonstration a process of comparing ideas and finding congruencies and incongruencies ; and it also discovers the causal and other probabilistic relations of objects that are revealed in experience. Demonstrative reasoning is never the cause of any action by itself: Probable or cause-and-effect reasoning does play a role in deciding what to do, but we see that it only functions as an auxiliary, and not on its own. Our aversion or propensity makes us seek the causes of the expected source of pain or pleasure, and we use causal reasoning to discover what they are.

Once we do, our impulse naturally extends itself to those causes, and we act to avoid or embrace them. Plainly the impulse to act does not arise from the reasoning but is only directed by it. Probable reasoning is merely the discovering of causal connections, and knowledge that A causes B never concerns us if we are indifferent to A and to B. Thus, neither demonstrative nor probable reasoning alone causes action. The second argument is a corollary of the first. It takes as a premise the conclusion just reached, that reason alone cannot produce an impulse to act. Given that, can reason prevent action or resist passion in controlling the will?

To stop a volition or retard the impulse of an existing passion would require a contrary impulse. If reason alone could give rise to such a contrary impulse, it would have an original influence on the will a capacity to cause intentional action, when unopposed ; which, according to the previous argument, it lacks. Therefore reason alone cannot resist any impulse to act.

Therefore, what offers resistance to our passions cannot be reason of itself. The third or Representation argument is different in kind. One might suppose he means to give another argument to show that reason alone cannot provide a force to resist passion. Yet the Representation Argument is not empirical, and does not talk of forces or impulses. Therefore, a passion or volition or action , not having this feature, cannot be opposed by truth and reason. The argument allegedly proves two points: The point here is not merely the earlier, empirical observation that the rational activity of the understanding does not generate an impulse in the absence of an expectation of pain or pleasure.

The main point is that, because passions, volitions, and actions have no content suitable for assessment by reason, reason cannot assess prospective motives or actions as rational or irrational; and therefore reason cannot, by so assessing them, create or obstruct them. By contrast, reason can assess a potential opinion as rational or irrational; and by endorsing the opinion, reason will that is, we will adopt it, while by contradicting the opinion, reason will destroy our credence in it.

The Representation Argument, then, makes a point a priori about the relevance of the functions of the understanding to the generation of actions. Hume allows that, speaking imprecisely, we often say a passion is unreasonable because it arises in response to a mistaken judgment or opinion, either that something a source of pleasure or uneasiness exists, or that it may be obtained or avoided by a certain means.

In just these two cases a passion may be called unreasonable, but strictly speaking even here it is not the passion but the judgment that is so. And there is no other instance of passion contrary to reason. Interpreters disagree as to whether Hume is an instrumentalist or a skeptic about practical reason. Either way, Hume denies that reason can evaluate the ends people set themselves; only passions can select ends, and reason cannot evaluate passions. Instrumentalists understand the claim that reason is the slave of the passions to allow that reason not only discovers the causally efficacious means to our ends a task of theoretical causal reasoning but also requires us to take them.

The classificatory point in the Representation Argument favors the reading of Hume as a skeptic about practical reason; but that argument is absent from the moral Enquiry. Hume claims that moral distinctions are not derived from reason but rather from sentiment. His rejection of ethical rationalism is at least two-fold.

Moral rationalists tend to say, first, that moral properties are discovered by reason, and also that what is morally good is in accord with reason even that goodness consists in reasonableness and what is morally evil is unreasonable. Hume rejects both theses. Some of his arguments are directed to one and some to the other thesis, and in places it is unclear which he means to attack. Demonstrative reasoning discovers relations of ideas, and vice and virtue are not identical with any of the four philosophical relations resemblance, contrariety, degrees in quality, or proportions in quantity and number whose presence can be demonstrated.

Nor could they be identical with any other abstract relation; for such relations can also obtain between items such as trees that are incapable of moral good or evil. Furthermore, were moral vice and virtue discerned by demonstrative reasoning, such reasoning would reveal their inherent power to produce motives in all who discern them; but no causal connections can be discovered a priori.

Causal reasoning, by contrast, does infer matters of fact pertaining to actions, in particular their causes and effects; but the vice of an action its wickedness is not found in its causes or effects, but is only apparent when we consult the sentiments of the observer. Therefore moral good and evil are not discovered by reason alone. Hume also attempts in the Treatise to establish the other anti-rationalist thesis, that virtue is not the same as reasonableness and vice is not contrary to reason.

He gives two arguments for this. The first, very short, argument he claims follows directly from the Representation Argument, whose conclusion was that passions, volitions, and actions can be neither reasonable nor unreasonable. Actions, he observes, can be laudable or blamable. The properties are not identical. The second and more famous argument makes use of the conclusion defended earlier that reason alone cannot move us to act. Morality — this argument goes on — influences our passions and actions: Therefore morals cannot be derived from reason alone. This argument about motives concludes that moral judgments or evaluations are not the products of reason alone.

From this many draw the sweeping conclusion that for Hume moral evaluations are not beliefs or opinions of any kind, but lack all cognitive content. That is, they take the argument to show that Hume holds a non-propositional view of moral evaluations — and indeed, given his sentimentalism, that he is an emotivist: Such a reading should be met with caution, however. For Hume, to say that something is not a product of reason alone is not equivalent to saying it is not a truth-evaluable judgment or belief.

Hume does not consider all our propositional beliefs and opinions to be products of reason; some arise directly from sense perception, for example, and some from sympathy. Also, perhaps there are propositional beliefs we acquire via probable reasoning but not by such reasoning alone. One possible example is the belief that some object is a cause of pleasure, a belief that depends upon prior impressions as well as probable reasoning. Another concern about the famous argument about motives is how it could be sound. In order for it to yield its conclusion, it seems that its premise that morality or a moral judgment influences the will must be construed to say that moral evaluations alone move us to action, without the help of some further passion.

This is a controversial claim and not one for which Hume offers any support. The premise that reason alone cannot influence action is also difficult to interpret. It would seem, given his prior arguments for this claim e. Yet it is hard to see how Hume, given his theory of causation, can argue that no mental item of a certain type such as a causal belief can possibly cause motivating passion or action.

Such a claim could not be supported a priori. And in Treatise 1. It is possible that Hume only means to say, in the premise that reason alone cannot influence action, that reasoning processes cannot generate actions as their logical conclusions; but that would introduce an equivocation, since he surely does not mean to say, in the other premise, that moral evaluations generate actions as their logical conclusions.

The transition from premises to conclusion also seems to rely on a principle of transitivity If A alone cannot produce X and B produces X, then A alone cannot produce B , which is doubtful but receives no defense. Commentators have proposed various interpretations to avoid these difficulties. If we understand the terms this way, the argument can be read not as showing that the faculty of reason or the beliefs it generates cannot cause us to make moral judgments, but rather as showing that the reasoning process comparing ideas is distinct from the process of moral discrimination.

This is usually thought to mean something much more general: A number of present-day philosophers, including R. Some interpreters think Hume commits himself here to a non-propositional or noncognitivist view of moral judgment — the view that moral judgments do not state facts and are not truth-evaluable. If moral evaluations are merely expressions of feeling without propositional content, then of course they cannot be inferred from any propositional premises.

Some see the paragraph as denying ethical realism, excluding values from the domain of facts. Others interpret it as making a point about the original discovery of virtue and vice, which must involve the use of sentiment. On this view, one cannot make the initial discovery of moral properties by inference from nonmoral premises using reason alone; rather, one requires some input from sentiment. It is not simply by reasoning from the abstract and causal relations one has discovered that one comes to have the ideas of virtue and vice; one must respond to such information with feelings of approval and disapproval.

They point out that Hume himself makes such inferences frequently in his writings. Four main interpretations have significant textual support. First, as we have seen, the nonpropositional view says that for Hume a moral evaluation does not express any proposition or state any fact; either it gives vent to a feeling, or it is itself a feeling Flew, Blackburn, Snare, Bricke. A more refined form of this interpretation allows that moral evaluations have some propositional content, but claims that for Hume their essential feature, as evaluations, is non-propositional.

The subjective description view, by contrast, says that for Hume moral evaluations describe the feelings of the spectator, or the feelings a spectator would have were she to contemplate the trait or action from the common point of view. Often grouped with the latter view is the third, dispositional interpretation, which understands moral evaluations as factual judgments to the effect that the evaluated trait or action is so constituted as to cause feelings of approval or disapproval in a suitably characterized spectator Mackie, in one of his proposals.

On the dispositional view, in saying some trait is good we attribute to the trait the dispositional property of being such as to elicit approval. A fourth interpretation distinguishes two psychological states that might be called a moral evaluation: Versions of this fourth interpretation differ in what they take to be the content of that latter mental state. One version says that the moral judgments, as distinct from the moral feelings, are factual judgments about the moral sentiments Capaldi.

A distinct version, the moral sensing view, treats the moral beliefs as ideas copied from the impressions of approval or disapproval that represent a trait of character or an action as having whatever quality it is that one experiences in feeling the moral sentiment Cohon. These moral sentiments are emotions in the present-day sense of that term with a unique phenomenological quality, and also with a special set of causes. Approval approbation is a pleasure, and disapproval disapprobation a pain or uneasiness.

The moral sentiments are typically calm rather than violent, although they can be intensified by our awareness of the moral responses of others. They are types of pleasure and uneasiness that are associated with the passions of pride and humility, love and hatred: We distinguish which traits are virtuous and which are vicious by means of our feelings of approval and disapproval toward the traits; our approval of actions is derived from approval of the traits we suppose to have given rise to them.

We can determine, by observing the various sorts of traits toward which we feel approval, that every such trait — every virtue — has at least one of the following four characteristics: Vices prove to have the parallel features: In the Treatise Hume details the causes of the moral sentiments, in doing so explaining why agreeable and advantageous traits prove to be the ones that generate approval.

He claims that the sentiments of moral approval and disapproval are caused by some of the operations of sympathy, which is not a feeling but rather a psychological mechanism that enables one person to receive by communication the sentiments of another more or less what we would call empathy today. Sympathy in general operates as follows. So does observing the typical cause of a passion: We at all times possess a maximally vivid and forceful impression of ourselves.

Here resemblance and contiguity are primary. All human beings, regardless of their differences, are similar in bodily structure and in the types and causes of their passions. The person I observe or consider may further resemble me in more specific shared features such as character or nationality. Because of the resemblance and my contiguity to the observed person, the idea of his passion is associated in my mind with my impression of myself, and acquires great vivacity from it.

The sole difference between an idea and an impression is the degree of liveliness or vivacity each possesses. So great is this acquired vivacity that the idea of his passion in my mind becomes an impression, and I actually experience the passion. When I come to share in the affections of strangers, and feel pleasure because they are pleased, as I do when I experience an aesthetic enjoyment of a well-designed ship or fertile field that is not my own, my pleasure can only be caused by sympathy T 2.

Similarly, Hume observes, when we reflect upon a character or mental quality knowing its tendency either to the benefit or enjoyment of strangers or to their harm or uneasiness, we come to feel enjoyment when the trait is beneficial or agreeable to those strangers, and uneasiness when the trait is harmful or disagreeable to them.

This reaction of ours to the tendency of a character trait to affect the sentiments of those with whom we have no special affectionate ties can only be explained by sympathy. We greatly approve the artificial virtues justice with respect to property, allegiance to government, and dispositions to obey the laws of nations and the rules of modesty and good manners , which Hume argues are inventions contrived solely for the interest of society.

We approve them in all times and places, even where our own interest is not at stake, solely for their tendency to benefit the whole society of that time or place. The sympathy-generated pleasure, then, is the moral approbation we feel toward these traits of character. We find the character traits — the causes — agreeable because they are the means to ends we find agreeable as a result of sympathy. Hume extends this analysis to the approval of most of the natural virtues. Those traits of which we approve naturally without any social contrivance , such as beneficence, clemency, and moderation, also tend to the good of individuals or all of society.

So our approval of those can be explained in precisely the same way, via sympathy with the pleasure of those who receive benefit. And since the imagination is more struck by what is particular than by what is general, manifestations of the natural virtues, which directly benefit any individual to whom they are directed, are even more apt to give pleasure via sympathy than are the manifestations of justice, which may harm identifiable individuals in some cases though they contribute to a pattern of action beneficial to society as a whole T 3.

As we saw, the moral sentiments are produced by sympathy with those affected by a trait or action. However, the sympathetic transmission of sentiments can vary in effectiveness depending upon the degree of resemblance and contiguity between the observer and the person with whom he sympathizes. I receive the sentiments of someone very much like me or very close to me in time or place far more strongly than I do those of someone unlike me or more remote from me in location or in history. Yet the moral assessments we make do not vary depending upon whether the person we evaluate resembles us in language, sex, or temperament, or is near or far.

Indeed, our moral assessments of people remain stable even though our position with respect to them changes over time. At least with respect to natural virtues and vices, this common point of view is composed of the intimate perspectives of the various individuals who have direct interactions with the person being evaluated.

Thus I acquire by sympathy the pleasure or uneasiness that I imagine people would feel were the trait able to operate as it ordinarily does. As we have seen, for Hume evaluation of an action is derived from evaluation of the inner quality we suppose to have given rise to it. A character trait, for Hume, is a psychological disposition consisting of a tendency to feel a certain sentiment or combination of sentiments, ones that often move their possessor to action.

Thus moral approval is a sentiment that is directed toward sentiments, or the dispositions to have them. He divides the virtues into those that are natural — in that our approval of them does not depend upon any cultural inventions or jointly-made social rules — and those that are artificial dependent both for their existence as character traits and for their ethical merit on the presence of conventional rules for the common good , and he gives separate accounts of the two kinds. The traits he calls natural virtues are more refined and completed forms of those human sentiments we could expect to find even in people who belonged to no society but cooperated only within small familial groups.

The traits he calls artificial virtues are the ones we need for successful im personal cooperation; our natural sentiments are too partial to give rise to these without intervention. Hume does not explicitly draw a distinction between artificial and natural virtues in the moral Enquiry. In the Treatise Hume argues in turn that the virtues of material honesty and of faithfulness to promises and contracts are artificial, not natural virtues. Both arguments fall into at least two stages: He also explains the social construction of the other artificial virtues and what social good they serve.

Hume offers a rather cryptic argument to show that our approval of material honesty must be the product of collaborative human effort convention. Therefore all actions deemed virtuous derive their goodness only from virtuous motives — motives we approve. The basis of our approval could not be specified.

For every virtue, therefore, there must be some non-moral motive that characteristically motivates actions expressive of that virtue, which motive, by eliciting our approval, makes the actions so motivated virtuous. The virtue of an action of this species would be established by its being done from this non-moral motive, and only then could an agent also or alternatively be moved so to act by her derivative concern for the virtue of the act. However, Hume observes that there is no morally approved and so virtue-bestowing , non-moral motive of honest action.

Hume offers an account of the genesis of the social convention that creates honesty with respect to property, and this is meant to cope in some way with the circularity he identifies. How it does so is a matter of interpretive controversy, as we will see. Hume next poses two questions about the rules of ownership of property and the associated virtue of material honesty: By nature human beings have many desires but are individually ill-equipped with strength, natural weapons, or natural skills to satisfy them.

We can remedy these natural defects by means of social cooperation: It occurs to people to form a society as a consequence of their experience with the small family groups into which they are born, groups united initially by sexual attraction and familial love, but in time demonstrating the many practical advantages of working together with others.

Hume argues that we create the rules of ownership of property originally in order to satisfy our avidity for possessions for ourselves and our loved ones, by linking material goods more securely to particular individuals so as to avoid conflict. Within small groups of cooperators, individuals signal to one another a willingness to conform to a simple rule: This rule will in time require more detail: This signalling is not a promise which cannot occur without another, similar convention , but an expression of conditional intention.

The usefulness of such a custom is so obvious that others will soon catch on and express a similar intention, and the rest will fall in line. The convention develops tacitly, as do conventions of language and money. When an individual within such a small society violates this rule, the others are aware of it and exclude the offender from their cooperative activities. Once the convention is in place, justice of this sort is defined as conformity with the convention, injustice as violation of it; indeed, the convention defines property rights, ownership, financial obligation, theft, and related concepts, which had no application before the convention was introduced.

So useful and obvious is this invention that human beings would not live for long in isolated family groups or in fluctuating larger groups with unstable possession of goods; their ingenuity would quickly enable them to invent property, so as to reap the substantial economic benefits of cooperation in larger groups in which there would be reliable possession of the product, and they would thus better satisfy their powerful natural greed by regulating it with rules of justice.

Greed, and more broadly, self-interest, is the motive for inventing property; but we need a further explanation why we think of justice adherence to the rules of ownership as virtuous, and injustice their violation as vicious. Hume accounts for the moralization of property as follows. As our society grows larger, we may cease to see our own property violations as a threat to the continued existence of a stable economic community, and this reduces our incentive to conform.

But when we consider violations by others, we partake by sympathy in the uneasiness these violations cause to their victims and all of society. Such disinterested uneasiness, and the concomitant pleasure we feel on contemplating the public benefits of adherence, are instances of moral disapproval and approval. We extend these feelings to our own behavior as a result of general rules. Private education assists in this further artifice.

Thus material honesty becomes a virtue. Does this account resolve the circularity problem? Is there any non-moral motive of honest action?

'Study what you love,' says Aimee Wragg

Some interpreters say yes, it is greed redirected, which removes the circle. But this presents two difficulties: Some interpret Hume as coping with the first difficulty by supposing that politicians and parents deceive us into thinking, falsely, that every individual just act advances the interests of the agent; or they claim that Hume himself mistakenly thought so, at least in the Treatise see Baron, Haakonssen, and Gauthier. Others claim that Hume identifies a non-moral motive of honest action albeit an artificial one other than redirected greed, such as a disposition to treat the rules of justice as themselves reason-giving Darwall or having a policy of conforming to the rules of justice as a system Garrett.

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Still others say there is no non-moral motive of honest action, and Hume escapes from the circle by relaxing this ostensibly universal requirement on virtuous types of behavior, limiting it to the naturally virtuous kinds. These interpreters either claim that there is no particular motive needed to evoke approval for conformity to the rules of property — mere behavior is enough Mackie — or that we approve of a motivating form of the moral sentiment itself, the sense of duty Cohon. Fidelity is the virtue of being disposed to fulfill promises and contracts. While he identifies the same circularity puzzle about the approved motive of fidelity that he tackles at length in connection with honesty, in the case of fidelity he concentrates on a different conundrum that arises with the misguided attempt to analyze fidelity as a non-conventional natural virtue.

Suppose the practice of giving and receiving promises did not depend on a socially-defined convention. In that case, what could we mean by the utterances we use to make them, and what would be the origin of our obligation to fulfill them?

Hume's Moral Philosophy

The requisite mental act or mental state, though, could not be one of mere desire or resolution to act, since it does not follow from our desiring or resolving to act that we are morally obligated to do so; nor could it be the volition to act, since that does not come into being ahead of time when we promise, but only when the time comes to act.

And of course, one can promise successfully incur obligation by promising even though one has no intention to perform; so the mental act requisite to obligation is not the intention to perform. The only likely act of mind that might be expressed in a promise is a mental act of willing to be obligated to perform the promised action, as this conforms to our common view that we bind ourselves by choosing to be bound.

But, Hume argues, it is absurd to think that one can actually bring an obligation into existence by willing to be obligated. What makes an action obligatory is that its omission is disapproved by unbiased observers. But no act of will within an agent can directly change a previously neutral act into one that provokes moral disapproval in observers even in the agent herself.

Sentiments are not subject to such voluntary control. Even on a moral rationalist view the thesis would be absurd: Thus, there is no such act of the mind.