Hume, David (1711-76) Scottish philosopher who developed a naturalist perspective on all aspects of human life. For Hume the highest good is based on the pursuit of happiness. We are personally happy when we are good to others because this leads to a harmonious social whole. Personal and social well-being go hand in hand. Morality is not based on rationality but on a desire for happiness. Reason cannot determine anything without experience and is properly understood as the “slave of passion.” Hume’s metaphysics, in particular his critique of causality, remains an important challenge to our conventional way of seeing. All we can be sure of, says Hume, is that certain events occur one after the other in a given region for a certain duration. On a billiard table, for instance, the first ball on impact appears to cause the motion of the remaining balls. But Hume says all we can truly know is that the first ball impacts and then the other balls move. We cannot prove that the first ball’s impact will always be followed by the other balls’ movement. There is no rational way to demonstrate a causal connection:
Reason can never shew us the connexion of one object with another, tho’ aided by experience, and the observation of their constant conjunction in all past instances. When the mind, therefore, passes from the idea or impression of one object to the idea or belief of another, it is not determin’d by reason, but by certain principles, which associate together the ideas of these objects, and unite them in the imagination (David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1896 ed.), SECTION VI.: Of the inference from the impression to the idea, paragraph 278).
Put differently, from prior experience we build up a series of expectations and habitual ways of interpreting observations. Hume calls these “ideas.” At first this may seem absurd. But on a quantum level of reality, physicists claim that observations of subatomic particles support the ideas of probability and simultaneity rather than linear causality. Whether it is valid to compare quantum and macroscopic realities remains open to debate, for subatomic particles arguably exist in a different arena, and behave in different ways than larger aggregate objects. And the answer to this debate might depend on one’s perspective. Or in Hume’s terms, “customs of thought.” » Atheism, Behaviorism, Mill (John Stuart), Roberts (Jane), Rousseau (Jean Jacques), Smith (Adam), Synchronicity, Unconscious, William of Ockham
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