Was Philosopher David Hume the Foremost Enemy of Liberty?

At the libertarian think-tank Cato Institute, David Boaz ranks David Hume as one of the five major contributors to modern libertarianism, by which Boaz means a philosophy supportive of individualism.

Cato Institute ranks David Hume as one of the five major contributors to modern libertarianism and yet, Hume, properly understood, may well have been liberty’s worst enemy.

And yet, Hume, properly understood, may well have been liberty’s worst enemy. Ayn Rand and many other scholars blame Immanuel Kant for killing the Enlightenment. Kant is the founder of what I call the German anti-Enlightenment movement. However, Hume may have been as responsible for killing the Enlightenment, or more so than Kant, partly because his arguments are easier to understand and propagate in the culture.

The Enlightenment was a philosophical movement which dominated the world of ideas in Europe in the 18th century. The principal goals of Enlightenment thinkers were individual liberty, scientific and industrial progress, and secular reason, thus ending the monopoly of the church and state on ethics and social order. It was the Enlightenment that blessed individualism.

Hume may have been as responsible for killing the Enlightenment, or more so than Kant, partly because his arguments are easier to understand and propagate in the culture.

Hume is part of what I call the Scottish anti-Enlightenment. Francis Hutcheson is usually considered the father of the Scottish anti-Enlightenment, but Hume became its most powerful advocate.

Hume’s arguments were couched in three principles that attack the core of the Enlightenment:

1) Skepticism of causation (as though events were causeless or random),

2) Skepticism of induction (as a process that could create new knowledge), and

3) The “is-ought” attack on ethics (which was the denial that what is could ever be reconciled to what ought to be; in other words, a denial that ethics {the ought} could be derived from the is).

Rand focused on the third problem. She asserted, “The fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do,” thereby reversing the onus from one of reconciliation to one of necessity.

The first two arguments are actually interrelated for Hume. He was grappling with the problem that for deductive syllogisms to be true, the premise statements must be true. But how do we arrive at the premise concepts? The classical example is:

1. All men are mortal.
2. Socrates is a man.
3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal

For Hume this syllogism raises the issue: How do we know that all men are mortal? We have not met all men, all men who have lived have not died, and how do we know that the future will be like the past?

Hume realized that all abstract statements, indeed, all concepts, must start with individual perceptions or instances, unless god or someone gives us a tablet with all the abstractions. But how do we go from particular instances to an abstraction? For example, from “all the people I know are mortal” to “all men are mortal”? This is a question of induction. Hume realized for induction to be true, we must assume that cause and effect exist and are knowable.

However, Hume did not see any justification for our confidence that cause and effect exist or are knowable via theorizing and the building of causal models. Hume saw cause and effect only in terms of pattern recognition, which at best has a probabilistic certainty. Thus, Hume’s skepticism about induction and causal relationships led him to believe that the two are intimately interconnected.

Hume ignores the law of identity in his arguments. That is, at least in part, how I think Rand and Aristotle would respond to Hume. A thing is what it is and, therefore, it has certain properties. If a thing changes, then we know that something caused it to change. Otherwise it would violate the law of identity. Perhaps Hume’s response would be to attack the law of identity. However, this would be an extraordinary claim and so require extraordinary evidence.^[1]

Hume illustrates his ideas on the lack of causality using billiard balls. This is how Wikipedia explains it:

For example, when one thinks of “a billiard ball moving in a straight line toward another”, one can conceive that the first ball bounces back with the second ball remaining at rest, the first ball stops and the second ball moves, or the first ball jumps over the second, etc. There is no reason to conclude any of these possibilities over the others.

This example shows that Hume is ignoring the law of identity.^[2] For instance, the first ball cannot jump over the second ball without violating the law of identity.^[3] Billiard balls do not jump for no reason. The same is true of the first ball bouncing back and the second ball staying in place. A billiard ball moves when struck.

Hume was either profoundly ignorant or had an agenda to attack the Enlightenment.

A famous example to illustrate Hume’s attack on induction is the black swan scenario. In this scenario you observe one hundred swans and they are all white. Thus, you infer (induce) that all swans are white. The next day you see a black swan. This is essentially what Hume thinks that scientists are doing.

Hume made this argument about 50 years after Isaac Newton’s Principia. I think this shows that Hume was either profoundly ignorant or had an agenda to attack the Enlightenment. Newton’s laws of mechanics and gravity had overwhelmingly revealed the power of science and reason, and, therefore, induction, but Hume chose to reject them. Hume did not even come close to meeting his burden of proof in this argument.

The swan example shows another flaw in Hume’s argument. Hume has made an inference based on an accidental cause. I consider this an intellectually dishonest argument. Some eggs are white, some clouds are white, some paper is white, some flowers are white, and so are some other birds. Drawing the conclusion that all swans are white is to focus on an accidental cause of relations, as Aristotle would point out. (Most humans are within a certain height range, but that would be no reason to define humans as being taller than 4.5 feet or shorter than 6.5 feet.) Hume in this example ignores what is an important or causal feature of swans for a trivial feature. This is worthy of a side show magician and it is not serious philosophy or science.

Color is not part of the identity that makes a swan a swan. Induction works when it’s associated with a causal model. Hume, being skeptical of causation as we mentioned earlier, simply gives up on induction as a means of acquiring knowledge.
 

Perfect knowledge

There is another form of error made by people who argue along the lines of Hume. This method was used to attack Newton’s ideas on gravity. People argued that Newton had failed to explain why masses have gravity or how gravity works at a distance. Therefore, they rejected all of Newton’s ideas on gravity. The criticism is fair, but the conclusion is not. In fact, Newton acknowledged this was a problem, but that did not mean he had not contributed enormously to the understanding of gravity.

People argued that Newton had failed to explain why masses have gravity or how gravity works at a distance. Therefore, they rejected all of Newton’s ideas on gravity. The criticism is fair, but the conclusion is not.

The “perfect knowledge” argument is that if you do not know everything with perfect precision, then you do not know anything. The only way to you can meet this definition of knowledge is to be omniscient, which is metaphysically impossible. Thus, a false hurdle is set up by establishing a standard for knowledge that can never be met.

Rand’s response would be that perfect knowledge proponents are using the wrong definition of knowledge.

“Knowledge” is . . . a mental grasp of a fact(s) of reality, reached either by perceptual observation or by a process of reason based on perceptual observation.^[4]

A related attack on knowledge is to ignore its context and then show it does not work outside of that context.

Knowledge is contextual . . . By “context” we mean the sum of cognitive elements conditioning the acquisition, validity or application of any item of human knowledge.^[5]

In the case of Newton, his mechanics are correct within the context in which the knowledge was developed. There are areas (context) where Newtonian mechanics is not correct. All this proves is that Newton was not omniscient, not that “he got it all wrong.”
 

Probabilistic knowledge

One of the proposed solutions to Hume, as suggested by Hume himself, is that knowledge is probabilistic.^[6] Karl Popper is probably the best known advocate of this idea. This idea as applied to the black swan case above would be that the more swans we see, the more certain we are that all swans are white, although we never know for sure. Thus, we never know anything and scientific theories are never true; they have just not been proven incorrect yet.

This idea has become quite popular in the scientific community. However, probabilistic knowledge ignores the law of identity. Probability is built on the law of identity.^[7] Probability theory was developed to understand the odds in games of chance. For instance, what is the probability that a die, when rolled, will land on a six? If we rolled a die and the position of the numbers could change without cause (that is, the die could violate the law of identity), then probability theory would not work. In order to determine the probability of the die being six when rolled, we first determine all the possible outcomes (law of identity) and then we determine how many of these are a six.

Probability also does not defy causation. It assumes that we do not know the initial conditions and the initial conditions are random. If we know the initial conditions, then we can use Newtonian mechanics to determine exactly which number will appear on the die when we roll it.

Now, some people will counter that is not true since we don’t know if a fly will land on the die or an asteroid will land on us just as the die is thrown. This is context dropping, which was discussed above.

The probabilistic hypothesis of knowledge shows a lack of understanding of the law of identity. The attributes that make up a swan allow for the feathers to be black; finding a black swan does not negate our biological model of what a swan is. And, if there were biological differences, the discovery is one of a new species or sub-species. Knowledge is gained by building a model of causality and testing it with observations.
 

Why Does This Matter?

David Hume is still highly influential today. For instance, his “is-ought” argument underpins the moral and cultural relativism present today. His attack on causality shows up in Karl Popper’s ideas that all knowledge is probabilistic and we can never know anything. This leads to today’s modern cynicism. It also is the basis of the environmentalists’ so-called “precautionary principle.”

Hume’s attack on causation allows Keynesians to maintain that consumption causes production (rather than the other way around) and proponents of modern economics to maintain that production is more important than invention or capital is what causes inventions. It also makes possible Obama’s “You didn’t build that.”

Confusing cause and effect is the source of numerous errors that lead to real problems in the real world. For instance, are increasing levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere the cause or the result of increasing temperatures on Earth?

What is disturbing is that Hume wrote these ideas after Locke, Bacon, Newton, Galileo, and Robert Boyle. The philosophy of science regressed because of Hume. In my opinion, Hume and his non-continental followers have not been given the scrutiny they deserve.

Hume in fact deserves at least equal billing with Kant for the ignominy of killing the Enlightenment and the resulting human suffering. Hume is one of the philosophical fathers of modern cynicism, unscientific environmentalism, and arbitrary social sciences.

^[1] Thomas Paine

^[2] To some extent Hume’s “is-ought” argument also ignores the law of identity.

^[3] This is true notwithstanding the nonsense of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.

^[4] Ayn Rand Lexicon, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology “Concepts of Consciousness,” Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 35

^[5] Ayn Rand Lexicon, Leonard Peikoff, The Philosophy of Objectivism lecture series, Lecture 5

^[6] This is an easy trap to fall into and one that the author has made.

^[7] This is true notwithstanding the nonsense of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Related Posts:

1. Ayn Rand, Aristotle, and the Ethics of Flourishing
2. Why So Negative, Miss Rand?
3. Perfecting Ayn Rand’s Egoism: Setting the Record Straight

   

About the Author: Dale B. Halling

Dale B. Halling is a software developer with a BSEE, an MS in Physics, and a JD. He is the author of The Decline and Fall of the American Entrepreneur: How Little Known Laws and Regulations are Killing Innovation and the Source of Economic Growth. He is the coauthor of the novels Pendulum of Justice and Trails of Injustice. Dale B. Halling is also a named inventor on nine patents.