A DEFENSE OF HUMEAN PROPERTY THEORY

ABSTRACT Two rival approaches to property rights dominate contemporary political philosophy: Lockean natural rights and egalitarian theories of distributive justice. This article defends a third approach, which can be traced to the work of David Hume. Unlike Lockean rights, Humean property rights are not grounded in pre-institutional moral entitlements. In contrast to the egalitarian approach, which begins with highly abstract principles of distributive justice, Humean theory starts with simple property conventions and shows how more complex institutions can be justified against a background of settled property rights. Property rights allow people to coordinate their use of scarce resources. For property rules to serve this function effectively, certain questions must be considered settled. Treating existing property entitlements as having prima facie validity facilitates cooperation between people who disagree about distributive justice. Lockean and egalitarian theories endorse moral claims that threaten to unsettle property conventions and undermine social cooperation.

Colloquium 2 How to Argue about Aristotle about Practical Reason

In this paper, I consider Aristotle’s views in relation to the Humean theory of motivation (HTM). I distinguish three principles which HTM is committed to: the ‘No Besires’ principle, the ‘Motivation Out—Desire In’ principle, and the ‘Desire Out—Desire In’ principle. To reject HTM, one only needs to reject one of these principles. I argue that while it is plausible to think that Aristotle accepts the first two principles, there are some grounds for thinking that he might reject the third.

Colloquium 2 Commentary on Pearson

The Humean interpretation of Aristotle takes him to say that the goals of action are ultimately specified by desire. The Combo interpretation takes Aristotle to say that the goals of action are ultimately specified, sometimes by reason, other times by desire, and yet other times by both. I agree with Pearson that there are passages supporting each side and that the passages Pearson introduces into the debate support the Combo interpretation. To further support the Combo interpretation, I identify four features that Humeans want in a moral theory, and then show that a Humean interpretation of the passages bearing directly on the debate blocks the attribution of these features to Aristotle. A Humean interpretation may produce an Aristotle who is technically Humean, but this Aristotle will not accept the doctrines that make a Humean theory of motivation attractive to Humeans in the first place.

Humean replies to Regard for Reason

First, I argue that the Humean theory is compatible with the commonsense psychological explanations May invokes against it. Second, I explain why desire provides better-integrated explanations than the mental states May describes as sharing its effects. Third, I defend individuating processes by relata, which May rejects in arguing that anti-Humean views are as parsimonious as the Humean theory.

What the Humean Theory of Motivation Gets Wrong

I show that defenses of the Humean theory of motivation (HTM) often rely on a mistaken assumption. They assume that desires are necessary conditions for being motivated to act because desires (and other non-cognitive states) themselves have a special, essential, necessary feature, such as their world-to-mind direction of fit, that enables them to motivate. Call this the Desire-Necessity Claim. Beliefs (and other cognitive states) cannot have this feature, so they cannot motivate. Or so the story goes. I show that: (a) when pressed, a proponent of HTM encounters a series of prima facie counterexamples to this Claim; and (b) the set of claims that seem to naturally complement the Desire-Necessity Claim as well as provide successful responses to these counterexamples turn out to deny the truth of this same claim. As a result, the Humean implicitly grants that it is at least equally plausible, if not more plausible, to claim that desires are not able to motivate in virtue of what they necessarily possess. Instead, desires contingently possess features that enable them to motivate.

Freeing Reason from Desire

The previous chapter showed that our beliefs about which actions we ought to perform frequently have an effect on what we do. But Humean theories, holding that all motivation has its source in desire, insist on connecting such beliefs with an antecedent motive. However, reason needn’t be a slave to the passions. We can allow moral (or normative) beliefs a more independent role to generate intrinsic desires by developing an anti-Humeanism (distinct from internalism) that is empirically sound. Since an anti-Humean theory provides perfectly ordinary and intelligible explanations of actions, Humeans have a burden to justify a more restrictive account. However, they cannot discharge this burden on empirical grounds, whether by appealing to research on neurological disorders (acquired sociopathy, Parkinson’s, and Tourette’s), the psychological properties of desire, or the scientific virtue of parsimony.