Professor Davis has presented an excellent interpretation of Hume's critique of moral relations and Reid's defense of a foundational moral relation between an agent and his action. According to Professor Davis, Reid proposes a moral relation which not only is a plausible account of moral judgment, but also circumvents Hume's key arguments against moral relations. My task is to show the inadequacies of Reid's account and defend Hume's assessment of moral relations.

The distinction between the moral agent and moral spectator is key to understanding Hume's account of morality and his rejection of moral relations. The moral agent is the person who performs an action (such as stealing a car), and the moral spectator is the person who approves or disapproves of the agent's action. The spectator can be either a third-party observer of an action, or a first-party participant in an action. For example, I am a third-party spectator when I disapprove of Smith stealing Jones's car. By contrast, Smith, who is the agent of the action, can also be a first-party spectator and approve or disapprove of his own action. Thus, Smith may assume both the roles of agent and spectator. For Hume, distinct psychological phenomenon are associated with the role of the agent and the role of the spectator. The key psychological phenomenon associated with the agent are the development of virtues, the sense of obligation, and the motivation to act. By contrast, the key psychological phenomenon associated with the spectator are sympathetic feelings of moral approval and disapproval, particularly feelings of pleasure and pain.

It is important to note that the basic agent-spectator distinction was common to many 18th century discussions of morality, and widely recognized. For example, Shaftesbury argues for such a division with both sense perception and moral judgments: "The Mind, which is Spectator or Auditor of other Minds, cannot be without its Eye and Ear..." (Inquiry, 1.2.3). John Bruce in his Elements of the science of ethics (1786) clearly notes the agent-spectator distinction with respect to Hutcheson's theory of morality. According to Bruce, Hutcheson

observed, that virtuous actions not only afford complacency to the actor, but excite love and esteem in the spectator, and that vicious actions have opposite tendencies and effects.(1)

Reid, in summarizing Hume's view of the moral sentiment, also recognizes this division:

As beauty is not a quality of the object, but a certain feeling of the spectator, so virtue and vice are not qualities in the persons to whom language ascribes them, but feelings of the spectator.(2)

The goal of Hume's arguments against moral rationalism in Part I of Book III is to show that the spectator's moral approval is not a judgment of reason, but is instead a feeling in the mind of the spectator. Accordingly, Hume's three arguments discussed by Professor Davis are intended to show that a spectator's moral approval is not a judgment about relations.

As Professor Davis correctly notes, Reid counters Hume by proposing a moral relation between the agent and his action. For Reid, once the agent conceives of himself and his action, a judgment concerning his duty immediately emerges from his moral faculty. The problem with Reid's suggestion is that it does not fully address the issue with which Hume is concerned: a spectator's moral approval (or disapproval) of an agent's action. Reid's theory only accounts for how an agent arrives at his own sense of duty (or obligation) in a given situation. As noted above, the agent can also be a first-party spectator to his own action. However, it is not clear that an agent's sense of duty is the same thing as his act of moral approval or disapproval (as a first-party spectator). Hume argues in several places that they cannot be the same moral phenomenon.(3) The sense of duty or obligation is the motivating force which causes the agent to act. And this motive must be present before one passes moral judgment on it as a first-party spectator. Therefore, according to Hume, the agent's motivating sense of duty cannot be identical to his moral approval (as a first-party spectator). It follows, then, that Reid's account of the agent's sense of duty in terms of moral relations cannot serve a second function as an account of first-party moral approval.

Suppose, however, that Hume is wrong in driving a wedge between the agent's sense of duty and his first-party sense of moral approval. At best, Reid's theory would only account for moral approval when the agent and spectator are the same person. This still would not account for the phenomenon of moral approval when the agent and the spectator are different people. For Reid, the function of the duty-generating mechanism is to inform only the agent of the morality of his situation. Further, much of the input data required to generate the sense of duty is privilege information, known only to the agent. For example, the input data listed by Professor Davis about the agent's self-conception, past beliefs, and past actions are inaccessible to a third-party spectator. In a brief section of his Essays on the Active Powers, Reid attempts to explain the moral approval of third-party spectators in terms of sympathy. But, his account involves only the third-party spectator's sympathetic reaction to the observable virtues or vices of an agent. There is no appeal to the duty-producing mechanism involving a relation between an agent and his action. Thus, Reid's duty-generating mechanism is neither designed for third-party moral judgments, nor could the necessary input data be accessed for third-party moral judgments.(4)

This limitation to Reid's duty-generating mechanism resurrects the problem of arboreal parricide launched by Hume. From the third-party spectator's perspective, is there a perceived relational difference between arboreal parricide and Nero killing his mother? Reid would argue that the difference lies in the willful motivations and the sense of duty which Nero has, and the young tree lacks. Hume's response would be that the contents of Nero's motivations are inaccessible to a third-party spectator. At best, the spectator will only acknowledge such motivations as the proximate cause of Nero's action. More detailed information about the nature of this cause is not available to the spectator (such as Nero's self-concept and past beliefs). Further, the young tree also has its proximate causes for overtopping its parent. Therefore, from the third-party spectator's perspective, the parallel between Nero and the young tree holds.

In summary, for two reasons Reid's account of moral relations fails as an explanation of a spectator's moral approval. First, according to Reid, the perception of moral relations is part of a psychological mechanism which produces a sense of duty in the agent. However, perceiving one's duty as an agent is not the same thing as approving or disapproving of one's action as a first-party spectator. Second, perception of the moral relation itself requires access to privileged information about the agent. But, such information would not be available to a third-party spectator.

These two problems affect only the adequacy of Reid's theory as an explanation of a spectator's moral approval (which, as noted, is the topic of concern for Hume in Book III, Part I). These two problems have no bearing, though, on whether an agent's sense of duty results from the perception of moral relations. But Hume would also criticize Reid on this latter issue. Reid would hold that the perception of moral relations is sufficient to motivate the agent to act. Hume, of course, believes that no rational perception can motivate the will to action. This, though, is a separate issue, and Professor Davis himself believes that Hume's view on this issue may be well founded.

1. John Bruce, Elements of the science of ethics (1786), pp. 68-69.

2. Thomas Reid, Essays on the active powers of man, in The Works of Thomas Reid, ed. William Hamilton (Edinburgh: Maclachlan and Stewart, 1877), Vol. II, p. 677.

3. See T 478-479, T 483, Letters of David Hume, Vol. 1, Letter 35 to Francis Hutcheson.

4. Pp. 592-594. In this section, Reid appears to believe that a spectator's moral approval is a facet of the moral faculty. Since Reid also classes the duty-producing mechanism as a facet of the moral faculty, then it seems he believed that moral approval and duty are related. However, it is not clear whether he believed that they involved the same psychological mechanism, or whether they are merely members of the same genus designated by the phrase "moral faculty."