Why Hume Sucks

David Hume is one of the most beloved philosophers among other philosophers. He is widely read and cited, and a number of views are labeled “Humean” after him. He’s one of the most frequently assigned figures in undergraduate classes, and the majority of philosophers enjoy reading him and think well of him. I think he sucks.

It’s not just that I don’t like him, or that I disagree with his views. Hobbes has many of the same bad views Hume has, but I think Hobbes is an interesting philosopher with some interesting things to say. Hume, though, just sucks. His arguments are terrible, and his approach to philosophy is one of the silliest and most obviously objectionable approaches ever. His popularity is an embarrassment to the discipline. Here, I explain the main reasons I think Hume sucks.

Hume’s Major “Discovery” is Trivial

Probably the most referred to success of Hume’s is the “is/ought gap.” The is/ought gap points out that you can’t derive a statement about how things ought to be from statements about how things are. More generally, conclusions with moral terms can’t be deduced from premises that don’t include those terms. There is, of course, and is/ought gap. There’s nothing at all interesting or important about this, though.

With a few irrelevant exceptions, it is impossible to have a term occur in the conclusion of a deductively valid argument unless it first appears in at least one premise. This isn’t surprising, or even interesting. You can’t reach new conclusions about something if you don’t know anything about it in the first place. Arguments, at their best, extend our knowledge of an issue. They never originate knowledge from nothing. Of course it is true, of any type of term, that you can’t reach conclusions about it unless you have knowledge of things in that category that didn’t depend on arguments to establish them.

For some reason, when Hume pointed out that this applied to ethical terms, people acted like he had done something brilliant, and they seem to have concluded that he had gone a long way to establishing important views about the nature of morality. This is bizarre. Anyone who understands logic should be able to prove this for any two types of claims. Statements about digestion can’t be logically deduced from statements that don’t, at the very least, tell us what digestion is. This doesn’t show something interesting about digestion. It just tells us that basic truths of logic don’t magically fail to hold once you start talking about digestion. Hume’s “discovery” is no more impressive than my “digestion/non-digestion” gap. The only interesting thing about it is the psychology of those who would think it somehow matters.

Hume Loves False Dilemmas

It’s not Hume’s fault if people give him more credit than he deserves for pointing out true things. It is his fault when he uses really crappy arguments for his views. His favorite type of argument, at least in epistemology, is the use of false dilemmas to support his skeptical views. His overall position is motivated by the claim that all knowledge consists either in impressions on the senses or relations between ideas. As a supposed empiricist, one would expect a process of identifying relatively clear cases of knowledge, and then trying to classify them appropriately. However, this is very much not what happens in his work. Instead, Hume just lays out this general principle as if it doesn’t require any support at all.

Having limited knowledge to these two types, he then proceeds to find numerous examples of apparent knowledge that don’t fall into these categories. The senses only tell us about correlation between sensation, not causation of events. Therefore, we never know that causal facts hold. Since we don’t know that these facts hold, we also can’t know that the future will resemble the past, and that the sun will come up tomorrow. So, we now have the problem of induction. The senses only tell us that experiences occur. Therefore, we don’t know that anyone is having those experiences. We now have the problem of knowing that we exist.

Does Hume reflect on the possibility that he has provided too few options? No. Instead, he just declares all knowledge that doesn’t fit neatly into his categories as suspect, and he endorses widespread skepticism. In each case, the conclusion is motivated by his false dilemma about the possible sources of knowledge. He gives no real reason to accept this false dilemma in the first place, and none of his conclusions have any merit as a result. Does he care that any decent empiricist wouldn’t follow this approach? No. Instead, he follows the rationalist method of starting with first principles he’s taken from others about the possible sources of knowledge, and discusses their implications instead of investigating the empirical question about what people actually know first. Hume isn’t just a bad philosopher, he’s a bad empiricist. Since he’s often heralded as the ideal empiricist, this is just plain sad. He doesn’t follow the method he’s supposed to emulate. He instead follows the approach of those he’s supposed to surpass.

Hume can’t Recognize reductio ad adsurdums of his Arguments

An argument counts as a reductio ad absurdum when it reaches a concussion so implausible that it should serve as a rejection of the assumptions it starts from. In math and in formal logic, this happens when an actual contradiction is reached. However, this should apply to any crazy conclusion. If adding up my expenses and deposits one month results in the conclusion that I’m a millionaire, I sadly must conclude that I screwed up, not that I should head out and buy a Ferrari. The sun will rise tomorrow. Hitting one billiard ball into another will cause the second billiard ball to move. Torturing an innocent puppy will still be wrong tomorrow, just as it was today. The lack of logical entailment has absolutely no relevance to any of this. Not all conclusions are based on deductive reasoning. Not all beliefs are based on reasoning at all, as opposed to the direct deliverance of a source of foundational knowledge, or of inductive inferences.

Hume, however, seems to think that anything that doesn’t fall into the deductive conclusions admired by philosophers must have no actual evidence in their favor at all. Any rational person who has been led to the conclusion that the sun might not come up tomorrow should realize their opinions have been shaped by assumptions that are unreliable. If you think there is good reason to doubt that the sun will rise tomorrow, it is quite certain that you have drastically misevaluated what counts as evidence. Every plan you have in the future, every belief about how others will behave tomorrow, every single opinion about the future you have presupposes that the universe won’t magically stop working in the morning. If something has led you to think otherwise, those thoughts are mistaken, not the things you know to be true. His refusal to step back and wonder if the ideas that lead to his skepticism might be mistaken is perhaps Hume’s greatest intellectual failure. It is related to and supported by the next one, though.

Hume Reveres Philosophers for No Good Reason

Relative to their time, famous philosophers were often quite good. This wasn’t true of Hume, since Thomas Reid successfully disproved basically everything Hume said while Hume was still alive. Still, on average, famous philosophical works passed thresholds of respect at the time they were written. By modern standards, though, very little that was written over 100 years ago would have a prayer of being published today. As should happen in every discipline, philosophers have gotten vastly better over time.

For some reason, though, people seem insistent on the idea that these thinkers have hidden and wonderful gems left to be unearthed. Exegesis of their work is almost religious for some philosophers. These efforts almost always, in my opinion, take the form of developing a much better version of an idea, and then pretending it was always there to be found. History of philosophy strikes me as rather odd. Who came up with an idea is irrelevant. A better idea isn’t extra-specially better just because you can convince people a famous thinker had it already.

Worse, reverence is an obstacle to success. If you think ideas deserve special respect just because of the fame of the person who had it, then when those people say something stupid or confused, people will feel compelled to pretend it doesn’t say what it obviously says. The similarities to people who spend endless time trying to make silly claims from the Bible somehow seem non-silly struck me almost instantly whenever I would read works in the history of philosophy. Even outside of that area, though, anything labeled as the idea of a famous thinker was thought thereby to be an interesting possibility. I don’t see why we should waste our time with a bad idea just because someone who was smart for their time said it. Freud’s theory of dreams is just stupid. Aristotle’s physics is, too. The fact that they also had other good ideas, and the fact that they’re both very smart, doesn’t change this.

This applies to Hume because Hume constantly takes the opinion of philosophers to be obviously and vastly better than those of the “vulgar.” He describes the view that we can see objects as a view “destroyed by the slightest philosophy.” He thinks that any rational person should admit that they ought to agree with Barkley’s idealism, even though they are doomed to reject it once they enter the real world. He takes the fact that no one can seriously believe the results of these philosophers’ “reason” as evidence that we’re doomed, irrational animals, rather than as evidence that those philosophers screwed up. The absurd arrogance and reverence for his colleges required for this is hard to fathom. He, and those he loves, ask “who are you going to believe, us or your own lying eyes?” He literally expects all rational people to choose them. That’s insane. Humans screw up. Intelligence doesn’t change that. In fact, since intelligence encourages us to consider difficult issues more often, smart people screw up more often, not less. Reverence for the views of intelligent people is not only unjustified, it is contrary to reason. Smart people are usually wrong whenever they say something new. They’re almost always wrong when they say something that sounds crazy. The insanity of respecting their views so much that you would deny the evidence of your own eyes rather than reject those views is something only blind worshipers could feel good about. Reverence is irrational and immoral. We’re all human, and no one deserves to be treated like they aren’t, no matter how smart they are.

Hume is a Smug Twerp

Okay, this isn’t really about his philosophical skills. It’s just a major reason I don’t like him. Hume often writes as if he is doing masterful work destroying the illusions of others to force them to see the emptiness of their views. He positively revels in his superiority to the “vulgar” masses, who maintain their crude judgments. If he was right about most things, this would just make him an asshole. Since he isn’t, this makes him a smug twerp. He enjoys the feeling of superiority and special access to the truth common of conspiracy theorists, and of partisans. He enjoys the thought of sowing discomfort in others. He likes preening and feeling special, even when he isn’t. He quite literally makes me sick.

I think it says something pretty horrible about philosophers that they like him so much. A majority of people I have talked to who like him started liking him due to his work in philosophy of religion. His work there is probably the most reasonable, and the least subject to the issues I’ve raised here (except for the smug twerp one). I don’t really think there’s anything original or interesting in most of his writings there. His objections to religion typically consist of well-known objections. All that is unusual is that he accepts these objections rather than rejecting them. A number of people who talk about his work, though, encountered it very early on in their studies, and they mostly describe the feeling they got from this as one of vindication. Hume made them feel good about being atheists, and gave them the praise they had always sought for beliefs others had often criticized them for.

I guess it’s good that smart, frequently justifiably annoyed kids felt better about themselves after reading Hume. The attitude it supported, though, isn’t good. There are a large number of interesting questions that deserve honest and serious consideration. These include questions about the nature of reality, and about how it came to be the way it is. Being shut off to all such discussions because you’re somehow certain you already know the answer to them is silly.

Hume marks the beginning of the smug, dogmatic scientism that has corrupted philosophy for hundreds of years now. Hume isn’t just a smug twerp, he’s the cause of smug-twerp-osity in others. Scientism isn’t just false, it’s an outrageous purity test on perfectly legitimate possibilities that philosophers dislike for bad reasons. There’s no way smart apes on a tiny, random planet can answer the most fundamental questions of reality by feeling annoyed about a particular religion that was pushed on them while they were teenagers. The pretense to knowledge about the true nature of reality that Hume encouraged in people is, in my opinion, the largest irrational point of faith that stands in the way of doing good philosophy in these areas. Of course our religions are false. We’re limited apes on a random planet in the middle of a vast universe. That doesn’t mean the extreme opposite must be the truth. And when people think a philosopher as bad as Hume has done worthwhile work just because he creates well-known excuses for rejecting beliefs that they don’t like, it’s tragic. Hume sucks. Philosophers should stop pretending otherwise. This might help make them able to honestly address questions philosophers are supposed to care about.