My own position on the question of emotion is that it cannot be separated from reason. I have used Hume as a *sounding-board* below in order to present my views on the subject, mainly because I have his works handy as I write.

For ontological reasons that will be come apparent, in this piece I believe that the result of Hume’s claim that emotion [he calls it *passion*] has no representative quality is ultimately detrimental to his theory of morality.

                              Hume's ethical position might be summed up as:

PASSIONS AND WILL.

Hume's theory of mind, claims passions are impressions rather than ideas.

T2.3.2. Repudiates liberty as: “absurd and unintelligible.” Hume construes necessity as meaning the same as “constant union and conjunction of like objects,” or that together with “the inference of the mind from the one to the other”
(ibid.).

He argues that just as we mistakenly discover necessity to hold between the movements of material bodies, we discover the same necessity to hold between human motives.

Compatibilistically he agrees that we are free to oppose violence or constraint.

For Hume we have:

      Hume argues that the causal necessity of human actions is not only compatible with moral responsibility, but is requisite to it. Unless a harm is accidental - to finger an agent responsible for vandalising our property is not enough - we must impute the badness of the fleeting act to the enduring agent with the imputation that he should be punished.

The will is merely that impression we feel when we knowingly give rise to an action.

    Hume claims that: “Reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will,” and that reason alone “can never oppose passion in the direction of the will” (T 413)

He grants that reason provides information which makes a difference to the direction of the will, but reason alone cannot motivate action; the impulse to act itself must come from passion.

The “slave of the passions” argument is defended in the Treatise in three arguments for the motivational “inertia” of reason alone.

     He plays down the role of reason in the motivation of action, and that the impulse to act must come from passion and provides what I consider to be tenuous explanations for reason's lack of the compulsion to act

(A) Reasoning is Thinking – merely an ideational activity - never the actual initiator or instigator of causes and effects.

(B) Reason is ineffective in preventing or overcoming passionate compulsion.

(C) The Representation Argument is not empirical but concludes that passions, volitions and intentional actions can be neither reasonable nor unreasonable.

      I interpret this as referring to experientially developed templates or ratiocinates we have formulated in our mind. Understanding representation here as copying, Hume says a passion has no “representative quality, which renders it a copy of any other existence or modification”
(T2.3.3.5).

     In other words passionate action includes no ideational *historically internalised reasoned response* or ideational template that reason can apply to anything which appears to transgress these *interiorised models. Passionate, volitions, and emotional actions are always *one offs* so to speak, and have no content suitable for assessment by reason, upon which reason can *get a handle.*

                                            CONCLUSIONS

It is with great reluctance that I have to say that I must oppose the master in these abstractional matters of ideation and his almost Platonic attitude to such usefully fictional umbrella-words such as *reason, passion, will, understanding.* For me the brain is not a mental multiplex compartmentalised into opposing inclinations struggling for cerebral domination, but a reticulate singularity - a network of complex neurological activity which *bleeds* over its processes of mentation from one human psychological process to another.

I argue that what can sometimes be mistaken for passion is actually reasoned behaviour.

I offer an example by way of clarification.

We encounter a tough-looking individual passionately bashing the daylights out of a weaker man who is obviously in great pain and has given up any attempt to strike back.

'For God's sake man stop! Use your reason. Can't you see the man has had enough?'

To our surprise the assailant is articulate, philosophically knowledgeable and argues that he is using his reason. The supine man is a child abuser, who he just caught in the act. He reasons that due to the leniency of the courts he considers a beating will be more useful in dissuading the offender from such future activities.

'I am not enjoying doing this - in fact I find it most distasteful,' he adds. 'I regard it as a moral obligation to society to teach this man a lesson. As a matter of fact,' he continues, as he pins the man to the ground with his hobnail boot on his neck.

'Hume implied that even though our actions are deterministically influenced, and in the case of this wretch his disgusting appetites are possibly genetic in origin, that, with the exception of moral injury done by accident, when a man is judged to be morally responsible for a deliberate misdemeanour we must attribute the responsibility of the act to him and act accordingly.'

                                This is what Hume is getting at when he wrote:

      I hold that when we condemn the concerns or actions of others and characterise them as irrational and based on passion rather than reason, we are merely rejecting the results of their ratiocinated processes that may well differ greatly from our own. The young man who straps a string of explosives around his chest and pulls the cord in a crowded bus may well be acting with grim rationality in his passionate sacrifice of his own life as far as the paradigmatic reasoning processes of his religious or patriotic beliefs are concerned.

     In other words - one man's reasoned, calculated commitment is another man's irrational passion - and vice versa.

     The above illustrates that it is possible to represent passion, strong feeling or emotion and provide a well-grounded, reasoned account of it.

     I am willing to grant that in an EXTREME fit of wild passion a man might strangle his partner who he has just discovered in flagrante delicto with another man. At first glance it would appear that reason played no part in such a tragedy. But if we grant that in the moment of the initial confrontation the man reasoned that he had been terribly betrayed, and in his mind [or more usually – in his culture] such a thing was the most terrible act of immorality and harm that one person could wreak upon another, then we could conclude that the frenzied act was a combination of deterministically inspired reason and passion and in the mind of the man he had reasoned that his errant spouse deserved to die? Indeed, if he had not reasoned to take such a terrible revenge, we would be justified in concluding that he had reasoned that she be given another chance, or at least let to live with her transgression.

    In both scenarios he had, in that split second before he acted, reasoned upon a certain course of action, which for him was obviously reasonable. The reasonableness or un reasonableness of his action as reasoned by others is a matter of subjective opinion.

     If he killed her a modern court would rule that there were mitigating circumstances and that he committed the act: *whilst the balance of his mind was disturbed.* In another form of language we might conclude with Hume that passions, volitions and actions do not refer to other entities [such as the specific erring spouse] they are “original existences* or in modern terms: *antecedally internalised strongly held beliefs or obsessions.* Most countries allow conditions that "affect the balance of the mind" to be regarded as mitigating circumstances. This means that a person may be found guilty of "manslaughter" on the basis of "diminished responsibility" rather than murder, if it can be proved that the killer was suffering from a condition that affected their judgment at the time.*

It would appear from this that the law is in accord with Hume's Representation Argument, and that the legal emphasis concentrates totally upon the Crime Passionnel aspect. In my opinion that does not mean that the court or jury completely excludes reason from its conclusions. The fact of the matter is that in some sections of the public mind there exists a feeling that such transgressions of trust, such as that of an erring partner or the abuse of a child's trust by a predator deserves death, or at least a severe punishment with the implication that even if the murder was exclusively a reasoned, cold blooded act, that even that deserved a certain degree of mitigation.

In recapitulation I reluctantly oppose my hero on three counts:

(1) I believe that the severalising of human ideation into separate abstractional mental activity is an error.
(2) I hold that it is possible to represent a well-grounded, detailed, reasoned account of passion, strong feeling or emotion.
(3) I believe that to equivocate that humans are causally determined on the one hand, but are to be held to account for their actions on the other is hypocritical. Hume should have admitted the obvious, which is perfectly in keeping with his position regarding his statement that *reason is slave of the passions.”

     At he outset of this paper I mentioned that I have been forced into a welcome reassessment of my position on the question of the punishment of concatenationally engendered moral transgression which deterministically can be described as being *no fault of the transgressor – a position that formally made me feel slightly ashamed and somewhat hypocritical

      I have now realised that there is no need for guilt. One does not ascribe free choice to a concatenationally determined dog. But, if we wish to educate the animal to refrain from urinating on the floor, we need to inflict sanctions upon it for its "education" or conditioning. Hence there is no contradiction between considering that people are causal automata (deterministic mechanisms) and inflicting appropriate punishment upon people for their crimes. It is all for the better conditioning of those biological mechanisms and [utilitarianistically] society in general. Such conditioning serves the public interest, and it prevents random violence from people addicted to crime and violence. One can then square oneself with the catenulate with the fact, and if one holds to the Humean analysis of reason being a slave to the passions, reconcile determination and punishment. In this way reason reasserts itself and conditions the passions.

My [reluctant] conclusion however is that the significance of Hume’s claim that passion has no representative quality is ultimately detrimental to his theory of morality.