by a "false sensation of liberty": when deliberating about our own actions, there is "a certain looseness" to the will, so that we can easily produce an "image or faint motion" for each alternative course of action. Thus, we end up convinced that we really could have acted differently, even though "a spectator can commonly infer our actions from our motives and character". Finally, we mistakenly think necessity poses a threat to moral responsibility, and is therefore "dangerous... to religion and morality". After noting that being dangerous is not the same as being false, Hume recalls that his "necessity" is a very attenuated one: there is nothing dangerous or even controversial about saying that constant conjunction and causal inference apply to human action as well as physical objects. He then attempts to turn the tables on his opponents, arguing that necessity is in fact "essential" to moral responsibility: the rewards and punishments of human law would be pointless if human action were not regular and uniform, and divine punishment would be unjust if a person's actions were a matter of sheer chance, lacking any causal connection to the person's psychology, and revealing nothing about the person's character. Thus, the threat to moral responsibility comes not from necessity, but from indeterministic liberty. Sections 3–8 Hume then passes from the will itself to the motivational factors that determine voluntary actions. Against the traditional view that reason and the passions frequently come into motivational conflict, Hume argues that reason is incapable of opposing the passions, and that the passions cannot run contrary to reason. First, reason alone cannot motivate us—it can only perform demonstrative or causal reasoning. And since abstract demonstrations influence us only by directing causal reasoning (e.g., doing math to pay your debts), and causal reasoning influences us only by directing preexisting motives (e.g., figuring out how to make the food you want), reason itself cannot bring about any motivation. And this in turn means it cannot counteract or regulate the passions: on the contrary, "[r]eason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions". Second, passions cannot be in agreement or disagreement with reason: for this is a matter of the agreement or disagreement between an idea and the object it represents, and passions do not represent anything else. Thus Hume notoriously writes: "'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the