An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals by David Hume An exploration of where our sense of right and wrong comes from.
What's it about?
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) is a revolutionary guide to moral philosophy based on human nature and sentiment. It’s refined from Hume’s earlier work, which established a naturalistic foundation for ethics that would challenge religious authorities. This work went on to influence the Enlightenment – and reshaped philosophical thinking for centuries to come.
Step into the cobblestone streets of 18th century Edinburgh, Scotland – a city so vibrant with intellectual energy it earned the nickname “Athens of the North.” Here, amid coffee houses buzzing with debate and university halls crackling with new ideas, David Hume developed a theory of morality that would challenge centuries of philosophical thought.
At the height of the Scottish Enlightenment, Hume published An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, refining ideas he had first explored decades earlier in his Treatise of Human Nature. While the earlier Treatise had been largely ignored, this more accessible work – which Hume himself considered his finest – would go on to transform Western thinking about ethics.
When philosophers and theologians across Europe located morality in divine commands or abstract reasoning, Edinburgh's foremost skeptic made the revolutionary claim: our moral judgments arise primarily from sentiment – from feeling, rather than thinking.
But if morality stems from sentiment rather than reason, what becomes of religious authority? Locating morality within human nature, instead of religion or rationality, set in motion ideas that would shape philosophy for centuries to come.
Hume developed insights that would eventually influence fields from psychology to economics. But it all began with a deceptively straightforward observation about human nature that continues to challenge how we understand morality today. To find out what, let’s now dive straight in to Hume’s remarkable vision.
At the center of David Hume's moral philosophy lies a bold and, for his time, radical claim: that moral judgments do not come from logic or reason, but from sentiment or feeling. He observed that pure reasoning, as powerful as it might be in other domains, simply cannot motivate human action on its own. You might reason endlessly about facts, but facts by themselves don’t tell you what you ought to do. This insight led to what philosophers now call the is-ought problem.
Indeed, Hume noted that a great many thinkers before him routinely made precisely this unwarranted leap: they would move from describing how things are in the world, to claiming how things ought to be, all without proper justification. He saw this as a fundamental error in moral reasoning. For him, moral distinctions are not derived from some abstract, rational thought. Instead, they emerge from moral sentiments that exist naturally within all humans.
How does this look in practice? Well, say you approve of someone’s action, or maybe a character trait. Hume explains that this approval comes from a feeling, not a logical deduction. Reason can inform you about facts and relationships, but ultimately, moral judgments are grounded in your sentiments.
This does not mean that Hume believed moral judgments are entirely personal or arbitrary, however. Far from it. Hume strongly believed human nature includes common sentiments that create shared moral feelings across humanity. These shared feelings make morality possible as a social phenomenon, rather than just an individual preference.
This view directly challenged the rationalist approaches to ethics that were dominant in European philosophy at the time. Most thinkers before Hume assumed that virtue must be based on rational principles that transcended human feelings. Hume reversed this perspective, grounding morality both in human nature, and our human capacity for feeling.
By placing sentiment at the foundation of morality, Hume created a pioneering naturalistic ethical theory. His approach explained moral judgments as natural human responses rather than conformity to abstract, rational principles or divine commands. This naturalistic view would influence numerous later philosophers in profound ways, sparking new avenues of ethical inquiry.
Central to Hume's moral theory is the concept of sympathy, a multifaceted capacity that allows humans to share and respond to the feelings of others. Sympathy, for Hume, is not merely feeling sorry for someone. Instead, it represents our fundamental ability to resonate with other people's emotions, both their joys and their sorrows.
Hume observed that humans naturally mirror the emotions they witness in others. When you see someone in pain, you feel a version of that pain yourself. Similarly, when you witness joy, you experience a similar, pleasant feeling. It’s quite remarkable that this observation was supported by research in neuroscience nearly 250 years later In 1992, when neuroscientists led by Giacomo Rizzolatti at the University of Parma discovered mirror neurons – brain cells that activate both when you perform an action, and when you observe someone else performing that very same action. This discovery provided a potential neurological basis for Hume’s earlier insight.
But for Hume, sympathy extends beyond this kind of automatic mirroring. It involves your imagination actively working to place yourself in another's position, to truly see the world from their vantage point. It operates through what he called associative principles – these essentially convert your idea of another's passion into an actual feeling. This process is influenced by factors like proximity, similarity, and familiarity with the other person. In other words, the closer you are, or the more like you they seem, the easier it is to sympathize.
This capacity for sympathy serves as the foundation for our moral judgments. When you observe an action that brings happiness to others, your natural sympathy with their pleasure leads you to approve of that action. Traits like benevolence and generosity produce happiness in those who receive their benefits. Through sympathy, you share in this happiness and thus approve of these qualities, considering them virtuous.
For Hume, moral judgments are remarkably social in nature. They depend on your ability to step outside your immediate self-interest and share in the feelings of the broader community. The more similar someone is to you, the easier this sympathetic process becomes, explaining why humans often feel stronger moral obligations to those closer to them, like family and friends.
Yet Hume recognized that humans can extend sympathy far beyond their immediate connections. Through conversation, education, and the influence of shared customs, your capacity for sympathy can grow to encompass increasingly diverse groups of people. This expansion represents moral progress not just for individuals but for entire societies.
By grounding morality in this rich concept of sympathy, Hume provided an account of ethics that arises naturally from human emotional capacities that everyone possesses.
While Hume grounded morality in individual human sentiments, he understood that these sentiments operate within a broader social context. Your moral feelings do not exist in isolation, but are shaped by and expressed through your interactions with others in society.
The sympathy you feel toward others naturally extends beyond immediate personal connections to encompass wider social circles. Hume observed that humans live in communities, and our moral judgments inescapably reflect this fundamentally social existence. Your approval or disapproval of actions is influenced by considering their effects not just on specific individuals but on society as a whole.
This social dimension of sympathy explains why humans across different cultures tend to approve of qualities that benefit their communities. When you witness an act of justice, generosity, or kindness that helps many people, your sympathetic response is amplified by the combined happiness of all those affected. This creates a powerful sentiment of approval toward actions that promote social welfare.
Hume noted that your moral judgments often transcend your own personal interests. You can approve of virtuous acts that do not benefit you directly, and even approve of virtuous people who lived long ago or in distant lands. This demonstrates that moral sentiments naturally expand beyond self-interest to consider the interests of humanity more broadly.
Your capacity for sympathy allows you to adopt what Hume called a general point of view. This means stepping back from your immediate personal perspective to consider how actions and character traits affect everyone in society. This general viewpoint creates more stable and consistent moral judgments than if each person relied solely on their fleeting, immediate personal reactions.
The social nature of sympathy also helps correct for biases in your moral judgments. Through conversation and interaction with others, you learn to adjust your initial reactions and develop more impartial assessments. In this sense, society itself becomes a corrective mechanism for individual moral sentiments, guiding us toward more thoughtful and widely accepted evaluations.
Hume believed that moral progress occurs as societies develop institutions and practices that more effectively align individual interests with the common good. As communities grow larger and more complex, they create systems of justice, property, and governance. These systems, in turn, help to transform natural sympathy into sustainable social cooperation, forming the bedrock of a flourishing society.
This social understanding of sympathy therefore creates the foundation for Hume's views on utility and the common good. It effectively shows how individual moral sentiments naturally evolve into concern for collective welfare and social harmony.
Building on his understanding of sympathy and its social dimensions, Hume developed a sophisticated theory about utility and its vital relation to moral approval. For Hume, utility refers to the usefulness or tendency of actions and character traits to promote happiness and prevent misery, not just for individuals but for society as a whole.
This connection between utility and moral approval appears remarkably consistent across different cultures and historical periods. Qualities like benevolence, fidelity, and honesty receive universal praise largely because they promote social welfare. So, even when you examine supposedly diverse moral systems, Hume believed you would find this shared foundation of utility underneath any surface differences.
Importantly, Hume did not see utility as a cold, calculating principle. Instead, he viewed it as intimately connected with sentiment. You approve of useful qualities because your sympathy allows you to feel pleasure when witnessing benefits to others. This emotional response, then, is what truly grounds your moral judgments about utility.
Hume distinguished between natural virtues like benevolence, which directly produce happiness, and artificial virtues like justice, which benefit society through more indirect means. Natural virtues create immediate positive effects that anyone can appreciate through sympathy. Artificial virtues, by contrast, require social conventions and longer-term perspectives to fully recognize their utility.
Your appreciation of utility also extends beyond your immediate circle. Through education and social interaction, you learn to value qualities that benefit humanity broadly, even when those benefits do not directly affect you. This expansion of moral concern reflects the development of a more refined and impartial moral sentiment.
Hume's emphasis on utility as a foundation for moral judgment later influenced utilitarian philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. However, unlike some later utilitarians, Hume never reduced morality to a simple mathematical calculation of pleasure and pain. For him, utility remained firmly grounded in human sentiment and sympathy, preserving the emotional core of moral judgment.
By connecting utility to sympathy, Hume created a moral theory that explains how individual moral sentiments naturally align with the common good. This approach provided a thoroughly humanistic foundation for ethics without appealing to divine command or abstract rational principles.
One of Hume's most original contributions to moral philosophy was his analysis of justice as an artificial virtue. Unlike natural virtues like benevolence or compassion, which arise spontaneously from human sentiment, Hume argued that justice emerges through social convention and agreement.
For Hume, justice primarily concerns rules about property, contracts, and promises. These rules do not spring directly from sentiments. Indeed, if you probe your immediate emotional reactions, you might not feel natural approval toward abstract principles of property rights or contract enforcement. Instead, these principles developed because humans gradually recognized the overall utility of social cooperation over time.
Justice also becomes necessary under specific conditions of human existence. Where resources are limited, human generosity can become restricted, and people naturally favor their own interests and those of their close associates. In a hypothetical world of unlimited abundance or perfect benevolence, strict rules of justice might be unnecessary. Given actual human circumstances that vary over time, justice serves as an evolving framework for peaceful coexistence.
Justice evolves through social experience. As societies develop, people discover that certain arrangements of property and promise-keeping benefit everyone in the long run. Your natural sympathy allows you to appreciate these collective benefits, even when following rules of justice might occasionally conflict with your immediate interests.
Though artificial in origin, justice becomes deeply integrated into moral sentiment over time. Through education and social reinforcement, you develop genuine feelings of approval toward just actions and disapproval toward unjust ones. Justice thus becomes "naturalized" in human moral psychology, even though it began as an artificial construction. It starts to feel like second nature.
Hume noted that rules of justice do vary somewhat across societies and historical periods, reflecting different circumstances and needs. However, all functional systems of justice share the fundamental purpose of securing social cooperation. This explains why certain basic elements of justice appear across diverse cultures, despite variations in specific rules.
The artificial nature of justice does not make it any less important than natural virtues, however. In fact, Hume considered justice absolutely essential for any functioning society. Without the stability provided by rules of property and promise-keeping, social cooperation would collapse, and human flourishing would be all but impossible.
By analyzing justice as artificial but essential, Hume provided valuable insight into how moral systems evolve to meet human needs. This perspective allows us to understand both the universal aspects of justice, and its adaptability across different social contexts, without appealing to abstract rational principles or divine law.
While many moral philosophers focus on abstract rules or individual actions, Hume placed significant emphasis on character traits and virtues. For him, moral evaluation primarily concerns the qualities of a person's character, rather than just their isolated acts. When you make moral judgments, you are typically assessing what kind of person someone is, not merely what they have done in a particular circumstance.
Hume believed that virtues are those character traits that evoke approval from moral sentiments. These traits fall into four main categories based on their effects: traits useful to others, traits useful to the person possessing them, traits immediately agreeable to others, and traits immediately agreeable to the person possessing them. This classification shows how Hume integrated both utility and sentiment in his account of virtue.
Traits useful to others include benevolence, justice, and fidelity. You naturally approve of these qualities because your sympathy allows you to share in the happiness they produce for society. Traits useful to the person possessing them include prudence, industry, and frugality. You approve of these because sympathetic concern extends to the welfare of the individual as well as to society.
Traits immediately agreeable to others include wit, eloquence, and modesty. These traits produce immediate pleasure in those who interact with the person possessing them. Traits immediately agreeable to the person possessing them include cheerfulness and self-esteem. These create a pleasant character for the individual, which in turn affects their interactions with others.
Unlike some virtue ethicists, Hume did not believe in a single, unified vision of human excellence. Instead, he recognized a plurality of valuable character traits that contribute to individual and social flourishing in different ways. This pluralistic approach allows for diversity in virtuous character, while maintaining that certain fundamental traits deserve universal approval.
By focusing on character and virtues, Hume provided an account of morality that goes beyond actions. His approach emphasizes the development of a virtuous character through habit, education, and social interaction. Moral improvement involves cultivating those traits that produce benefits for yourself and others, guided by an increasingly refined and impartial moral sentiment.
This naturalistic account of virtue connects individual character development with broader social welfare, showing how personal excellence and public utility naturally align through the operation of sympathy and the moral sentiments.
In this lesson to An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals by David Hume, you’ve learned that Hume revolutionized moral philosophy by locating ethics in human sentiment rather than abstract reason or divine command.
His work made morality accessible to everyone with the capacity for sympathy. Through his naturalistic approach, Hume argued that moral judgments arise from our shared emotional responses to actions that promote happiness and welfare, both for individuals and society. He distinguished between natural virtues like benevolence that emerge spontaneously from sentiment, and artificial virtues like justice that develop through social convention to serve human needs. Grounding morality in human nature while acknowledging the role of utility and social context, Hume created an ethical framework that explains both universal moral tendencies and cultural variations over time.
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) is a revolutionary guide to moral philosophy based on human nature and sentiment. It’s refined from Hume’s earlier work, which established a naturalistic foundation for ethics that would challenge religious authorities. This work went on to influence the Enlightenment – and reshaped philosophical thinking for centuries to come.
Step into the cobblestone streets of 18th century Edinburgh, Scotland – a city so vibrant with intellectual energy it earned the nickname “Athens of the North.” Here, amid coffee houses buzzing with debate and university halls crackling with new ideas, David Hume developed a theory of morality that would challenge centuries of philosophical thought.
At the height of the Scottish Enlightenment, Hume published An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, refining ideas he had first explored decades earlier in his Treatise of Human Nature. While the earlier Treatise had been largely ignored, this more accessible work – which Hume himself considered his finest – would go on to transform Western thinking about ethics.
When philosophers and theologians across Europe located morality in divine commands or abstract reasoning, Edinburgh's foremost skeptic made the revolutionary claim: our moral judgments arise primarily from sentiment – from feeling, rather than thinking.
But if morality stems from sentiment rather than reason, what becomes of religious authority? Locating morality within human nature, instead of religion or rationality, set in motion ideas that would shape philosophy for centuries to come.
Hume developed insights that would eventually influence fields from psychology to economics. But it all began with a deceptively straightforward observation about human nature that continues to challenge how we understand morality today. To find out what, let’s now dive straight in to Hume’s remarkable vision.
At the center of David Hume's moral philosophy lies a bold and, for his time, radical claim: that moral judgments do not come from logic or reason, but from sentiment or feeling. He observed that pure reasoning, as powerful as it might be in other domains, simply cannot motivate human action on its own. You might reason endlessly about facts, but facts by themselves don’t tell you what you ought to do. This insight led to what philosophers now call the is-ought problem.
Indeed, Hume noted that a great many thinkers before him routinely made precisely this unwarranted leap: they would move from describing how things are in the world, to claiming how things ought to be, all without proper justification. He saw this as a fundamental error in moral reasoning. For him, moral distinctions are not derived from some abstract, rational thought. Instead, they emerge from moral sentiments that exist naturally within all humans.
How does this look in practice? Well, say you approve of someone’s action, or maybe a character trait. Hume explains that this approval comes from a feeling, not a logical deduction. Reason can inform you about facts and relationships, but ultimately, moral judgments are grounded in your sentiments.
This does not mean that Hume believed moral judgments are entirely personal or arbitrary, however. Far from it. Hume strongly believed human nature includes common sentiments that create shared moral feelings across humanity. These shared feelings make morality possible as a social phenomenon, rather than just an individual preference.
This view directly challenged the rationalist approaches to ethics that were dominant in European philosophy at the time. Most thinkers before Hume assumed that virtue must be based on rational principles that transcended human feelings. Hume reversed this perspective, grounding morality both in human nature, and our human capacity for feeling.
By placing sentiment at the foundation of morality, Hume created a pioneering naturalistic ethical theory. His approach explained moral judgments as natural human responses rather than conformity to abstract, rational principles or divine commands. This naturalistic view would influence numerous later philosophers in profound ways, sparking new avenues of ethical inquiry.
Central to Hume's moral theory is the concept of sympathy, a multifaceted capacity that allows humans to share and respond to the feelings of others. Sympathy, for Hume, is not merely feeling sorry for someone. Instead, it represents our fundamental ability to resonate with other people's emotions, both their joys and their sorrows.
Hume observed that humans naturally mirror the emotions they witness in others. When you see someone in pain, you feel a version of that pain yourself. Similarly, when you witness joy, you experience a similar, pleasant feeling. It’s quite remarkable that this observation was supported by research in neuroscience nearly 250 years later In 1992, when neuroscientists led by Giacomo Rizzolatti at the University of Parma discovered mirror neurons – brain cells that activate both when you perform an action, and when you observe someone else performing that very same action. This discovery provided a potential neurological basis for Hume’s earlier insight.
But for Hume, sympathy extends beyond this kind of automatic mirroring. It involves your imagination actively working to place yourself in another's position, to truly see the world from their vantage point. It operates through what he called associative principles – these essentially convert your idea of another's passion into an actual feeling. This process is influenced by factors like proximity, similarity, and familiarity with the other person. In other words, the closer you are, or the more like you they seem, the easier it is to sympathize.
This capacity for sympathy serves as the foundation for our moral judgments. When you observe an action that brings happiness to others, your natural sympathy with their pleasure leads you to approve of that action. Traits like benevolence and generosity produce happiness in those who receive their benefits. Through sympathy, you share in this happiness and thus approve of these qualities, considering them virtuous.
For Hume, moral judgments are remarkably social in nature. They depend on your ability to step outside your immediate self-interest and share in the feelings of the broader community. The more similar someone is to you, the easier this sympathetic process becomes, explaining why humans often feel stronger moral obligations to those closer to them, like family and friends.
Yet Hume recognized that humans can extend sympathy far beyond their immediate connections. Through conversation, education, and the influence of shared customs, your capacity for sympathy can grow to encompass increasingly diverse groups of people. This expansion represents moral progress not just for individuals but for entire societies.
By grounding morality in this rich concept of sympathy, Hume provided an account of ethics that arises naturally from human emotional capacities that everyone possesses.
While Hume grounded morality in individual human sentiments, he understood that these sentiments operate within a broader social context. Your moral feelings do not exist in isolation, but are shaped by and expressed through your interactions with others in society.
The sympathy you feel toward others naturally extends beyond immediate personal connections to encompass wider social circles. Hume observed that humans live in communities, and our moral judgments inescapably reflect this fundamentally social existence. Your approval or disapproval of actions is influenced by considering their effects not just on specific individuals but on society as a whole.
This social dimension of sympathy explains why humans across different cultures tend to approve of qualities that benefit their communities. When you witness an act of justice, generosity, or kindness that helps many people, your sympathetic response is amplified by the combined happiness of all those affected. This creates a powerful sentiment of approval toward actions that promote social welfare.
Hume noted that your moral judgments often transcend your own personal interests. You can approve of virtuous acts that do not benefit you directly, and even approve of virtuous people who lived long ago or in distant lands. This demonstrates that moral sentiments naturally expand beyond self-interest to consider the interests of humanity more broadly.
Your capacity for sympathy allows you to adopt what Hume called a general point of view. This means stepping back from your immediate personal perspective to consider how actions and character traits affect everyone in society. This general viewpoint creates more stable and consistent moral judgments than if each person relied solely on their fleeting, immediate personal reactions.
The social nature of sympathy also helps correct for biases in your moral judgments. Through conversation and interaction with others, you learn to adjust your initial reactions and develop more impartial assessments. In this sense, society itself becomes a corrective mechanism for individual moral sentiments, guiding us toward more thoughtful and widely accepted evaluations.
Hume believed that moral progress occurs as societies develop institutions and practices that more effectively align individual interests with the common good. As communities grow larger and more complex, they create systems of justice, property, and governance. These systems, in turn, help to transform natural sympathy into sustainable social cooperation, forming the bedrock of a flourishing society.
This social understanding of sympathy therefore creates the foundation for Hume's views on utility and the common good. It effectively shows how individual moral sentiments naturally evolve into concern for collective welfare and social harmony.
Building on his understanding of sympathy and its social dimensions, Hume developed a sophisticated theory about utility and its vital relation to moral approval. For Hume, utility refers to the usefulness or tendency of actions and character traits to promote happiness and prevent misery, not just for individuals but for society as a whole.
This connection between utility and moral approval appears remarkably consistent across different cultures and historical periods. Qualities like benevolence, fidelity, and honesty receive universal praise largely because they promote social welfare. So, even when you examine supposedly diverse moral systems, Hume believed you would find this shared foundation of utility underneath any surface differences.
Importantly, Hume did not see utility as a cold, calculating principle. Instead, he viewed it as intimately connected with sentiment. You approve of useful qualities because your sympathy allows you to feel pleasure when witnessing benefits to others. This emotional response, then, is what truly grounds your moral judgments about utility.
Hume distinguished between natural virtues like benevolence, which directly produce happiness, and artificial virtues like justice, which benefit society through more indirect means. Natural virtues create immediate positive effects that anyone can appreciate through sympathy. Artificial virtues, by contrast, require social conventions and longer-term perspectives to fully recognize their utility.
Your appreciation of utility also extends beyond your immediate circle. Through education and social interaction, you learn to value qualities that benefit humanity broadly, even when those benefits do not directly affect you. This expansion of moral concern reflects the development of a more refined and impartial moral sentiment.
Hume's emphasis on utility as a foundation for moral judgment later influenced utilitarian philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. However, unlike some later utilitarians, Hume never reduced morality to a simple mathematical calculation of pleasure and pain. For him, utility remained firmly grounded in human sentiment and sympathy, preserving the emotional core of moral judgment.
By connecting utility to sympathy, Hume created a moral theory that explains how individual moral sentiments naturally align with the common good. This approach provided a thoroughly humanistic foundation for ethics without appealing to divine command or abstract rational principles.
One of Hume's most original contributions to moral philosophy was his analysis of justice as an artificial virtue. Unlike natural virtues like benevolence or compassion, which arise spontaneously from human sentiment, Hume argued that justice emerges through social convention and agreement.
For Hume, justice primarily concerns rules about property, contracts, and promises. These rules do not spring directly from sentiments. Indeed, if you probe your immediate emotional reactions, you might not feel natural approval toward abstract principles of property rights or contract enforcement. Instead, these principles developed because humans gradually recognized the overall utility of social cooperation over time.
Justice also becomes necessary under specific conditions of human existence. Where resources are limited, human generosity can become restricted, and people naturally favor their own interests and those of their close associates. In a hypothetical world of unlimited abundance or perfect benevolence, strict rules of justice might be unnecessary. Given actual human circumstances that vary over time, justice serves as an evolving framework for peaceful coexistence.
Justice evolves through social experience. As societies develop, people discover that certain arrangements of property and promise-keeping benefit everyone in the long run. Your natural sympathy allows you to appreciate these collective benefits, even when following rules of justice might occasionally conflict with your immediate interests.
Though artificial in origin, justice becomes deeply integrated into moral sentiment over time. Through education and social reinforcement, you develop genuine feelings of approval toward just actions and disapproval toward unjust ones. Justice thus becomes "naturalized" in human moral psychology, even though it began as an artificial construction. It starts to feel like second nature.
Hume noted that rules of justice do vary somewhat across societies and historical periods, reflecting different circumstances and needs. However, all functional systems of justice share the fundamental purpose of securing social cooperation. This explains why certain basic elements of justice appear across diverse cultures, despite variations in specific rules.
The artificial nature of justice does not make it any less important than natural virtues, however. In fact, Hume considered justice absolutely essential for any functioning society. Without the stability provided by rules of property and promise-keeping, social cooperation would collapse, and human flourishing would be all but impossible.
By analyzing justice as artificial but essential, Hume provided valuable insight into how moral systems evolve to meet human needs. This perspective allows us to understand both the universal aspects of justice, and its adaptability across different social contexts, without appealing to abstract rational principles or divine law.
While many moral philosophers focus on abstract rules or individual actions, Hume placed significant emphasis on character traits and virtues. For him, moral evaluation primarily concerns the qualities of a person's character, rather than just their isolated acts. When you make moral judgments, you are typically assessing what kind of person someone is, not merely what they have done in a particular circumstance.
Hume believed that virtues are those character traits that evoke approval from moral sentiments. These traits fall into four main categories based on their effects: traits useful to others, traits useful to the person possessing them, traits immediately agreeable to others, and traits immediately agreeable to the person possessing them. This classification shows how Hume integrated both utility and sentiment in his account of virtue.
Traits useful to others include benevolence, justice, and fidelity. You naturally approve of these qualities because your sympathy allows you to share in the happiness they produce for society. Traits useful to the person possessing them include prudence, industry, and frugality. You approve of these because sympathetic concern extends to the welfare of the individual as well as to society.
Traits immediately agreeable to others include wit, eloquence, and modesty. These traits produce immediate pleasure in those who interact with the person possessing them. Traits immediately agreeable to the person possessing them include cheerfulness and self-esteem. These create a pleasant character for the individual, which in turn affects their interactions with others.
Unlike some virtue ethicists, Hume did not believe in a single, unified vision of human excellence. Instead, he recognized a plurality of valuable character traits that contribute to individual and social flourishing in different ways. This pluralistic approach allows for diversity in virtuous character, while maintaining that certain fundamental traits deserve universal approval.
By focusing on character and virtues, Hume provided an account of morality that goes beyond actions. His approach emphasizes the development of a virtuous character through habit, education, and social interaction. Moral improvement involves cultivating those traits that produce benefits for yourself and others, guided by an increasingly refined and impartial moral sentiment.
This naturalistic account of virtue connects individual character development with broader social welfare, showing how personal excellence and public utility naturally align through the operation of sympathy and the moral sentiments.
In this lesson to An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals by David Hume, you’ve learned that Hume revolutionized moral philosophy by locating ethics in human sentiment rather than abstract reason or divine command.
His work made morality accessible to everyone with the capacity for sympathy. Through his naturalistic approach, Hume argued that moral judgments arise from our shared emotional responses to actions that promote happiness and welfare, both for individuals and society. He distinguished between natural virtues like benevolence that emerge spontaneously from sentiment, and artificial virtues like justice that develop through social convention to serve human needs. Grounding morality in human nature while acknowledging the role of utility and social context, Hume created an ethical framework that explains both universal moral tendencies and cultural variations over time.
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