Excerpts from Annette Baier's entry on Hume in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (General Ed. Edward Craig)

David Hume (1711-76)

Passions and sentiments. Hume takes us to share our basic passion-repertoire, as well as our ability to learn from experience, with the higher animals. They may lack moral, aesthetic, religious, and philosophical 'sentiments', but they do, if Hume is right, love, hate, feel pride and shame, as well as desire, enjoy, suffer, hope, and fear. Their passions have the same sorts of objects that ours do, and we can sympathize with some of their passions, as some of them can with some of ours. 'Passions', with the exception of a few instinctive appetities, are 'impressions of reflection', reactions of pleasure or displeasure to some perception of our situation.

All passions have 'objects', what Brentano called 'intentional directedness' and others have termed 'aboutness'. 'Direct' passions, such as desire, joy, sorrow, hope and fear, are caused by their 'objects'. What Hume calls the 'indirect' passions, such as pride, involve both the thought of something that pleases, such as a fine cloak, and also the recognition of that good thing as belonging to a particular person, bringing a consequent pleasure in that person. Should the particular person be oneself, the pleasure one feels will be pride. Should it be another person, the pleasure will be affection or esteem for that person. So the basic 'causes' of all passions are 'agreeable' pleasure and 'uneasy' pain or distress, and thoughts about their causes or occasions...

Sympathy. All passions can be and often are communicated from one animal or person to another, through their understood bodily expression and our response to that in what Hume calls 'sympathy'. Sympathy enlivens a mere idea of another's passion into an impression. 'The howlings and lamentations of a dog produce a sensible concern in his fellows' (Treatise: 398). It is not only distress which is thus communicated, but any expressed passion, or even opinion. 'This is not only conspicuous in children, who implicitly embrace every opinion propos'd to them; but also in men of the greatest judgment and understanding, who find it very difficult to follow their own reason or inclination, in opposition to that of their friends and daily companions' (Treatise: 316). We spontaneously imitate the expressed state of mind of those around us, Hume believes, and this communication of feeling, along with its extension by our ability to imagine what others would feel, in various circumstances, is essential for the possibility of 'the moral sentiment'. But there is also a 'principle', or basic tendency, which interferes with the workings of sympathy. This is 'comparison', which leads us to ask if we are doing better or worse than others. We can welcome another's misfortune, rather than feel compassion for them, if that misfortune points up our own better fortune. 'Comparison' is invoked by Hume to explain malice and envy. He treats remorse as a case of malice against oneself, 'an irregular appetite for evil'. He finds envy to be typically felt for those close in position to ourselves, and to be felt even when we are 'superior', should our inferiors be perceived to be advancing.

Sympathy can be blocked by the operation of 'comparison', but is facilitated by the perception of any sort of 'natural relation' between ourselves and others. 'Similarity in our manners, or character, or country, or language...facilitates the sympathy' (Treatise: 318). (Blood ties, and spatial contiguity also facilitate it.) Sympathy is sharing the feelings of others perceived to be like ourselves, or related to us, and so is felt differentially. Hume takes the moral sentiment to correct for such natural partialities in our sympathy...

The virtues. Hume takes it to be agreed that moral judgment is primarily a judgment about human character traits, a recognition of 'virtues' and 'vices'...

In his 'catalogue of virtues' he distinguishes the 'natural virtues' from what in the Treatise he calls 'artificial', or convention-dependent, virtues. The latter consist in conformity to some beneficial social scheme of cooperation, such as a particular form of government. The artificial virtues, for him, include 'justice' (taken to include respect for traditional property rights, and 'fidelity to promises'), 'allegiance' (to magistrates), female modesty and chastity (preparation for and conformity to the role given to women in the artifice of marriage), and the duties of sovereign states to keep treaties, to respect each others' territorial boundaries, to give protection to ambassadors, and otherwise conform to 'the law of nations'. All the artificial virtues will be expected to take different specific forms in different societies and historical conditions.

In contrast to the artificial virtues, the 'natural' virtues are expected to be fairly invariant across cultures. Hume includes among the natural virtues compassion, generosity, gratitude, friendship, fidelity, charity, beneficence, clemency, equity, prudence, temperance, frugality, industry, courage, ambition, due pride (duly concealed so as not to offend others), due modesty (awareness of one's weaknesses), due self-assertiveness, good sense, wit and humour, perseverance, patience, courage, parental devotion, good nature, cleanliness, articulateness, responsiveness to poetry, decorum, and 'a certain je-ne-sais-quoi of agreeable and handsome', which 'render a person lovely or valuable' (Treatise: 611-12)...

Hume's list of virtues is a self-conscious rejection of a puritan morality, and to some extent of Christian morality. Not only, as he wrote to Francis Hutcheson, does he not take his 'catalogue of virtues' from The Whole Duty of Man (a Protestant religious tract he had been encouraged to read as a child), but he finds some of the virtues listed there to be vices, from the point of view of a morality which has freed itself from 'the delusive glosses of superstition and false religion'. Hume's ethics are avowedly hedonist. All virtues, he generalizes, are qualities that please from a moral point of view either because they prove 'agreeable' (tend to bring pleasure) to their possessors or to others, or else because they are seen to have 'utility' for their possessors or for others. 'Celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self denial, humility, silence, solitude, and the whole train of monkish virtues' are, he finds, neither agreeable nor useful; they 'stupify the understanding and harden the heart, obscure the fancy and sour the temper' (Enquiries: 270). The Whole Duty of Man had included, in its list of breaches of duty, various breaches of the duty of humility, and such other sins as 'eating too much', 'heightening of lust by pampering the body', 'not labouring to subdue it by Fasting, and other Severities', and 'not assigning any Set or Solemn time for Humiliation and Confession, or too seldom'. It was not merely the 'monks' whom Hume was opposing when listing the virtues, but the Calvinists who had preached to him, and the other Protestant divines whose tracts he had been given as a child to help him learn to recognize vice.

But there are very many of the duties listed in The Whole Duty of Man that Hume includes in his catalogue, and that repeat those listed in Cicero's Offices, which he told Hutcheson was his preferred source book on morals. 'Not loving peace', and 'going to law on slight occasion', as well as theft, ingratitude, lying, malice, and oppression are all condemned in The Whole Duty of Man, and Hume would have little quarrel with these disapprobations....

Artificial virtues: justice. The part of morals that Hume does treat as being on a like footing with civil laws, and so as sanction-backed, is the area covered by 'the artificial virtues'. These consist in conformity to some generally beneficial convention, where the benefit accrues not act by act, but from the 'whole scheme of actions'. Since general conformity is needed for the benefit to be obtained, pressure is deliberately brought to bear, on adults as on children, to get them to show honesty in matters of property, to keep their promises, to show allegiance to lawful magistrates, and to show chastity and marital fidelity, at least if they are women.

'Justice', as rendering each their due, is taken by Hume to be primarily respect for property rights.. Although he frequently refers to equity, it is not clear what relation he took it to have to justice. (He includes it in a list of natural virtues.) What he argues about 'justice', in his sense, is that we need to have a convention establishing property, and establishing particular property rights, before anything could count as respect for such rights. Similarly, he will argue, we must have the social institution of promise (or contract, taken as mutual promise) before anything could count as keeping or breaking promises, and must have the institution of government before anyone can count as a superior, to whom allegiance is owed....

Hume's analysis of promises and promissory rights follows the same lines as the analysis of property and property rights. Until a convention fixes which assurances are binding assurances, there will be no promises or contracts. The fixing, as in the case of property, will contain some elements of arbitrariness. Societies vary in such matters as the need for witnesses, for the contract to be written and signed, for there to be some 'consideration'. Hume takes the function of promise to be to extend security in transfers of goods and services to include future delivery and future services. He takes there to be a special form of words, 'I promiseƒ' used when such binding assurances are given, and he takes their force to include the promisor's acceptance of the appropriateness of penalty in the form of withdrawal of trust (and thus disablement as a party to binding agreements) if the promise is broken. This informal enforcement of the sacredness of promissory obligations gives promises their verbal magic. Hume likens them to the priest's words in the mass, to the magic of transubstantiation, with the significant difference that 'the obligation [binding force] of promises is an invention for the interest of society', while 'priestly inventions...have no public interest in view' (Treatise: 524).

How artificial virtue is inculcated. Hume takes it that we have a self-interested motive to adopt the policy of respecting property and keeping our promises and marriage vows since these 'inventions' are so designed that general conformity to their rules does bring advantages to 'the whole and every part' of society. And we have good moral reason to approve of such conformity. But, especially with property rights as they develop over a long period of time, and are affected by the transfers that have occurred through contract and through the invention of money, it is easy for a person to lose sight of the 'remote' and long term interest they may have in respect for established property rights. 'The artifices of politicians' may be needed to bolster their motivation. But Hume believes that we will usually see well enough what is wrong with disrespect for property rights when we are the victims of it. We see such disrespect as a 'vice', and feel disapprobation. We feel sympathy with other victims of theft, and our 'sympathy with public interest' leads us to condemn all breaches of property rights, however 'obscure' it may have become just what personal advantage we each get from a policy of honesty in preference to occasional judicious dishonesty. Hume grants that there may be no convincing answer to the 'sensible knave', who successfully conceals his dishonesty, and believes he does better than the scrupulously honest person. If educators, moralists and politicians have failed to give him 'an antipathy to treachery and roguery', if all he cares about is 'profit or pecuniary advantage', then no argument the moralist can provide is likely to change his mind. The moralist, on behalf of 'the party of humankind' (some of whom the clever knave is cheating and defrauding), may sincerely believe that the knaves are 'the greatest dupes', since they 'have sacrificed the invaluable enjoyment of a character, with themselves at least, for the acquisition of worthless toys and geegaws' (Enquiries: 283)...

The moral sentiment.... Hume takes virtues to be recognized as such by the moral sentiment, a special pleasure taken in agreeable and useful character traits, when these are surveyed from a 'general and steady' point of view. One of his most famous theses is that moral distinctions are not made by 'reason alone', but by the special sort of pleasure and displeasure we take in character traits and in the 'manners', or ways of behaving, that express them. Our approbation and disapprobation are what makes the approved traits virtues, the disapproved ones vices. 'We do not infer a character to be virtuous, because it pleases: But in feeling that it pleases after such a particular manner, we in effect feel that it is virtuous' (Treatise: 471). The 'particular manner' in which character traits must please to be virtues stems from the special 'point of view' which must be taken, and which we take in order to 'converse together on any reasonable terms' (Treatise: 581) about human merit. It is a 'steady and general' point of view which we have reason to expect others to be able to take, and from which agreement is in theory possible. In order to 'overlook our own interest', and get such a 'general' view, we must be capable both of sympathizing with other people's private viewpoints, and of correcting for natural bias in our sympathy. We consider how a given trait, say our own ambition, affects others, and try to see it as they see it. We do not ignore our own interest, but we look beyond that to the interests and concerns of everyone affected. When what we are judging is some military leader's courage, we will sympathetically consider both its effects on the armies he led, and his own nation, and also its effects on those against whom he led his forces, 'the subversion of empires, the devastation of provinces, the sack of cities' (Treatise: 601). Moral approbation is a pleasure taken in a character trait, all things considered, and much preparation, including fact-finding, is needed to get to a point of view which really can claim to be general, which can expect to be 'steady', and expect to be shared.

Moral disagreement. Our expectation that our moral judgment will be shared with other moral judges is usually tempered by experience of moral controversy. Can Hume account for apparent moral disagreement? Even when we try to speak for 'the party of humankind', rather than just for ourselves, our class, or our nation, we often find other would-be representatives for humankind contradicting us.

Hume discusses apparent moral disagreement in 'A Dialogue'. 'Of the Standard of Taste' addresses what he sees as the closely similar topic of apparent disagreement about literary merit. In both these discussions Hume explains away the appearance of disagreement as due to some confusion, or lack of proper preparation or competence in some of the disagreeing judges. 'In moral decisions, all the circumstances and relations must be previously known; and the mind, from the contemplation of the whole, feels some new impression of affection or disgust, esteem or contempt, approbation or blame' (Enquiries: 290). Since very many judgments which purport to be moral are based on imperfect knowledge of circumstances, on narrow sympathies, on a contemplation of much less than 'the whole', it is not surprising that there is less than unanimity in such judgments....

The arguments against the rationalists. Hume, in the Treatise, tries to refute the claims of rationalists such as Samuel Clarke that moral distinctions can be discerned by pure reason....

...there do not seem to be any rationally discernible facts or relations which would establish the sort of conclusion which the rationalist moralist expects to be able to draw, for example that certain sorts of behaviour (incest, killing a parent) are wrong if done by human beings, but not if done by animals or plants. This argument attempts to show that the wrongness of murder or incest is not a matter of rationally discernible relations. Hume cites the supposedly exhaustive list of 'philosophical' (cognitively discernible) relations of ideas given in Book I of the Treatise, and the claim of the Treatise (Bk I, Pt III, Sect. I) that only four of these, resemblance, contrariety, degrees in quality, and proportion in quantity or number, can be traced by 'demonstration'. Hume challenges any rationalist who disputes the completeness of his list of 'demonstrable relations' to point out the extra morally relevant relation. He requires that such a relation relate inner actions or states of mind to mind-external 'objects' (since he takes it that we all agree that moral judgment is restricted to expressed character traits), and that such a relation or relations determine what is 'forcible and obligatory' for all those capable of discerning them, that is for all rational beings. He takes it that, in order to found obligations, the relations would have to be shown to have a necessary effect on the will of all those who are obligated, and he seems to think that no rationalist could meet this challenge.

He adds, to his main anti-rationalist arguments, a famous 'observation' which he thought would 'subvert all the vulgar systems of morality' (Treatise: 470). This observation is that those who want to move from some factual claim to some conclusion about how we ought to behave owe us an explanation of how to derive the 'ought' of the conclusion from the 'is' of the premise.... This is a challenge similar to that issued earlier to the rationalist who wants to found obligations on rationally discernible relations - to show a connexion to the will of the obligated, to show why that relation, or that fact, should fix for them what to do....