David Hume · Philosophy
Hume overturns the rationalist picture of ethics: morality is founded not on reason but on sentiment. Reason is ‘the slave of the passions’, and you cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.
Hume now turns his empiricist method onto morality, and reaches a conclusion as revolutionary as his account of causation. The dominant view, held by rationalists, was that morality is founded on reason: that moral truths are like mathematical truths, discoverable by the intellect, and that to be moral is to act in accordance with reason. Hume rejects this completely. Morality, he argues, is founded not on reason but on sentiment - on feeling, on the moral emotions of approval and disapproval that certain actions and characters arouse in us. When we judge an action to be virtuous or vicious, we are not perceiving a fact established by reason; we are expressing a feeling - a sentiment of approval or disapproval that arises in us when we contemplate the action. “Morality,” he writes, “is more properly felt than judg’d of.” To call an act virtuous is to say that contemplating it gives us a particular kind of pleasure or approbation; to call it vicious is to say it gives us a feeling of disapproval. Moral distinctions are rooted in the heart, not the head - in the moral sentiments that are part of our human nature.
Behind Hume’s sentimentalism lies a striking thesis about the relationship between reason and action: that reason, by itself, can never motivate us to do anything. Reason’s job, Hume argues, is to discover truth - relations of ideas (as in mathematics) and matters of fact (as in empirical inquiry). But discovering a truth does not, by itself, move us to act; to be moved, we must care about something, and caring is a matter of the passions (desires, aversions, feelings), not of reason. Reason can tell me that this path leads to the fire and that fire burns - but only my desire to avoid pain makes me turn away. Reason informs the passions about how to attain their objects, but it cannot, on its own, generate a motive or an end. From this Hume draws his most famous and provocative formulation: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Reason is the navigator, but the passions are the engine; reason tells us how to get what we want, but the wanting comes from passion. This has a radical consequence for ethics: since morality clearly does move us to act (we are moved to help, to refrain from cruelty), and since reason alone cannot move us, morality cannot be founded on reason alone. It must be founded on the passions - on the moral sentiments.
If morality is based on feeling rather than reason, does that make it merely subjective and arbitrary - a matter of individual taste, with no more authority than a preference for one flavour over another? Hume is keenly aware of this worry and answers it carefully. Moral sentiments, he argues, are not random personal quirks; they are rooted in a shared human nature and follow regular patterns. Above all, they spring from sympathy (what we would call empathy) - the natural human capacity to share in the feelings of others, to feel pleasure at their happiness and pain at their suffering. Because we are social creatures equipped with sympathy, we naturally approve of qualities and actions that are useful or agreeable to people - to their possessor or to others - and disapprove of those that are harmful. And crucially, when we make specifically moral judgements (as opposed to merely self-interested ones), we adopt a general, common point of view, setting aside our private interest and considering an action’s effects on everyone concerned. This shared standpoint - the ‘sentiment of humanity’ that all of us, as humans, can occupy - gives morality a stability and intersubjectivity that mere personal taste lacks. Morality is founded on feeling, but on feelings that are widely shared, regular, and corrected by a common point of view - so it is neither coldly rational nor merely arbitrary, but a natural, social, and broadly shared feature of human life.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Hume held morality is based on sentiment, not reason; that reason alone cannot move us to act (it is ‘the slave of the passions’); and that you cannot logically derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Explain these claims.
Leads to Adam Smith.
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