Synthesized answer
Hume's central argument is that morals are founded not on reason, but on sentiment [2]. Reason, or the understanding, can inform us about the tendencies of actions and their usefulness [1]. However, it is a feeling of happiness for mankind and resentment of misery – a sentiment – that leads us to prefer useful actions over harmful ones [1]. Without these warm feelings and prepossessions in favor of virtue and against vice, morality would not be a practical study or regulate our lives [3].
The distinction is that reason provides knowledge of facts and consequences, while sentiment provides the actual motivation and judgment of good or bad. The final judgment that labels actions as amiable or odious, praise-worthy or blameable, and constitutes virtue as happiness and vice as misery, likely depends on an internal sense or feeling that is universal to the human species [3]. This "internal sense or feeling" is what Hume refers to as sentiment.
Synthesized from the book passages below. Chat with the book on Feynman for follow-up.
From the book
e a SENTIMENT should here display itself, in order to give a preference to the useful above the pernicious tendencies. This SENTIMENT can be no other than a feeling for the happiness of mankind, and a resentment of their misery; since these are the different ends which virtue and vice have a tendency to promote. Here therefore REASON instructs us in the several tendencies of actions, and HUMANITY makes a distinction in favour of those which are useful and beneficial. This partition between the faculties of understanding and sentiment, in all moral decisions, seems clear from the…
ble of like impressions. The only way, therefore, of converting an antagonist of this kind, is to leave him to himself. For, finding that nobody keeps up the controversy with him, it is probable he will, at last, of himself, from mere weariness, come over to the side of common sense and reason. There has been a controversy started of late, much better worth examination, concerning the general foundation of Morals; whether they be derived from Reason, or from Sentiment; whether we attain the knowledge of them by a chain of argument and induction, or by an immediate feeling and finer…
ures only the cool assent of the understanding; and gratifying a speculative curiosity, puts an end to our researches. Extinguish all the warm feelings and prepossessions in favour of virtue, and all disgust or aversion to vice: render men totally indifferent towards these distinctions; and morality is no longer a practical study, nor has any tendency to regulate our lives and actions. These arguments on each side (and many more might be produced) are so plausible, that I am apt to suspect, they may, the one as well as the other, be solid and satisfactory, and that reason and sentiment…
in all its parts, with the MORAL DISTINCTION, whose foundation has been so often, and so much in vain, enquired after. The same endowments of the mind, in every circumstance, are agreeable to the sentiment of morals and to that of humanity; the same temper is susceptible of high degrees of the one sentiment and of the other; and the same alteration in the objects, by their nearer approach or by connexions, enlivens the one and the other. By all the rules of philosophy, therefore, we must conclude, that these sentiments are originally the same; since, in each particular, even the most…
hip for human kind; some particle of the dove kneaded into our frame, along with the elements of the wolf and serpent. Let these generous sentiments be supposed ever so weak; let them be insufficient to move even a hand or finger of our body, they must still direct the determinations of our mind, and where everything else is equal, produce a cool preference of what is useful and serviceable to mankind, above what is pernicious and dangerous. A MORAL DISTINCTION, therefore, immediately arises; a general sentiment of blame and approbation; a tendency, however faint, to the objects of…
More questions about this book
- If morals are founded on sentiment rather than reason, what are the practical implications for how individuals might resolve ethical dilemmas or how societies might construct their laws?
- What challenges or counter-arguments might arise if one were to solely base moral judgments on "sentiment" as opposed to "reason," and how might Hume address these?
- Can you describe a specific moral action or belief that would be difficult to explain if reason alone were the foundation of morals, but which makes sense if sentiment is considered primary?
- Why is Hume's assertion, made during the Enlightenment, that sentiment rather than reason forms the basis of morals, significant or potentially controversial for his time?