Hume’s account of moral distinctions: the role of reason and sentiment in moral evaluation

Abstract

One of the longest lasting beliefs in Hume scholarship is that Hume endorsed sentimentalism about moral distinctions. Indeed, in “the first known printed discussion of Hume’s moral theory” (Fieser, 2005, Vol. 1, p.1), which appeared in a Bibliothèque raisonée des ouvrages des savans de l’Europe in 1741, we are told that, according to Hume, the activity of distinguishing “what is Right from what is Wrong … is a matter of feeling: reason has nothing to do with the distinctions” (2005, p. 7; emphasis added). Almost three centuries later, most scholars are still committed to the belief that “explaining how we come to feel … unique moral sentiments will be equivalent to understanding moral distinctions themselves” (Norton, 2009, p. 288). This thesis argues that although Hume endorsed robust sentimentalism about the detection of individual moral qualities, while he also anchored his account of the origin of moral distinctions to his robustly sentimentalist account of the origin of individual moral qualities, Hume did not hold a sentimentalist view on the origin of moral distinctions. Hume’s account of the origin of moral distinctions is hybrid in nature: partly rationalist and partly sentimentalist. More precisely, the drawing of moral distinctions is a matter of a complex evaluative process that involves the interplay of sympathy (moral sentiments), imagination, and intuitive reason. This reveals a long neglected aspect of Hume’s moral epistemology: the fact that Hume maintained that it is “by means of our ideas” and “impressions” that “we distinguish betwixt vice and virtue, and pronounce an action blameable and praise-worthy” (THN, 456).