David Hume on Morality

Quote

"Morality... is more properly felt than judg'd of."

— David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part I, Section II (1739–40)

Historical Context

The sentence appears in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), in the third book, "Of Morals," where Hume sets out his account of the foundation of moral distinctions. The Treatise was Hume's attempt to do for the human sciences what Newton had done for the physical: to discover the principles of human nature and explain the phenomena of thought, passion, and action by them. The book was a commercial failure — Hume later said it "fell dead-born from the press" — but it is now recognized as one of the most important works of modern philosophy. The passage on morality comes immediately after the section containing the famous is-ought passage, in which Hume observes that writers on morality slide imperceptibly from "is" and "is not" to "ought" and "ought not" — a transition that, in the absence of explanation, is not evidently justified.

The intellectual context was the debate between two accounts of moral judgment. The rationalists — Samuel Clarke, William Wollaston, and in a later generation the intuitionists — held that moral distinctions are discovered by reason, as mathematical truths are. The sentimentalists — Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume himself — held that moral distinctions are felt: they arise from a sentiment of approval or disapproval that human nature is constituted to feel. Hume's sentence is the sharpest statement of the sentimentalist thesis. Morality, he insists, is not a matter of the head but of the heart; we do not judge virtue and vice as we judge triangles, we feel them.

Philosophical Interpretation

Hume's claim that morality is "more properly felt than judg'd of" rests on his theory of the passions. The business of reason, in Hume's psychology, is to discover truth and falsehood — to compare ideas and to trace causes and effects. But reason, he argues, is "the slave of the passions": it can inform our desires but cannot oppose them, and it can never by itself produce action or motivate the will. Morality, however, does motivate — the thought that an act is wrong moves us to avoid it. Therefore morality cannot be the product of reason alone; it must have its source in sentiment, in the feelings of approval and disapproval that human beings naturally experience toward actions and characters.

On Hume's account, virtue and vice are not properties in the world waiting to be discovered, like colors are not in the objects themselves but in the eye of the beholder. The perception of virtue consists in a particular kind of feeling — the pleasurable sentiment of approbation we feel when we contemplate a generous act, the painful sentiment of disapprobation we feel at cruelty. Moral judgment, properly understood, is the expression of these sentiments. This makes Hume a moral anti-realist in modern terms: moral properties are projections of our sentiments onto the world rather than features of the world itself. Yet Hume's position is not subjectivism in the crude sense — the sentiments are not arbitrary, because human nature is shared; we are so constituted that we approve of the useful and the agreeable, and the moral sense is uniform enough across persons to ground genuine agreement.

The deeper point of the passage is epistemological. If morality is felt rather than judged, then the route to moral knowledge is not abstract demonstration but reflection on our own responses and the refinement of the moral sense. Hume develops this thought through the fiction of the "judicious spectator," who corrects the partiality of our natural responses by sympathy. The passage also sharpens the is-ought problem: if moral judgments are expressions of sentiment, then the inference from descriptive premises about the world to normative conclusions about what ought to be done requires a premise about human nature and its sentiments — a premise the rationalists could not supply. Hume's sentence is thus the pivot on which modern meta-ethics turns: the claim that morality lives in feeling, not in the discovery of objective moral facts.

Related Concepts

The passage is the manifesto of moral sentimentalism, the view that moral distinctions are grounded in feeling. It introduces the contrast between reason and sentiment as rival accounts of moral judgment, and it is inseparable from the is-ought problem — the difficulty of deriving normative conclusions from descriptive premises. Hume's position is a form of moral anti-realism and an ancestor of modern emotivism and expressivism. The account also connects to sympathy and the impartial spectator, concepts Hume shares with Adam Smith, and to the empiricism that grounds all knowledge in experience.

Learning Path

Begin with the site's answers on what the is-ought problem is and on what moral realism versus anti-realism is, to see the two questions Hume's sentence bears on. Then read the companion book page on A Treatise of Human Nature and the quote page on Adam Smith's moral sentiments, which develops the sentimentalist program further. Compare Hume's sentimentalism with the rationalist ethics of Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and with the contemporary revival of moral realism in Korsgaard's The Sources of Normativity.