David Hume's Sentimentalism: Ethics and Emotions

David Hume's Sentimentalism

The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) is one of the most representative philosophers of the philosophical current known as empiricism. Empiricism prioritizes the role of observation and sensitive experimentation against reason in both science and general thought.

Hume's Ethical Theory

From the point of view of ethics, Hume undertook a study of morality that changed the prevailing rationalist perspective in previous philosophies. He focused more on emotions, passions, and feelings as the foundation of the moral life; therefore, we speak of "sentimentalism" in Hume.

Morality as Experience

According to Hume's ethical theory, morality is a kind of experience clearly different from logical-mathematical or merely empirical experience. People can calculate and relate ideas in their minds, as we do when we try to solve a mathematical problem. We can also observe what happens around us, as happens when we study something in a science laboratory or when we simply observe a natural phenomenon. But the experience of being morally moved by an event is an experience that cannot be inferred from relationships between ideas (as in mathematics) or other experienced events (as in the laboratory). Moral approval or moral rejection, that is, feeling good or bad when evaluating an action or an idea from a moral perspective, are simply emotional experiences that happen to us, but without any other rational implication.

Reason as a Slave to the Passions

Hume says that in moral matters, "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 faculty that allows us to discern the truth and falsity of a proposition, but it can never direct our will by itself, that is, without the intervention of any passion.

The Inability of Reason

To justify this inability of reason to guide our moral behavior, Hume resorts to an epistemological explanation. According to the Scottish philosopher, the objects reason works with are propositions, entities capable of truth value, that is, entities capable of being true or false. But neither passions nor human actions are capable of having a truth value, because neither passions nor actions serve to represent reality in a certain way; they simply are given in our mind.