Hume's theory of moral judgment: A study of 'A Treatise of Human Nature'

While Hume insists that "sympathy," or fellow feeling, is the primary source of moral evaluation, he recognizes that sympathetically acquired feelings vary in emotional intensity according to a number of factors he regards as morally irrelevant. The question arises as to how the changeableness of sympathy can be reconciled with the "stable" moral judgment. It emerges that the sympathetic judgment becomes corrected by adopting, what Hume calls, a "general point of view.".;Specifically, the theory of belief and "general rules" in Bk.I of the Treatise accounts for both the prejudice which besets the moralist and the method which corrects such prejudice. In Bk.III, Hume only makes implicit references to the place of general rules in moral judgment. It is urged that without a full appreciation of the theory of belief and general rules in Bk.I, Hume's ideas about moral judgment are far too brief to be understood and are therefore subject to a number of misconceptions.;Part One examines Hume's ideas about human reason and Part Two aims to clarify Hume's notion of sympathy. Both parts seek to explain how the "trivial properties" of the imagination are responsible for the "unreasonable" judgment of fact and the "partial" judgment of merit. These properties, or over-generalizing propensities, generate the general rules of the imagination. It is by means of the general rules of the understanding, the rules which regulate initial judgments by an act of reflection, that factual judgments become reasonable and moral judgments impartial.;What is of interest is the ongoing dialectic of the two sorts of general rules, the "combat" of reason and imagination, which, it is maintained, Hume never resolves. Although it is concluded that Hume's theory of moral judgment ends with the same skepticism as does his theory of belief and general rules at the close of Bk.I, the positive role that both reason and imagination play in the development of science and morality is also stressed.