"An All-around Enlightenment Man": Study On Hume’s Moral Thought

In history, the Great Britain shows distinctive national character, demonstratedby their spiritual nature that they are moderate, rather than to be blind follower, andempiricist but not extremist, and also featured by development model that they paymore attention to balance between tradition and revolution and also focus onequalization between politics and religion, which has already been clearly proved inprocess of spread of enlightenment spirit that philosophical tradition for BritainEmpiricist seeks to find some balance between contemporary demands in liberalismand obvious destructive feature at the early romanticism. As a master for empiricist,Mr. David Hume can be considered as a great representative to focus on explorationin terms of moral phenomenon and establish strictly logic thought system.Hume’s moral philosophy is consistent with his philosophy of human naturesystem on the basic principles of the theories and methods. Hume believes that moralphilosophy is the practice of science, to be built on the basis of experiments andobservations. He pointed out that morality is the root cause of one’s inner sense ofmorality, rather than rational; On the basis of moral evaluation and judgment, Humeproposed four aspects, they are useful to oneself, useful to others, directly to makeothers happy and pleasant oneself. Hume also divided virtue into the virtue ofman-made and natural. He said that, we can make the seemingly subjective sense ofmorality universal by sympathy, which makes the moral-judgment possible. Onresearch methods, Hume used a description of psychology and psychological analysis,stressed the use of habits, association and imagination in moral evaluation.In Hume’s age, sociology, ethics, psychology, history and political science are intheir childhood, they are mixed together, constitute a "human science", Only later,they became independent disciplines. At that time, the moral issue is the core of thesocial problems. So, Hume’s investigation of moral thought naturally extended topolitics, religion, aesthetics, history and other areas of knowledge. Hume’s politicalthought is conservative; his religion is the moral emotivism religion; he extensivelyused psychological analysis to explore the aesthetic principles; and his understandingof history served to the attention and analysis of the moral phenomenon.The impacts of Hume’s moral thought are mainly in two aspects. First, Kant feltthe impact of Hume on his attitudes and feelings toward moral; second, his moralthought had a far-reaching impact on future generations’ utilitarianism.