Hume’s Emotivism Ethical Thought And Its Contemporary Value

Hume is the eighteenth century famous British philosopher, he based on the experienceand observation, researches about people’s rational, emotional, moral, and produces asignificant impact on the development of later philosophy. As a master of emotionalismethics, his thought reflects people’s moral appeals in British society at that time. His ethicalthought has important significance to today’s moral construction in our country.In this article, I illustrate his ethics thought through three aspects, namely theepistemological basis, the moral sense, and the sympathetic mechanism, these three aspectsare interconnected. First of all, the theory provides us with the research methodology ofHume’s ethics thought which is the experience principle of supremacy, feeling theory as thefoundation, suspected attitude, causal reasoning to demonstrate. Secondly, I discuss about themoral sense. Based on the different between the emotion and rational, Hume says thatrational should serve the emotion and make a detailed research on the sources of moralsense.The last part is about the sympathy, which can be seen as Hume seeking to make moralsense universal mechanism. Compassion makes us jump out the circle of self, and that moraljudgments act has the universality.Hume’s emotivism ethical thought is very rich, so I discuss the characteristic section inthis paper, which I want to get some inspirations to our moral construction. This article fromthe three factors which affect the development of individual moral psychology, such as livingenvironment, communication methods, and education, analyzes the current situation of moraldevelopment, and points out that the current social moral problems of the lack ofemotional.Thus, moral construction must be attention to the cultivation of moral emotion andreveals the Hume thought contemporary value.