On Hume's Thought Of Virtue

With the revival of the contemporary western virtue ethics,the thought of virtue of Hume is more and more taken seriously.Hume's thought of virtue was produced in 17-18 th century which was British capitalist economy and political prosperity period,also the period of the rapid development of natural science.Hume's thought of virtue manifest the main ideas in economic political and cultural aspects of this period.His thought of virtue absorbed the concept of virtue in ancient Greek ethics,also absorbed Scottish enlightenment empirical method and sentimentalism ethics.Its main features include three aspects: one is philosophy of human nature exploring the law of human nature;Second is empiricism exploring the objective facts;third is sentimentalism pointing to moral practice.Hume virtue thought mainly includes three parts.One is the psychological mechanism of virtue.Virtue is a kind of psychological personality traits;judgment of virtue is based on people's emotion and rational cognition and emotion plays a leading role;generating of virtue depends on the cultivation of moral sentiment and taste of individuals.The second is the moral status and value source of virtue.Virtue takes precedence in value over moral behavior and consequence of behavior;the value of virtue mainly comes from the good moral motivation and utility of virtue.The third is the classification of virtue.According to if a virtue happen naturally,and get the praise of people naturally,virtues are divided into natural virtue and artificial virtue.Natural virtue includes mainly empathy and benevolence,artificial virtue is justice.According to the utility and pleasure of virtue,and the distinction between self and other,the characters are divided into characters useful for others,useful for oneself,the quality making others happy directly,making oneself happy directly.The first kind of classification essentially distinguishes between two types of morality,one is based on the direct moral emotion which is altruistic and positive morality,the other is based on the consultation and agreement which is negative morality,rule system used to code the individual rights.The second kind of classification is to illustrate the utility and pleasure of virtue,through expounding the four kinds of characters,Hume is to base the value of virtue in our real life,it is overturn moral philosophy of asceticism and theology.The primary influence of Hume's thought of virtue is moral psychology,Anscombe and Williams were inspired by Hume's moral psychology and thereby criticize modern moral philosophy,and promote the revival of virtue ethics.Hume thought of virtue mainly is a kind of theory of moral judgment and primary related theory of moral psychology,although it contains some important suggestions and ideas of virtue ethics,but we can't take narrowly his ethical thought as virtue ethics,it is overgeneralization to Hume's ethical thought.The development of Hume thought of virtue is sentimentalist virtue ethics of Slote,which and contemporary new Aristotle's ethics constitute two of the most important schools of contemporary western virtue ethics.Considering the current development status and trend of virtue ethics,the Hume's thought of virtue has great significance.In method of ethics,Hume explored virtue and evil through naturalistic empiricism method,it is the main method to research virtue in western ethics in future.Hume's thought about the roles of reason and emotion in moral in psychological mechanism prompt virtue ethicists to focus on the status of emotion in moral life,attaches great importance to the emotion in moral psychological activity,moral judgment and moral evaluation.And,more importantly,it inspire virtue ethicists come back to empiricism moral psychology,focusing on compaction of moral psychology foundation,rather than rushing to set up a system of virtue ethics.