David Hume's Time: The Nature Of Morality

Back in Hume’s time, there were mainly three schools of thought regarding the nature of morality. This debate was initiated by Thomas Hobbes’ view that moral obligations and duties came from self-regarding motives. In response to Thomas Hobbes’ argument, there are two schools of thought, namely rationalism and sentimentalism. Rationalists such as Samuel Clarke argued that morality could be explained by pure reason , and acting morally is just the same as acting rationally. Hume is on the side of the sentimentalists, as he rejects reason as the basis of morality . Hume argues, rather, that it is our moral sentiments that serve as the basis of moral approvals and disapprovals . In Hume’s picture, each action produces certain feelings in the recipients, be it pain or pleasure, and it is through sympathizing with the recipients which we have an impression of the resulting pain or pleasure in the recipients, and thus approve of or disapprove of the active person’s character trait which led to the action.
In this paper, I will first introduce the key concepts regarding Hume’s notion of sympathy, then examine the nature of Hume’s sympathy by going through some of its challenges (and the corresponding responses), before I discuss the importance of the concept of sympathy to the sentimentalist school of
thought.