Hume’s Philosophy: Empiricism and Moral Sentiments

Posted on Mar 21, 2025 in Philosophy and ethics

Knowledge

Empiricism Principles

  1. Empirical Principles: All thinking is derived from perception, be it internal or external. Hume, like Locke, considers both internal and external perception.
  2. Principle of Immanence: The contents of the mind are only pictures and images derived from perception. There is no immediate contact between the mind and the thing. The senses transmit the image from the thing to the mind.
  3. Principle of Copy: This is the great principle of Humean thought. According to this principle, all our ideas are copies of our impressions, so that wherever an idea appears, there must necessarily be an impression that this idea copies.
  4. Principle of Decoupling Ideas: This complements the former principle. According to this principle, the imagination connects ideas, so they are not disjointed in the mind. Hume places the entire burden of mental activity on the imagination.
  5. Principle of Negation of General Ideas: All our ideas are copies of our impressions. But it is not possible to have impressions of objects represented by general ideas. In this way, the generated ideas cannot exist as such. These ideas are the product of the mind. A general idea is just a particular idea associated with a general nominal term.

Impressions and Ideas

For Hume, all knowledge comes from perceptions, and the boundaries of knowledge are located within these perceptions. A perception is:

“Everything that can be present in the human mind, whether through our senses, or that we are moved by passion, or exercise our thought and reflection.”

There are two types of perceptions:

  • Impressions: These come from our senses and enter our minds with greater force and vivacity, including impressions from thought and reflection.
  • Ideas: These are faint images in thought, remaining in the mind when the impression disappears. It is the trace that the impression leaves in the mind.

The relationship is object-impression-idea, so the object constitutes an impression that, in turn, is the origin of an idea.

Association of Ideas

Ideas are associated in the mind through introspection. Although all knowledge originates in impressions, these disappear when the object disappears, leaving a mark on the mind that is the idea. Knowledge is born from the impression but is knowledge of ideas.

  • Philosophical Relations: The set of introspections in an arbitrary manner between two conscious ideas that are, in principle, not related because it sees fit to compare them with each other. There would be no intrinsic connection principle ideas, but that connection would be the comparison established between them by the imagination. The connection would be based on similarity, identity, space, time, quantity, and number.
  • Natural Relations: The imagination will link two ideas by introducing one from the other. This relationship is unconscious; there is a link between ideas acting on the imagination to associate them using its spontaneity. Similarity, continuity, and space-time causality give us information about external reality.

Humans and Morality

Hume’s goal is to create a total science of man, and morality is an integral part of his project. Hume’s moral thought is built on two pillars: a critique of rationalism as the source of morality and the claim that moral judgments arise from sentiment.

Hume finds the basis of moral judgments not in reason, but in sentiment. Humans act in certain ways, doing some things and not others, but reason cannot drive this action; the momentum comes from feeling. Hume says that we all have a moral feeling that leads us to approve or condemn human actions—a sentiment present in human nature that is selfless.

Virtues are those qualities that are useful or joyful, while vices are those that give us an uncomfortable feeling. This approval or disapproval is made from a social level. The development of moral judgments is made from a common viewpoint on others.

God

If only God can know that of which we have sensible experience, God cannot be known. Nor can the existence of God be demonstrated through the principle of causality, as this is only a matter of belief and custom. One can believe that God exists if one accepts that He is the cause of nature, but no more.