Joseph Pallattil

In this article we try to discover the depth of Moral Philosophy which David Hume presents in his works like Treatise of Human Nature, Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals and in some of his Essays. We know that he was an opponent of philosophical rationalists. He gives importance to sensory perceptions and emotions. Hume points out that passions govern human behaviour. His famous proclamation is that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” Passions controls reason. Hume was also known as a sentimentalists who held that ethics are based on emotion or sentiments rather than abstract moral principle.
Hume’s ethical philosophy is “to discover the true origin of morals. He traces the moral sentiments to sympathy. Sympathy means to feel with. Sympathy is a psychological mechanism that explains how we come to feel what others are feeling. Hume tells us that sympathy is the human capacity to receive the feelings and beliefs of other people. That is, it is the process by which we experience what others are feeling and thinking. This process begins by forming an idea of what another person is experiencing. Hume appeals to sympathy to explain a wide range of phenomena: our interest in history and current affairs, our ability to enjoy literature, movies, and novels, as well as our sociability. It is central to his explanations of our passions, our sense of beauty, and our sense of what is morally good and bad.
Sympathy is a process that moves me from my idea of what someone is feeling to actually experiencing the feeling. There are four steps to this process. I first arrive at the idea of what someone is feeling in any of the usual ways. I next become aware of the resemblances between us. Resemblance means the state of resembling or being alike. Therefore, we are linked by the principle of association. While we resemble every human being to some extent, we also resemble some individuals more than others. For example, we feel closer to those who share our language or culture. The associative principles of contiguity and causality also relate individuals who are located closely to us in time or space or who are family members or teachers. According to Hume, we are able to sympathize more easily and strongly with individuals with whom we have strong associative ties. The stronger the associative relations, the stronger our sympathetic responses.