Page 9 - GALIET THE HEROIC SPECTACLE OF MORALS: Hume IV

Galiet & Galiet
maxims by comparing particular instances? Aware that his enquiry is more speculative4 than practical, he concedes that generous qualities of “beneficence and humanity, friendship and gratitude, natural affection and public spirit,”5 certainly entitle the sympathy, approbation and good-will of others.
Social Utility: the Ground of Morality. Hume links. Hume must establish that a link exists between a pleasing means and a pleasing end: the means to something pleases only when its end pleases. For social utility to be a source of moral sentiment in its extension from self to others, it must follow that whatever contributes to society’s happiness directly merits social consent and good-will.6 Though Hume ignores any further explanations, he claims that this social happiness principle, to a great extent, grounds morality.7
Natural Sympathy. Hume concludes. Self-evident to Hume is the notion that emotional moral responses to certain dispositions and actions, arouse natural or spontaneous sentiments of sympathy or antipathy, approbation or disapprobation given social utility and our natural predisposition to favor law and order versus anarchism.8 Indeed, Richard Joyce in the Evolution of Morality9 shows how Hume ends his moral discourse on origins by appealing to the principle of natural sympathy. Hume, he says, also argues concerning the futility of first-cause research. Joyce, like Hume, agrees that one’s natural experience of humanity suffices to deem human sympathy a universal principle. Shermer in The Science of Good and Evil concurs with both by saying that, despite the vast multiplicity of cultural and historical moralities, a ‘sense of being right or wrong... is a human universal that has [had] an evolutionary origin.”10
4 He can attack skepticism by appealing to experience. Yet he also establishes a speculative skepticism given that, to every rational analysis, a moral fact is and remains obscure. The fault to render a reason of morality (if he supposed he were to introduce it from the rationality in moral sentiment), causes him to seek the causes of approbation and blame.
5 Ibid. 2.5.
6 Ibid. 5.17
7 Ibid. 5.13
8 Virtue Ethics. Section 8. 89
9 He adds that Darwin pushed the inquiry of morals further by asking why nature... has made us one way rather than another. Joyce, Richard. The Evolution of Morality. Massachussets, MIT Press, 2007. 228-229. 10 Shermer, Michael. The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share and Follow the Golden Rule. USA: Henry Holt and Company, 2004.
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