David Hume in an Enquiry

David Hume

In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, David Hume suggests that our sense of morality -- what is right and wrong to do -- is based on our desire to have others think about us positively. We seek approval from others and do not want to be rejected by them, so we attempt to behave in ways that please others. He believes that the behaviors people disapprove of tend to make others happy. This means that morality may actually have less to do with right and wrong than we sometimes think it does. He also argues that it is just part of human nature to feel sympathy for others, and that everyone possesses sympathy to some degree.

While most people may possess some degree of sympathy for others, the existence of such people as John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy, both ruthless serial sexual predators and murderers, suggests that not everyone sympathizes with others. However, they may be balanced out by people who go to extraordinary lengths to help humankind -- for example, Mother Theresa.

The best argument in favor of Hume's view of morality might be that different cultures have different senses of what is right and what is wrong. In our culture, fidelity between spouses is considered important. Faithfulness within a marriage is viewed as morally right, and infidelity is viewed as morally wrong. However, this is not true in all cultures. This in turn suggests the idea of Hume's social pressure.

Many of us can relate to the complex nature of social forces combined with moral standards, because probably most of us know someone who cheated on a test in high school. My best friend did, and he told me how he did it. He felt it was justified because "everybody does it," which sounds as if society expects cheating and therefore condones it. However, at the same time, we were all required to sign a pledge that said that we would not cheat and that we would report any cheating we knew about.

In the four years I attended that school not one case of cheating was reported by other students, but we all knew it happened. If I had reported my friend's cheating, I would not have received recognition from my peers for doing the right thing. Even though the spoken standard was that students weren't supposed to cheat, there was a different standard among my peers that it wasn't our job to act as the moral police and turn in students we thought or knew to be cheating. The standard was that you don't interfere with someone else's life to that degree, and that it was their choice whether they cheated or not. Even the students who never cheated agreed with this: no matter what the school said, it was not their job to spy on their classmates and turn in offenders. So I stayed quiet. Among the other students, that was the morally right thing to do, and made my behavior acceptable to them.

Is cheating wrong? Of course it is, and it hurts others. We were all in competition to get into colleges, win scholarships, and to get end-of-year honors. My friend raised his grade from a low C. To a low B. It wasn't that much help to him. He only got a 2 on the AP exam, so he couldn't count it for college credit. His earning a B. In chemistry instead of a C. didn't threaten any honors or scholarships I might have been considered for. It didn't bump his grades up enough that he became Valedictorian instead of someone else. But it was still wrong.

In spite of the fact that it was wrong, it didn't bring him any social sanctions. In spite of the fact that the stated policy was that I would be "right" to turn him, I would have faced far more severe censure among our classmates for reporting him than he would have if his cheating had been made public.

The dictionary defines morality as "1. standards of conduct that are accepted as right or proper; 2. The rightness or wrongness of something as judged by accepted moral standards; 3. A lesson in moral behavior." (Encarta, 1999) All three of those definitions have a strong element of the larger society in them.

Public discussions of moral behavior also emphasize the social nature of judging behavior. In Great Britain, Tony Blair gave a speech where he argued for a "new social morality" that included duties as well as rights ((Lloyd, 1996)). Such comments demonstrate the difficulty of establishing whose morality is the right one. Blair is a politician, and it seems reasonable that he was motivated by his political ambitions at least as much as he was concerned about the moral development of individuals. But in addition, most people probably already include their duties in what they consider moral behavior. For instance, in a family the parents have a duty to provide the minimum amounts of support for their children, including food, clothing, shelter, and education. If they don't send their children to school, they are not doing their duty. If the parents divorce, we require both parents do everything they can to support the children financially. If they fail to feed their children adequately, the state will come in and either make sure that happens or make other provisions for the children. We have duties all around us. Fail to meet those duties, and we are judged by others as flawed.

Hume sees the pressure to be moral as coming from outside ourselves. We want to be happy, and in order to be happy we have to meet other people's expectations. Aristotle believed that individual reason played an important role, but Kant may have been closer to the truth, seeing a combination of reason and will (Davenport, 2000). I that applies to my high school situation. Reason would have told me that I signed a pledge and that I was obligated to fulfill that pledge and turn my friend in for cheating. Will, however -- my own choices over my actions -- dictated that the pledge itself was coercive. That is, it was an attempt by someone else to force me to do something I might not want to do.