Sympathy

Sympathy for Hume is not a passion or feeling.¹⁶ It is not itself an emotion like pity, benevolence or compassion.¹⁷ This must be emphasised. Rather, for Hume sympathy is a fundamental property or principle of the mind.

I start by noting that sympathy is a psychological principle.¹⁹ Of course for Hume this principle cannot be known a priori. It is known empirically by observation and causal reason. And that empirical process tells us that there is an easy communication of sentiments between people. As Hume notes, there is a propensity “to receive by communication [others’] inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own”.²⁰ Thus,

A good-natur’d man finds himself in an instant of the same humour with his company; and even the proudest and most surly take a tincture from their countrymen and acquaintance.... Hatred, resentment, esteem, love, courage, mirth and melancholy; all these passions I feel more from communication than from my own natural temper and disposition.²¹

Thus sympathy for Hume is what produces some related feeling in the sympathizer. But notice that what we sympathize with are observed general effects. We might hear a mother and child crying and feel compassion, see a liar publicly exposed and feel embarrassment and shame, or watch a player celebrate scoring the winning goal and feel joy. But never can we know for certain what others feel.

No passion of another discovers itself immediately to the mind. We are only sensible of its causes or effects. From these we infer the passion; and consequently these give rise to our sympathy.²³

On reflection there is nothing surprising about such a Humean position, for on his naturalistic foundations all we can ever know of another must come through our own senses.

We can now see that Hume’s principle of sympathy is itself a disposition humans have to feel what others appear to feel. Being a disposition it is, for Hume, contingent (and in this case, fortuitous). But in understanding sympathy we can also see that general effects are what are sympathized with, not anything that is necessarily an actual feeling.

For my intended purpose of presenting a convincing case for moral scepticism I need not go any further into Hume’s general conception of sympathy save to admit that his model is an unduly mechanical one. By that I mean only that Hume’s explanation is greatly over-simplified,²⁵ not that natural, causal explanation is theoretically impossible nor that sympathy relies on cognitive belief. Here is a list of the features of that Humean model which are essential to my upcoming discussion of the building of a system of moral conventions. They are:

(1) Sympathy produces an actual feeling in the sympathizer. It is a principle of contagiousness or communication or transference of feelings, passions and sentiments.

(2) The transferred feeling in the sympathizer corresponds to those external signs that generally accompany a similar feeling in the person being sympathized with. Loosely speaking, therefore, a non-existent feeling can be sympathized with.

(3) The feelings generated by sympathy can vary.

(4) For imagination to trigger sympathy the being with whose apparent sentiments we sympathize must have some relation to us.²⁶ The closer the relation, the more likely one is to sympathize and the less attenuated the produced feeling is likely to be. In short, sympathy is biased.

Recall that Hume is a moral subjectivist for whom the essence of morality is that people have and share certain feelings, feelings that spur action as well as being the basis of evaluation. But from where do the dispositions come to perform moral actions and to approve of moral actions? This is what Hume seeks to explain. And once it is conceded that not all such dispositions are instinctive or natural — a concession Hume readily makes²⁷ — then a fairly complex explanation of how and why a system of constraints on action arises and is sustained is needed. (Such a system, which after all is what lies at the core of a moral system, would involve a set of actions that is generally performed and generally approved of.) And it is just such an explanation that Hume offers. The principle of sympathy is at the heart of that explanation.

Hume argues that certain instinctual tendencies and inclinations, one’s own sentiments, awareness of others’ sentiments, causal reason and efforts to adopt a steady and general viewpoint are the ingredients which combine to form a basic moral system. The combination is due not to agreement but to convention as I shall show. But as the creation of the moral system depends inter alia on awareness of others’ feelings it is obvious that the presence of sympathy is a needed component in all, or almost all, people. And sympathy must be as Hume describes it, not in fact a separate feeling or passion like benevolence or pity. If sympathy were a separate feeling rather than a principle of communication then I could not feel what you feel²⁸ and so its presence could not be used to explain approval and disapproval as we shall see.

The fact that sympathy produces a feeling also explains how it may causally lead to action. Remember that for Hume a feeling is always required to move action. If sympathy were a mere belief that another was joyous or in agony or that pain is unpleasant this would never be able to move the sympathizer to act. Action requires feeling and sympathy does produce or create a feeling.²⁹

However, the feeling produced by sympathy does not guarantee action. Other feelings, sentiments or inclinations such as fear, greed, laziness or self-interest can outweigh the feeling produced by sympathy. It follows from this fact (that one can sympathize and not act) that once the basic and even the fully formed moral systems have evolved, moral motives alone are not conclusive. I am free to be amoral.

One can now see the sense in which the principle of sympathy lies at the heart of the empirical explanation Hume is going to offer of how and why a basic moral system arises and is sustained. It is a fundamental (or, to avoid taking a side for the moment on whether sympathy is a universal trait of all humans, a very widespread) feature of human nature without which I could not experience your feelings and thus without which Hume’s convention-based explanation could not get started. Sympathy is one causal component of morality. However its presence in a person offers no assurance, reason-based or otherwise, of the moral quality of that person’s character or acts. Sympathy, the disposition to feel what others are feeling, is a purely contingent aspect of human nature which plays a basic part in Hume’s causal explanation of the phenomenon of morality. If people were not sympathetic creatures then what are widely regarded as virtues and vices would not be so regarded and the range of qualities generally approved of would be drastically reduced. More pertinently, approval of moral acts and the characters of people who perform moral acts would be impossible (because explaining approval of what is useful to society, not to mention what is agreeable to others, requires sympathy).

Recall that I have argued already that evaluations include a core element of feeling or sentiment. It is a matter of having certain sentiments. Thus approval of moral acts is the having of a certain type of satisfaction feeling³⁰ in regarding a person’s character or actions from an impartial standpoint. Why do we approve of any acts, let alone moral acts? Because having sympathized with general effects we approve of the supposed cause (which in the case of virtue and vice is a person’s character)³¹ of those effects. But evaluations are certainly not a form or species of sympathy for Hume. Sympathy explains how passions emerge in a person’s consciousness but such passions cannot be analysed or defined in terms of sympathy.

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