Virtue

I am now almost in a position to consider Hume’s explanation of the development of a basic system of morality. But before doing so I must more fully review Hume’s notion of virtue.³²

For Hume, moral evaluations are not based on reason but on sentiment, as I have already argued.

Moral good and evil are certainly distinguish’d by our sentiments, not reason: But these sentiments may arise either from the mere species or appearance of characters and passions, or from reflexions on their tendency to the happiness of mankind, and of particular persons.³⁴

This pleasure and this pain arise from four different sources. For we reap a pleasure from the view of a character, which is naturally fitted to be useful to others, or to the person himself, or which is agreeable to others, or to the person himself.³⁵

Thus Humean virtues are characteristics of any person X that are: a) immediately agreeable or pleasing to X himself; b) immediately agreeable or pleasing to other people (including the evaluating observer);³⁶ c) useful to X himself; or d) useful to society or others.³⁷

Having given the four categories of virtue, and mentioned in passing the causal dependence on sympathy in the move from virtue (in X) to approval (in observer Y), I should here note that Hume frequently talks of virtue in a very broad, non-Christian sense. Virtue in general is a ‘goodness at’³⁸ something in a person. It involves more the classical notion of ‘virtus’ rather than any Christian concept tied to obedience to the moral law. So motives and characters can be good, can be virtuous, because they are useful or because they please, just as motives can generally lead to actions that are good for society or for the actor.

For him there are two types of virtues — natural⁴⁰ and artificial ones. A natural virtue is a disposition to act in a particular way which people naturally have and of which they naturally approve. In a sense it is an “original instinct”,⁴¹ a “primary impulse”.⁴² An artificial virtue, by contrast, is a disposition to act in a way which is not natural (z.e. instinctive) to people and to approve of behaviour not from any natural impulse.⁴³ It is only by some artifice that these actions come to be done and approved. Nevertheless both these types of ‘felt evaluations’ are natural in Hume’s other sense of being common and inseparable from the human species. Inventing or creating by artifice is an empirically observable human characteristic and in this way just as ‘natural’ as any “original principle”⁴⁴ such as limited benevolence. Hume’s distinction between natural and artificial is a subdivision within a framework where both types of evaluation are already seen to be empirically ‘real’. It is just that one is instinctual and the other not.⁴⁵

Hume spends nearly a hundred pages of the Treatise discussing the non-instinctual, artificial virtues, those whose existence he traces to a complex convention. More revealingly perhaps, he discusses them first. They are at the heart of his moral theory. Only when he is finished with them does he turn, in forty pages, to the natural virtues. My interest in this book will also be predominantly with artificial virtues — the artifice by which humans come to feel approval for, indeed come to perform, actions they would not naturally approve of or perform. An understanding of this artifice, after all, may throw some light on law (which is a more formalised system of constraints on action) and its relation to morality.