moral judgement essay

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Hume’s Moral Philosophy

Hume’s position in ethics, which is based on his empiricist theory of the mind , is best known for asserting four theses: (1) Reason alone cannot be a motive to the will, but rather is the “slave of the passions” (see Section 3 ) (2) Moral distinctions are not derived from reason (see Section 4 ). (3) Moral distinctions are derived from the moral sentiments: feelings of approval (esteem, praise) and disapproval (blame) felt by spectators who contemplate a character trait or action (see Section 7 ). (4) While some virtues and vices are natural (see Section 13 ), others, including justice, are artificial (see Section 9 ). There is heated debate about what Hume intends by each of these theses and how he argues for them. He articulates and defends them within the broader context of his metaethics and his ethic of virtue and vice.

Hume’s main ethical writings are Book 3 of his Treatise of Human Nature , “Of Morals” (which builds on Book 2, “Of the Passions”), his Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals , and some of his Essays . In part the moral Enquiry simply recasts central ideas from the moral part of the Treatise in a more accessible style; but there are important differences. The ethical positions and arguments of the Treatise are set out below, noting where the moral Enquiry agrees; differences between the Enquiry and the Treatise are discussed afterwards.

1. Issues from Hume’s Predecessors

2. the passions and the will, 3. the influencing motives of the will, 4. ethical anti-rationalism.

• 5. Is and Ought

6. The Nature of Moral Judgment

7. sympathy, and the nature and origin of the moral sentiments, 8. the common point of view, 9. artificial and natural virtues, 10.1 the circle, 10.2 the origin of material honesty, 10.3 the motive of honest actions, 11. fidelity to promises, 12. allegiance to government, 13. the natural virtues, 14. differences between the treatise and the moral enquiry, other internet resources, related entries.

Hume inherits from his predecessors several controversies about ethics and political philosophy.

One is a question of moral epistemology: how do human beings become aware of, or acquire knowledge or belief about, moral good and evil, right and wrong, duty and obligation? Ethical theorists and theologians of the day held, variously, that moral good and evil are discovered: (a) by reason in some of its uses (Hobbes, Locke, Clarke), (b) by divine revelation (Filmer), (c) by conscience or reflection on one’s (other) impulses (Butler), or (d) by a moral sense: an emotional responsiveness manifesting itself in approval or disapproval (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson). Hume sides with the moral sense theorists: we gain awareness of moral good and evil by experiencing the pleasure of approval and the uneasiness of disapproval when we contemplate a character trait or action from an imaginatively sensitive and unbiased point of view. Hume maintains against the rationalists that, although reason is needed to discover the facts of any concrete situation and the general social impact of a trait of character or a practice over time, reason alone is insufficient to yield a judgment that something is virtuous or vicious. In the last analysis, the facts as known must trigger a response by sentiment or “taste.”

A related but more metaphysical controversy would be stated thus today: what is the source or foundation of moral norms? In Hume’s day this is the question what is the ground of moral obligation (as distinct from what is the faculty for acquiring moral knowledge or belief). Moral rationalists of the period such as Clarke (and in some moods, Hobbes and Locke) argue that moral standards or principles are requirements of reason — that is, that the very rationality of right actions is the ground of our obligation to perform them. Divine voluntarists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such as Samuel Pufendorf claim that moral obligation or requirement, if not every sort of moral standard, is the product of God’s will. The moral sense theorists (Shaftesbury and Hutcheson) and Butler see all requirements to pursue goodness and avoid evil as consequent upon human nature, which is so structured that a particular feature of our consciousness (whether moral sense or conscience) evaluates the rest. Hume sides with the moral sense theorists on this question: it is because we are the kinds of creatures we are, with the dispositions we have for pain and pleasure, the kinds of familial and friendly interdependence that make up our life together, and our approvals and disapprovals of these, that we are bound by moral requirements at all.

Closely connected with the issue of the foundations of moral norms is the question whether moral requirements are natural or conventional. Hobbes and Mandeville see them as conventional, and Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Locke, and others see them as natural. Hume mocks Mandeville’s contention that the very concepts of vice and virtue are foisted on us by scheming politicians trying to manage us more easily. If there were nothing in our experience and no sentiments in our minds to produce the concept of virtue, Hume says, no lavish praise of heroes could generate it. So to a degree moral requirements have a natural origin. Nonetheless,Hume thinks natural impulses of humanity and dispositions to approve cannot entirely account for our virtue of justice; a correct analysis of that virtue reveals that mankind, an “inventive species,” has cooperatively constructed rules of property and promise. Thus he takes an intermediate position: some virtues are natural, and some are the products of convention.

Linked with these meta-ethical controversies is the dilemma of understanding the ethical life either as the “ancients” do, in terms of virtues and vices of character, or as the “moderns” do, primarily in terms of principles of duty or natural law. While even so law-oriented a thinker as Hobbes has a good deal to say about virtue, the ethical writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries predominantly favor a rule- or law-governed understanding of morals, giving priority to laws of nature or principles of duty. The chief exception here is the moral sense school, which advocates an analysis of the moral life more like that of the Greek and Hellenistic thinkers, in terms of settled traits of character — although they too find a place for principles in their ethics. Hume explicitly favors an ethic of character along “ancient” lines. Yet he insists on a role for rules of duty within the domain of what he calls the artificial virtues.

Hume’s predecessors famously took opposing positions on whether human nature was essentially selfish or benevolent, some arguing that man was so dominated by self-interested motives that for moral requirements to govern us at all they must serve our interests in some way, and others arguing that uncorrupted human beings naturally care about the weal and woe of others and here morality gets its hold. Hume roundly criticizes Hobbes for his insistence on psychological egoism or something close to it, and for his dismal, violent picture of a state of nature. Yet Hume resists the view of Hutcheson that all moral principles can be reduced to our benevolence, in part because he doubts that benevolence can sufficiently overcome our perfectly normal acquisitiveness. According to Hume’s observation, we are both selfish and humane. We possess greed, and also “limited generosity” — dispositions to kindness and liberality which are more powerfully directed toward kin and friends and less aroused by strangers. While for Hume the condition of humankind in the absence of organized society is not a war of all against all, neither is it the law-governed and highly cooperative domain imagined by Locke. It is a hypothetical condition in which we would care for our friends and cooperate with them, but in which self-interest and preference for friends over strangers would make any wider cooperation impossible. Hume’s empirically-based thesis that we are fundamentally loving, parochial, and also selfish creatures underlies his political philosophy.

In the realm of politics, Hume again takes up an intermediate position. He objects both to the doctrine that a subject must passively obey his government no matter how tyrannical it is and to the Lockean thesis that citizens have a natural right to revolution whenever their rulers violate their contractual commitments to the people. He famously criticizes the notion that all political duties arise from an implicit contract that binds later generations who were not party to the original explicit agreement. Hume maintains that the duty to obey one’s government has an independent origin that parallels that of promissory obligation: both are invented to enable people to live together successfully. On his view, human beings can create a society without government, ordered by conventional rules of ownership, transfer of property by consent, and promise-keeping. We superimpose government on such a pre-civil society when it grows large and prosperous; only then do we need to use political power to enforce these rules of justice in order to preserve social cooperation. So the duty of allegiance to government, far from depending on the duty to fulfill promises, provides needed assurance that promises of all sorts will be kept. The duty to submit to our rulers comes into being because reliable submission is necessary to preserve order. Particular governments are legitimate because of their usefulness in preserving society, not because those who wield power were chosen by God or received promises of obedience from the people. In a long-established civil society, whatever ruler or type of government happens to be in place and successfully maintaining order and justice is legitimate, and is owed allegiance. However, there is some legitimate recourse for victims of tyranny: the people may rightly overthrow any government that is so oppressive as not to provide the benefits (peace and security from injustice) for which governments are formed. In his political essays Hume certainly advocates the sort of constitution that protects the people’s liberties, but he justifies it not based on individual natural rights or contractual obligations but based on the greater long-range good of society.

According to Hume’s theory of the mind, the passions (what we today would call emotions, feelings, and desires) are impressions rather than ideas (original, vivid and lively perceptions that are not copied from other perceptions). The direct passions, which include desire, aversion, hope, fear, grief, and joy, are those that “arise immediately from good or evil, from pain or pleasure” that we experience or think about in prospect (T 2.1.1.4, T 2.3.9.2); however he also groups with them some instincts of unknown origin, such as the bodily appetites and the desires that good come to those we love and harm to those we hate, which do not proceed from pain and pleasure but produce them (T 2.3.9.7). The indirect passions, primarily pride, humility (shame), love and hatred, are generated in a more complex way, but still one involving either the thought or experience of pain or pleasure. Intentional actions are caused by the direct passions (including the instincts). Of the indirect passions Hume says that pride, humility, love and hatred do not directly cause action; it is not clear whether he thinks this true of all the indirect passions.

Hume is traditionally regarded as a compatibilist about freedom and determinism, because in his discussion in the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding he argues that if we understand the doctrines of liberty and necessity properly, all mankind consistently believe both that human actions are the products of causal necessity and that they are free. In the Treatise , however, he explicitly repudiates the doctrine of liberty as “absurd... in one sense, and unintelligible in any other” (T 2.3.2.1). The two treatments, however, surprisingly enough, are entirely consistent. Hume construes causal necessity to mean the same as causal connection (or rather, intelligible causal connection), as he himself analyzes this notion in his own theory of causation: either the “constant union and conjunction of like objects,” or that together with “the inference of the mind from the one to the other” (ibid.). In both works he argues that just as we discover necessity (in this sense) to hold between the movements of material bodies, we discover just as much necessity to hold between human motives, character traits, and circumstances of action, on the one hand, and human behavior on the other. He says in the Treatise that the liberty of indifference is the negation of necessity in this sense; this is the notion of liberty that he there labels absurd, and identifies with chance or randomness (which can be no real power in nature) both in the Treatise and the first (epistemological) Enquiry . Human actions are not free in this sense. However, Hume allows in the Treatise that they are sometimes free in the sense of ‘liberty’ which is opposed to violence or constraint. This is the sense on which Hume focuses in EcHU: “ a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will; ” which everyone has “who is not a prisoner and in chains” (EcHU 8.1.23, Hume’s emphasis). It is this that is entirely compatible with necessity in Hume’s sense. So the positions in the two works are the same, although the polemical emphasis is so different — iconoclastic toward the libertarian view in the Treatise , and conciliatory toward “all mankind” in the first Enquiry .

Hume argues, as well, that the causal necessity of human actions is not only compatible with moral responsibility but requisite to it. To hold an agent morally responsible for a bad action, it is not enough that the action be morally reprehensible; we must impute the badness of the fleeting act to the enduring agent. Not all harmful or forbidden actions incur blame for the agent; those done by accident, for example, do not. It is only when, and because, the action’s cause is some enduring passion or trait of character in the agent that she is to blame for it.

According to Hume, intentional actions are the immediate product of passions, in particular the direct passions, including the instincts. He does not appear to allow that any other sort of mental state could, on its own, give rise to an intentional action except by producing a passion, though he does not argue for this. The motivating passions, in their turn, are produced in the mind by specific causes, as we see early in the Treatise where he first explains the distinction between impressions of sensation and impressions of reflection:

An impression first strikes upon the senses, and makes us perceive heat or cold, thirst or hunger, pleasure or pain, of some kind or other. Of this impression there is a copy taken by the mind, which remains after the impression ceases; and this we call an idea. This idea of pleasure or pain, when it returns upon the soul, produces the new impressions of desire and aversion, hope and fear, which may properly be called impressions of reflection, because derived from it. (T 1.1.2.2)

Thus ideas of pleasure or pain are the causes of these motivating passions. Not just any ideas of pleasure or pain give rise to motivating passions, however, but only ideas of those pleasures or pains we believe exist or will exist (T 1.3.10.3). More generally, the motivating passions of desire and aversion, hope and fear, joy and grief, and a few others are impressions produced by the occurrence in the mind either of a feeling of pleasure or pain, whether physical or psychological, or of a believed idea of pleasure or pain to come (T 2.1.1.4, T 2.3.9.2). These passions, together with the instincts (hunger, lust, and so on), are all the motivating passions that Hume discusses.

The will, Hume claims, is an immediate effect of pain or pleasure (T 2.3.1.2) and “exerts itself” when either pleasure or the absence of pain can be attained by any action of the mind or body (T 2.3.9.7). The will, however, is merely that impression we feel when we knowingly give rise to an action (T 2.3.1.2); so while Hume is not explicit (and perhaps not consistent) on this matter, he seems not to regard the will as itself a (separate) cause of action. The causes of action he describes are those he has already identified: the instincts and the other direct passions.

Hume famously sets himself in opposition to most moral philosophers, ancient and modern, who talk of the combat of passion and reason, and who urge human beings to regulate their actions by reason and to grant it dominion over their contrary passions. He claims to prove that “reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will,” and that reason alone “can never oppose passion in the direction of the will” (T 413). His view is not, of course, that reason plays no role in the generation of action; he grants that reason provides information, in particular about means to our ends, which makes a difference to the direction of the will. His thesis is that reason alone cannot move us to action; the impulse to act itself must come from passion. The doctrine that reason alone is merely the “slave of the passions,” i.e., that reason pursues knowledge of abstract and causal relations solely in order to achieve passions’ goals and provides no impulse of its own, is defended in the Treatise , but not in the second Enquiry , although in the latter he briefly asserts the doctrine without argument. Hume gives three arguments in the Treatise for the motivational “inertia” of reason alone.

The first is a largely empirical argument based on the two rational functions of the understanding. The understanding discovers the abstract relations of ideas by demonstration (a process of comparing ideas and finding congruencies and incongruencies); and it also discovers the causal (and other probabilistic) relations of objects that are revealed in experience. Demonstrative reasoning is never the cause of any action by itself: it deals in ideas rather than realities, and we only find it useful in action when we have some purpose in view and intend to use its discoveries to inform our inferences about (and so enable us to manipulate) causes and effects. Probable or cause-and-effect reasoning does play a role in deciding what to do, but we see that it only functions as an auxiliary, and not on its own. When we anticipate pain or pleasure from some source, we feel aversion or propensity to that object and “are carry’d to avoid or embrace what will give us” the pain or pleasure (T 2.3.3.3). Our aversion or propensity makes us seek the causes of the expected source of pain or pleasure, and we use causal reasoning to discover what they are. Once we do, our impulse naturally extends itself to those causes, and we act to avoid or embrace them. Plainly the impulse to act does not arise from the reasoning but is only directed by it. “’Tis from the prospect of pain or pleasure that the aversion or propensity arises...” (ibid.). Probable reasoning is merely the discovering of causal connections, and knowledge that A causes B never concerns us if we are indifferent to A and to B. Thus, neither demonstrative nor probable reasoning alone causes action.

The second argument is a corollary of the first. It takes as a premise the conclusion just reached, that reason alone cannot produce an impulse to act. Given that, can reason prevent action or resist passion in controlling the will? To stop a volition or retard the impulse of an existing passion would require a contrary impulse. If reason alone could give rise to such a contrary impulse, it would have an original influence on the will (a capacity to cause intentional action, when unopposed); which, according to the previous argument, it lacks. Therefore reason alone cannot resist any impulse to act. Therefore, what offers resistance to our passions cannot be reason of itself. Hume later proposes that when we restrain imprudent or immoral impulses, the contrary impulse comes also from passion, but often from a passion so “calm” that we confuse it with reason.

The third or Representation argument is different in kind. Hume offers it initially only to show that a passion cannot be opposed by or be contradictory to “truth and reason”; later (T 3.1.1.9), he repeats and expands it to argue that volitions and actions as well cannot be so. One might suppose he means to give another argument to show that reason alone cannot provide a force to resist passion. Yet the Representation Argument is not empirical, and does not talk of forces or impulses. Passions (and volitions and actions), Hume says, do not refer to other entities; they are “original existence[s],” (T 2.3.3.5), “original facts and realities” (T3.1.1.9), not mental representations of other things. Since Hume here understands representation in terms of copying, he says a passion has no “representative quality, which renders it a copy of any other existence or modification” (T 2.3.3.5). Contradiction to truth and reason, however, consists in “the disagreement of ideas, consider’d as copies, with those objects, which they represent” (ibid.). Therefore, a passion (or volition or action), not having this feature, cannot be opposed by truth and reason. The argument allegedly proves two points: first, that actions cannot be reasonable or unreasonable; second, that “reason cannot immediately prevent or produce any action by contradicting or approving of it” (T3.1.1.10). The point here is not merely the earlier, empirical observation that the rational activity of the understanding does not generate an impulse in the absence of an expectation of pain or pleasure. The main point is that, because passions, volitions, and actions have no content suitable for assessment by reason, reason cannot assess prospective motives or actions as rational or irrational; and therefore reason cannot, by so assessing them, create or obstruct them. By contrast, reason can assess a potential opinion as rational or irrational; and by endorsing the opinion, reason will (that is, we will) adopt it, while by contradicting the opinion, reason will destroy our credence in it. The Representation Argument, then, makes a point a priori about the relevance of the functions of the understanding to the generation of actions. Interpreters disagree about exactly how to parse this argument, whether it is sound, and its importance to Hume’s project.

Hume allows that, speaking imprecisely, we often say a passion is unreasonable because it arises in response to a mistaken judgment or opinion, either that something (a source of pleasure or uneasiness) exists, or that it may be obtained or avoided by a certain means. In just these two cases a passion may be called unreasonable, but strictly speaking even here it is not the passion but the judgment that is so. Once we correct the mistaken judgment, “our passions yield to our reason without any opposition,” so there is still no combat of passion and reason (T 2.3.3.7). And there is no other instance of passion contrary to reason. Hume famously declaims, “’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. ‘Tis not contrary to reason for me to chuse my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. ‘Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledg’d lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than for the latter.” (2.3.3.6)

Interpreters disagree as to whether Hume is an instrumentalist or a skeptic about practical reason. Either way, Hume denies that reason can evaluate the ends people set themselves; only passions can select ends, and reason cannot evaluate passions. Instrumentalists understand the claim that reason is the slave of the passions to allow that reason not only discovers the causally efficacious means to our ends (a task of theoretical causal reasoning) but also requires us to take them. If Hume regards the failure to take the known means to one’s end as contrary to reason, then on Hume’s view reason has a genuinely practical aspect: it can classify some actions as unreasonable. Skeptical interpreters read Hume, instead, as denying that reason imposes any requirements on action, even the requirement to take the known, available means to one’s end. They point to the list of extreme actions that are not contrary to reason (such as preferring one’s own lesser good to one’s greater), and to the Representation Argument, which denies that any passions, volitions, or actions are of such a nature as to be contrary to reason. Hume never says explicitly that failing to take the known means to one’s end is either contrary to reason or not contrary to reason (it is not one of the extreme cases in his list). The classificatory point in the Representation Argument favors the reading of Hume as a skeptic about practical reason; but that argument is absent from the moral Enquiry .

Hume claims that moral distinctions are not derived from reason but rather from sentiment. His rejection of ethical rationalism is at least two-fold. Moral rationalists tend to say, first, that moral properties are discovered by reason, and also that what is morally good is in accord with reason (even that goodness consists in reasonableness) and what is morally evil is unreasonable. Hume rejects both theses. Some of his arguments are directed to one and some to the other thesis, and in places it is unclear which he means to attack.

In the Treatise he argues against the epistemic thesis (that we discover good and evil by reasoning) by showing that neither demonstrative nor probable/causal reasoning has vice and virtue as its proper objects. Demonstrative reasoning discovers relations of ideas, and vice and virtue are not identical with any of the four philosophical relations (resemblance, contrariety, degrees in quality, or proportions in quantity and number) whose presence can be demonstrated. Nor could they be identical with any other abstract relation; for such relations can also obtain between items such as trees that are incapable of moral good or evil. Furthermore, were moral vice and virtue discerned by demonstrative reasoning, such reasoning would reveal their inherent power to produce motives in all who discern them; but no causal connections can be discovered a priori . Causal reasoning, by contrast, does infer matters of fact pertaining to actions, in particular their causes and effects; but the vice of an action (its wickedness) is not found in its causes or effects, but is only apparent when we consult the sentiments of the observer. Therefore moral good and evil are not discovered by reason alone.

Hume also attempts in the Treatise to establish the other anti-rationalist thesis, that virtue is not the same as reasonableness and vice is not contrary to reason. He gives two arguments for this. The first, very short, argument he claims follows directly from the Representation Argument, whose conclusion was that passions, volitions, and actions can be neither reasonable nor unreasonable. Actions, he observes, can be laudable or blamable. Since actions cannot be reasonable or against reason, it follows that “[l]audable and blameable are not the same with reasonable or unreasonable” (T 458). The properties are not identical.

The second and more famous argument makes use of the conclusion defended earlier that reason alone cannot move us to act. As we have seen, reason alone “can never immediately prevent or produce any action by contradicting or approving of it” (T 458). Morality — this argument goes on — influences our passions and actions: we are often impelled to or deterred from action by our opinions of obligation or injustice. Therefore morals cannot be derived from reason alone. This argument is first introduced as showing it impossible “from reason alone... to distinguish betwixt moral good and evil” (T 457) — that is, it is billed as establishing the epistemic thesis. But Hume also says that, like the little direct argument above, it proves that “actions do not derive their merit from a conformity to reason, nor their blame from a contrariety to it” (T458): it is not the reasonableness of an action that makes it good, or its unreasonableness that makes it evil.

This argument about motives concludes that moral judgments or evaluations are not the products of reason alone. From this many draw the sweeping conclusion that for Hume moral evaluations are not beliefs or opinions of any kind, but lack all cognitive content. That is, they take the argument to show that Hume holds a non-propositional view of moral evaluations — and indeed, given his sentimentalism, that he is an emotivist: one who holds that moral judgments are meaningless ventings of emotion that can be neither true nor false. Such a reading should be met with caution, however. For Hume, to say that something is not a product of reason alone is not equivalent to saying it is not a truth-evaluable judgment or belief. Hume does not consider all our (propositional) beliefs and opinions to be products of reason; some arise directly from sense perception, for example, and some from sympathy. Also, perhaps there are (propositional) beliefs we acquire via probable reasoning but not by such reasoning alone . One possible example is the belief that some object is a cause of pleasure, a belief that depends upon prior impressions as well as probable reasoning.

Another concern about the famous argument about motives is how it could be sound. In order for it to yield its conclusion, it seems that its premise that morality (or a moral judgment) influences the will must be construed to say that moral evaluations alone move us to action, without the help of some (further) passion. This is a controversial claim and not one for which Hume offers any support. The premise that reason alone cannot influence action is also difficult to interpret. It would seem, given his prior arguments for this claim (e.g. that the mere discovery of a causal relation does not produce an impulse to act), that Hume means by it not only that the faculty of reason or the activity of reasoning alone cannot move us, but also that the conclusions of such activity alone (such as recognition of a relation of ideas or belief in a causal connection) cannot produce a motive. Yet it is hard to see how Hume, given his theory of causation, can argue that no mental item of a certain type (such as a causal belief) can possibly cause motivating passion or action. Such a claim could not be supported a priori . And in Treatise 1.3.10, “Of the influence of belief,” he seems to assert very plainly that some causal beliefs do cause motivating passions, specifically beliefs about pleasure and pain in prospect. It is possible that Hume only means to say, in the premise that reason alone cannot influence action, that reasoning processes cannot generate actions as their logical conclusions; but that would introduce an equivocation, since he surely does not mean to say, in the other premise, that moral evaluations generate actions as their logical conclusions. The transition from premises to conclusion also seems to rely on a principle of transitivity (If A alone cannot produce X and B produces X, then A alone cannot produce B), which is doubtful but receives no defense.

Commentators have proposed various interpretations to avoid these difficulties. One approach is to construe ‘reason’ as the name of a process or activity, the comparing of ideas (reasoning), and to construe ‘morals’ as Hume uses it in this argument to mean the activity of moral discrimination (making a moral distinction). If we understand the terms this way, the argument can be read not as showing that the faculty of reason (or the beliefs it generates) cannot cause us to make moral judgments, but rather as showing that the reasoning process (comparing ideas) is distinct from the process of moral discrimination. This interpretation does not rely on an assumption about the transitivity of causation and is consistent with Hume’s theory of causation.

5. Is and ought

Hume famously closes the section of the Treatise that argues against moral rationalism by observing that other systems of moral philosophy, proceeding in the ordinary way of reasoning, at some point make an unremarked transition from premises whose parts are linked only by “is” to conclusions whose parts are linked by “ought” (expressing a new relation) — a deduction that seems to Hume “altogether inconceivable” (T3.1.1.27). Attention to this transition would “subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason” (ibid.).

Few passages in Hume’s work have generated more interpretive controversy.

According to the dominant twentieth-century interpretation, Hume says here that no ought-judgment may be correctly inferred from a set of premises expressed only in terms of ‘is,’ and the vulgar systems of morality commit this logical fallacy. This is usually thought to mean something much more general: that no ethical or indeed evaluative conclusion whatsoever may be validly inferred from any set of purely factual premises. A number of present-day philosophers, including R. M. Hare, endorse this putative thesis of logic, calling it “Hume’s Law.” (As Francis Snare observes, on this reading Hume must simply assume that no purely factual propositions are themselves evaluative, as he does not argue for this.) Some interpreters think Hume commits himself here to a non-propositional or noncognitivist view of moral judgment — the view that moral judgments do not state facts and are not truth-evaluable. (If Hume has already used the famous argument about the motivational influence of morals to establish noncognitivism, then the is/ought paragraph may merely draw out a trivial consequence of it. If moral evaluations are merely expressions of feeling without propositional content, then of course they cannot be inferred from any propositional premises.) Some see the paragraph as denying ethical realism, excluding values from the domain of facts.

Other interpreters — the more cognitivist ones — see the paragraph about ‘is’ and ‘ought’ as doing none of the above. Some read it as simply providing further support for Hume’s extensive argument that moral properties are not discernible by demonstrative reason, leaving open whether ethical evaluations may be conclusions of cogent probable arguments. Others interpret it as making a point about the original discovery of virtue and vice, which must involve the use of sentiment. On this view, one cannot make the initial discovery of moral properties by inference from nonmoral premises using reason alone; rather, one requires some input from sentiment. It is not simply by reasoning from the abstract and causal relations one has discovered that one comes to have the ideas of virtue and vice; one must respond to such information with feelings of approval and disapproval. Note that on this reading it is compatible with the is/ought paragraph that once a person has the moral concepts as the result of prior experience of the moral sentiments, he or she may reach some particular moral conclusions by inference from causal, factual premises (stated in terms of ‘is’) about the effects of character traits on the sentiments of observers. They point out that Hume himself makes such inferences frequently in his writings.

On Hume’s view, what is a moral evaluation? Four main interpretations have significant textual support. First, as we have seen, the nonpropositional view says that for Hume a moral evaluation does not express any proposition or state any fact; either it gives vent to a feeling, or it is itself a feeling (Flew, Blackburn, Snare, Bricke). (A more refined form of this interpretation allows that moral evaluations have some propositional content, but claims that for Hume their essential feature, as evaluations, is non-propositional.) The subjective description view, by contrast, says that for Hume moral evaluations describe the feelings of the spectator, or the feelings a spectator would have were she to contemplate the trait or action from the common point of view. Often grouped with the latter view is the third, dispositional interpretation, which understands moral evaluations as factual judgments to the effect that the evaluated trait or action is so constituted as to cause feelings of approval or disapproval in a (suitably characterized) spectator (Mackie, in one of his proposals). On the dispositional view, in saying some trait is good we attribute to the trait the dispositional property of being such as to elicit approval. A fourth interpretation distinguishes two psychological states that might be called a moral evaluation: an occurrent feeling of approval or disapproval (which is not truth-apt), and a moral belief or judgment that is propositional. Versions of this fourth interpretation differ in what they take to be the content of that latter mental state. One version says that the moral judgments, as distinct from the moral feelings, are factual judgments about the moral sentiments (Capaldi). A distinct version, the moral sensing view, treats the moral beliefs as ideas copied from the impressions of approval or disapproval that represent a trait of character or an action as having whatever quality it is that one experiences in feeling the moral sentiment (Cohon). This last view emphasizes Hume’s claim that moral good and evil are like heat, cold, and colors as understood in “modern philosophy,” which are experienced directly by sensation, but about which we form beliefs.

Our moral evaluations of persons and their character traits, on Hume’s positive view, arise from our sentiments. The virtues and vices are those traits the disinterested contemplation of which produces approval and disapproval, respectively, in whoever contemplates the trait, whether the trait’s possessor or another. These moral sentiments are emotions (in the present-day sense of that term) with a unique phenomenological quality, and also with a special set of causes. They are caused by contemplating the person or action to be evaluated without regard to our self-interest, and from a common or general perspective that compensates for certain likely distortions in the observer’s sympathies, as explained in Section 8 . Approval (approbation) is a pleasure, and disapproval (disapprobation) a pain or uneasiness. The moral sentiments are typically calm rather than violent, although they can be intensified by our awareness of the moral responses of others. They are types of pleasure and uneasiness that are associated with the passions of pride and humility, love and hatred: when we feel moral approval of another we tend to love or esteem her, and when we approve a trait of our own we are proud of it. Some interpreters analyze the moral sentiments as themselves forms of these four passions; others argue that Hume’s moral sentiments tend to cause the latter passions. We distinguish which traits are virtuous and which are vicious by means of our feelings of approval and disapproval toward the traits; our approval of actions is derived from approval of the traits we suppose to have given rise to them. We can determine, by observing the various sorts of traits toward which we feel approval, that every such trait — every virtue — has at least one of the following four characteristics: it is either immediately agreeable to the person who has it or to others, or it is useful (advantageous over the longer term) to its possessor or to others. Vices prove to have the parallel features: they are either immediately disagreeable or disadvantageous either to the person who has them or to others. These are not definitions of ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’ but empirical generalizations about the traits as first identified by their effects on the moral sentiments.

In the Treatise Hume details the causes of the moral sentiments, in doing so explaining why agreeable and advantageous traits prove to be the ones that generate approval. He claims that the sentiments of moral approval and disapproval are caused by some of the operations of sympathy, which is not a feeling but rather a psychological mechanism that enables one person to receive by communication the sentiments of another (more or less what we would call empathy today).

Sympathy in general operates as follows. First, observation of the outward expression of another person’s “affection” (feeling or sentiment) in his “countenance and conversation” conveys the idea of his passion into my mind. So does observing the typical cause of a passion: for example, viewing the instruments laid out for another’s surgery will evoke ideas in me of fear and pain. We at all times possess a maximally vivid and forceful impression of ourselves. According to Hume’s associationism, vivacity of one perception is automatically transferred to those others that are related to it by resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect. Here resemblance and contiguity are primary. All human beings, regardless of their differences, are similar in bodily structure and in the types and causes of their passions. The person I observe or consider may further resemble me in more specific shared features such as character or nationality. Because of the resemblance and my contiguity to the observed person, the idea of his passion is associated in my mind with my impression of myself, and acquires great vivacity from it. The sole difference between an idea and an impression is the degree of liveliness or vivacity each possesses. So great is this acquired vivacity that the idea of his passion in my mind becomes an impression, and I actually experience the passion. When I come to share in the affections of strangers, and feel pleasure because they are pleased, as I do when I experience an aesthetic enjoyment of a well-designed ship or fertile field that is not my own, my pleasure can only be caused by sympathy (T 2.2.2–8, 3.3.1.7–8). Similarly, Hume observes, when we reflect upon a character or mental quality knowing its tendency either to the benefit or enjoyment of strangers or to their harm or uneasiness, we come to feel enjoyment when the trait is beneficial or agreeable to those strangers, and uneasiness when the trait is harmful or disagreeable to them. This reaction of ours to the tendency of a character trait to affect the sentiments of those with whom we have no special affectionate ties can only be explained by sympathy.

We greatly approve the artificial virtues (justice with respect to property, allegiance to government, and dispositions to obey the laws of nations and the rules of modesty and good manners), which (Hume argues) are inventions contrived solely for the interest of society. We approve them in all times and places, even where our own interest is not at stake, solely for their tendency to benefit the whole society of that time or place. This instance confirms that “the reflecting on the tendency of characters and mental qualities, is sufficient to give us the sentiments of approbation and blame” (T 3.3.1.9). The sympathy-generated pleasure, then, is the moral approbation we feel toward these traits of character. We find the character traits — the causes — agreeable because they are the means to ends we find agreeable as a result of sympathy. Hume extends this analysis to the approval of most of the natural virtues. Those traits of which we approve naturally (without any social contrivance), such as beneficence, clemency, and moderation, also tend to the good of individuals or all of society. So our approval of those can be explained in precisely the same way, via sympathy with the pleasure of those who receive benefit. And since the imagination is more struck by what is particular than by what is general, manifestations of the natural virtues, which directly benefit any individual to whom they are directed, are even more apt to give pleasure via sympathy than are the manifestations of justice, which may harm identifiable individuals in some cases though they contribute to a pattern of action beneficial to society as a whole (T 3.3.1.13).

As we saw, the moral sentiments are produced by sympathy with those affected by a trait or action. Such sympathetically-acquired feelings are distinct from our self-interested responses, and an individual of discernment learns to distinguish her moral sentiments (which are triggered by contemplating another’s character trait “in general”) from the pleasure or uneasiness she may feel when responding to a trait with reference to her “particular interest,” for example when another’s strength of character makes him a formidable opponent (T 3.1.2.4).

However, the sympathetic transmission of sentiments can vary in effectiveness depending upon the degree of resemblance and contiguity between the observer and the person with whom he sympathizes. I receive the sentiments of someone very much like me or very close to me in time or place far more strongly than I do those of someone unlike me or more remote from me in location or in history. Yet the moral assessments we make do not vary depending upon whether the person we evaluate resembles us in language, sex, or temperament, or is near or far. Indeed, our moral assessments of people remain stable even though our position with respect to them changes over time. Furthermore, sympathy only brings us people’s actual sentiments or what we believe to be their actual sentiments; yet we feel moral approval of character traits that we know produce no real happiness for anyone, because, for example, their possessor is isolated in a prison. To handle these objections to the sympathy theory, and to explain more generally how, on a sentiment-based ethical theory, moral evaluations made by one individual at different times and many individuals in a community tend to be fairly uniform, Hume claims that people do not make their moral judgments from their own individual points of view, but instead select “some common point of view, from which they might survey their object, and which might cause it to appear the same to all of them” (T 3.3.1.30). At least with respect to natural virtues and vices, this common point of view is composed of the intimate perspectives of the various individuals who have direct interactions with the person being evaluated. To make a moral evaluation I must sympathize with each of these persons in their dealings with the subject of my evaluation; the blame or praise I give as a result of this imaginative exercise is my genuine moral assessment of the subject’s character. In that assessment I also overlook the small external accidents of fortune that might render an individual’s trait ineffectual, and respond to traits that render a character typically “fitted to be beneficial to society,” even if circumstances do not permit it to cause that benefit (T 3.3.1.20). Thus I acquire by sympathy the pleasure or uneasiness that I imagine people would feel were the trait able to operate as it ordinarily does. “Experience soon teaches us this method of correcting our sentiments, or at least, of correcting our language, where the sentiments are more stubborn and inalterable” (T 3.3.1.16).

The standard object of moral evaluation is a “quality of mind,” a character trait. (As we have seen, for Hume evaluation of an action is derived from evaluation of the inner quality we suppose to have given rise to it.) The typical moral judgment is that some trait, such as a particular person’s benevolence or laziness, is a virtue or a vice. A character trait, for Hume, is a psychological disposition consisting of a tendency to feel a certain sentiment or combination of sentiments, ones that often move their possessor to action. We reach a moral judgment by feeling approval or disapproval upon contemplating someone’s trait in a disinterested way from the common point of view. So moral approval is a favorable sentiment in the observer elicited by the observed person’s disposition to have certain motivating sentiments. Thus moral approval is a sentiment that is directed toward sentiments, or the dispositions to have them.

In the Treatise Hume emphasizes that “our sense of every kind of virtue is not natural; but … there are some virtues, that produce pleasure and approbation by means of an artifice or contrivance, which arises from the circumstances and necessities of mankind” (T 3.2.1.1). He divides the virtues into those that are natural — in that our approval of them does not depend upon any cultural inventions or jointly-made social rules — and those that are artificial (dependent both for their existence as character traits and for their ethical merit on the presence of conventional rules for the common good), and he gives separate accounts of the two kinds. The traits he calls natural virtues are more refined and completed forms of those human sentiments we could expect to find even in people who belonged to no society but cooperated only within small familial groups. The traits he calls artificial virtues are the ones we need for successful im personal cooperation; our natural sentiments are too partial to give rise to these without intervention. In the Treatise Hume includes among the artificial virtues honesty with respect to property (which he often calls equity or “justice,” though it is a strangely narrow use of the term), fidelity to promises (sometimes also listed under “justice”), allegiance to one’s government, conformity to the laws of nations (for princes), chastity (refraining from non-marital sex) and modesty (both primarily for women and girls), and good manners. A great number of individual character traits are listed as natural virtues, but the main types discussed in detail are greatness of mind (“a hearty pride, or self-esteem, if well-concealed and well-founded,” T 3.2.2.11), goodness or benevolence (an umbrella category covering generosity, gratitude, friendship, and more), and such natural abilities as prudence and wit, which, Hume argues, have a reasonably good claim to be included under the title moral virtue, though traditionally they are not. Hume does not explicitly draw a distinction between artificial and natural virtues in the moral Enquiry .

In the Treatise Hume argues in turn that the virtues of material honesty and of faithfulness to promises and contracts are artificial, not natural virtues. Both arguments fall into at least two stages: one to show that if we suppose the given character trait to exist and to win our approval without help from any cooperative social arrangement, paradoxes arise; and another, longer stage to explain how the relevant convention might have come into being and to refute those with a different genetic story. He also explains the social construction of the other artificial virtues and what social good they serve.

10. Honesty with respect to Property

Hume offers a rather cryptic argument to show that our approval of material honesty must be the product of collaborative human effort (convention). When we approve an action, he says, we regard it merely as the sign of the motivating passion in the agent’s “mind and temper” that produced it; our evaluation of the action is derived from our assessment of this inner motive. Therefore all actions deemed virtuous derive their goodness only from virtuous motives — motives we approve. It follows from this that the motive that originally “bestows a merit on any action” can never be moral approval of that action (awareness of its virtue), but must be a non-moral, motivating psychological state — that is, a state distinct from the “regard to the virtue” of an action (moral approval or disapproval) (T 3.2.1.4). For if the virtue-bestowing motive of the action were the agent’s sense that the act would be virtuous to do — if that were why he did it, and why we approved it — then we would be reasoning in a vicious circle: we would approve of the action derivatively, because we approve of the agent’s motive, and this motive would consist of approval of the action, which can only be based on approval of a motive... The basis of our approval could not be specified. For every virtue, therefore, there must be some non-moral motive that characteristically motivates actions expressive of that virtue, which motive, by eliciting our approval, makes the actions so motivated virtuous. The virtue of an action of this species would be established by its being done from this non-moral motive, and only then could an agent also or alternatively be moved so to act by her derivative concern for the virtue of the act. However, Hume observes that there is no morally approved (and so virtue-bestowing), non-moral motive of honest action. The only approved, reliable motive that we can find for acts of “equity” is a moral one, the sense of virtue or “regard to the honesty” of the actions. The honest individual repays a loan not (merely) out of self-interest or concern for the well-being of the lender (who may be a “profligate debauchee” who will reap only harm from his possessions), but from a “regard to justice, and abhorrence of villainy and knavery” (T 3.2.1.9, 13). This, however, is “evident sophistry and reasoning in a circle…” Now nature cannot have “establish’d a sophistry, and render’d it necessary and unavoidable…”; therefore, “the sense of justice and injustice is not deriv’d from nature, but arises artificially… from education, and human conventions” (T 3.2.1.17). Whatever, exactly, the logic of this argument is supposed to be, Hume’s intent is to show that if we imagine equity to be a natural virtue we commit ourselves to a sophistry, and therefore honesty is instead man-made.

Hume offers an account of the genesis of the social convention that creates honesty with respect to property, and this is meant to cope in some way with the circularity he identifies. How it does so is a matter of interpretive controversy, as we will see.

Hume next poses two questions about the rules of ownership of property and the associated virtue of material honesty: what is the artifice by which human beings create them, and why do we attribute moral goodness and evil to the observance and neglect of these rules?

By nature human beings have many desires but are individually ill-equipped with strength, natural weapons, or natural skills to satisfy them. We can remedy these natural defects by means of social cooperation: shared strength, division of labor, and mutual aid in times of individual weakness. It occurs to people to form a society as a consequence of their experience with the small family groups into which they are born, groups united initially by sexual attraction and familial love, but in time demonstrating the many practical advantages of working together with others. However, in the conditions of moderate scarcity in which we find ourselves, and given the portable nature of the goods we desire, our untrammeled greed and naturally “confined generosity” (generosity to those dear to us in preference to others) tends to create conflict or undermine cooperation, destroying collaborative arrangements among people who are not united by ties of affection, and leaving us all materially poor. No remedy for this natural partiality is to be found in “our natural uncultivated ideas of morality” (T 3.2.2.8); an invention is needed.

Hume argues that we create the rules of ownership of property originally in order to satisfy our avidity for possessions for ourselves and our loved ones, by linking material goods more securely to particular individuals so as to avoid conflict. Within small groups of cooperators, individuals signal to one another a willingness to conform to a simple rule: to refrain from the material goods others come to possess by labor or good fortune, provided those others will observe the same restraint toward them. (This rule will in time require more detail: specific rules determining who may enjoy which goods initially and how goods may be transferred.) This signalling is not a promise (which cannot occur without another, similar convention), but an expression of conditional intention. The usefulness of such a custom is so obvious that others will soon catch on and express a similar intention, and the rest will fall in line. The convention develops tacitly, as do conventions of language and money. When an individual within such a small society violates this rule, the others are aware of it and exclude the offender from their cooperative activities. Once the convention is in place, justice (of this sort) is defined as conformity with the convention, injustice as violation of it; indeed, the convention defines property rights, ownership, financial obligation, theft, and related concepts, which had no application before the convention was introduced. So useful and obvious is this invention that human beings would not live for long in isolated family groups or in fluctuating larger groups with unstable possession of goods; their ingenuity would quickly enable them to invent property, so as to reap the substantial economic benefits of cooperation in larger groups in which there would be reliable possession of the product, and they would thus better satisfy their powerful natural greed by regulating it with rules of justice.

Greed, and more broadly, self-interest, is the motive for inventing property; but we need a further explanation why we think of justice (adherence to the rules of ownership) as virtuous, and injustice (their violation) as vicious. Hume accounts for the moralization of property as follows. As our society grows larger, we may cease to see our own property violations as a threat to the continued existence of a stable economic community, and this reduces our incentive to conform. But when we consider violations by others, we partake by sympathy in the uneasiness these violations cause to their victims and all of society. Such disinterested uneasiness, and the concomitant pleasure we feel on contemplating the public benefits of adherence, are instances of moral disapproval and approval. We extend these feelings to our own behavior as a result of general rules. This process is “forwarded by the artifice of politicians” (T 3.2.2.25), who assist nature by cultivating widespread esteem for justice and abhorrence of injustice in order to govern more easily. Private education assists in this further artifice. Thus material honesty becomes a virtue.

Does this account resolve the circularity problem? Is there any non-moral motive of honest action? Some interpreters say yes, it is greed redirected, which removes the circle. But this presents two difficulties: first, our greed is not in fact best satisfied by just action in every case, and second, Hume denies that this motive is approved. Some interpret Hume as coping with the first difficulty by supposing that politicians and parents deceive us into thinking, falsely, that every individual just act advances the interests of the agent; or they claim that Hume himself mistakenly thought so, at least in the Treatise (see Baron, Haakonssen, and Gauthier). Others claim that Hume identifies a non-moral motive of honest action (albeit an artificial one) other than redirected greed, such as a disposition to treat the rules of justice as themselves reason-giving (Darwall) or having a policy of conforming to the rules of justice as a system (Garrett). Still others say there is no non-moral motive of honest action, and Hume escapes from the circle by relaxing this ostensibly universal requirement on virtuous types of behavior, limiting it to the naturally virtuous kinds. These interpreters either claim that there is no particular motive needed to evoke approval for conformity to the rules of property — mere behavior is enough (Mackie) — or that we approve of a motivating form of the moral sentiment itself, the sense of duty (Cohon).

Hume’s genetic account of property is striking for its lack of patriarchal assumptions about the family, its explicit denial that the creation of ownership does or can depend on any promise or contract, and its concept of convention as an informal practice of mutual compromise for mutual advantage that arises incrementally and entirely informally, without the use of central authority or force.

Fidelity is the virtue of being disposed to fulfill promises and contracts. Hume has in mind promises made “at arm’s length” that parties undertake to promote their own interest, not affectionate exchanges of favors between friends. While he identifies the same circularity puzzle about the approved motive of fidelity that he tackles at length in connection with honesty, in the case of fidelity he concentrates on a different conundrum that arises with the misguided attempt to analyze fidelity as a non-conventional (natural) virtue. Unlike Hobbes and Locke, who help themselves to the concept of a promise or contract in their imagined state of nature, Hume argues that the performative utterance “I promise” would be unintelligible in the absence of background social conventions, and that the moral obligation of a promise is dependent upon such conventions as well.

Suppose the practice of giving and receiving promises did not depend on a socially-defined convention. In that case, what could we mean by the utterances we use to make them, and what would be the origin of our obligation to fulfill them? Where the words are used (uncharacteristically) in a way that does not purport to reveal the agent’s will (as when the person is joking or play-acting), we do not think a promise is really being made; we only take a speaker to have promised, and so to be bound to perform, if he understands the words he uses, in particular as purporting to obligate him. Thus for effective use there must be some act of the speaker’s mind expressed by the special phrase “I promise” and its synonyms, and our moral obligation results from this act of the mind. (This seems to be Hobbes’s assumption in Leviathan , where the implicit signs of covenant — as distinct from the explicit ones — are clear signs of the person’s will.) The requisite mental act or mental state, though, could not be one of mere desire or resolution to act, since it does not follow from our desiring or resolving to act that we are morally obligated to do so; nor could it be the volition to act, since that does not come into being ahead of time when we promise, but only when the time comes to act. And of course, one can promise successfully (incur obligation by promising) even though one has no intention to perform; so the mental act requisite to obligation is not the intention to perform. The only likely act of mind that might be expressed in a promise is a mental act of willing to be obligated to perform the promised action, as this conforms to our common view that we bind ourselves by choosing to be bound.

But, Hume argues, it is absurd to think that one can actually bring an obligation into existence by willing to be obligated. What makes an action obligatory is that its omission is disapproved by unbiased observers. But no act of will within an agent can directly change a previously neutral act into one that provokes moral disapproval in observers (even in the agent herself). Sentiments are not subject to such voluntary control. Even on a moral rationalist view the thesis would be absurd: to create a new obligation would be to change the abstract relations in which actions and persons stand to one another, and one cannot do this by performing in one’s own mind an act of willing such a relation to exist. Thus, there is no such act of the mind. Even if people in their natural (pre-conventional) condition “cou’d perceive each other’s thoughts by intuition,” they could not understand one another to bind themselves by any act of promising, and could not be obligated thereby. Since the necessary condition for a natural obligation of promises cannot be fulfilled, we may conclude that this obligation is instead the product of group invention to serve the interests of society.

Promises are invented in order to build upon the advantages afforded by property. The invention of mere ownership suffices to make possession stable. The introduction of transfer by consent permits some trade, but so far only simultaneous swapping of visible commodities. Great advantages could be gained by all if people could be counted on to provide goods or services later for benefits given now, or exchange goods that are distant or described generically. But for people without the capacity to obligate themselves to future action, such exchanges would depend upon the party who performs second doing so out of gratitude alone; and that motive cannot generally be relied on in self-interested transactions. However, we can devise better ways to satisfy our appetites “in an oblique and artificial manner...” (T 3.2.5.9). First, people can easily recognize that additional kinds of mutual exchanges would serve their interests. They need only express this interest to one another in order to encourage everyone to invent and to keep such agreements. They devise a form of words to mark these new sorts of exchanges (and distinguish them from the generous reciprocal acts of friendship and gratitude). When someone utters this form of words, he is understood to express a resolution to do the action in question, and he “subjects himself to the penalty of never being trusted again in case of failure” (T 3.2.5.10), a penalty made possible by the practice of the group, who enforce the requirement to keep promises by the simple expedient of refusing to contract with those whose word cannot be trusted . This “concert or convention” (ibid.) alters human motives to act. One is moved by self-interest to give the promising sign (in order to obtain the other party’s cooperation), and once one has given it, self-interest demands that one do what one promised to do so as to insure that people will exchange promises with one in the future. Some interpreters say that this enlightened self-interest remains the only motive for keeping one’s promise, once the practice of promising has been created. But Hume says the sentiment of morals comes to play the same role in promise-keeping that it does in the development of honesty with respect to property (T 3.2.5.12); so there is evidence he thinks the moral sentiment not only becomes “annex’d” to promise-keeping but further motivates it. In larger, more anonymous communities, a further incentive is needed besides the fear of exclusion; and a sentiment of moral approval of promise-keeping arises as the result of sympathy with all who benefit from the practice, aided by a “second artifice,” the well-meaning psychological manipulation of the people by parents and politicians, which yields a near-universal admiration of fidelity and shame at breaking one’s word (T 3.2.5.12). This may provide a moral motive for promise-keeping even in anonymous transactions.

A small society can maintain a subsistence-level economy without any dominion of some people over others, relying entirely on voluntary compliance with conventions of ownership, transfer of goods, and keeping of agreements, and relying on exclusion as the sole means of enforcement. But an increase in population and/or material productivity, Hume thinks, tends to stimulate a destabilizing rate of defection from the rules: more luxury goods greatly increase the temptation to act unjustly, and more anonymous transactions make it seem likely that one will get away with it. Though people are aware that injustice is destructive of social cooperation and so ultimately detrimental to their own interests, this knowledge will not enable them to resist such strong temptation, because of an inherent human weakness: we are more powerfully drawn to a near-term good even when we know we will pay for it with the loss of a greater long-term good. This creates the need for government to enforce the rules of property and promise (the “laws of nature,” as Hume sometimes rather ironically calls them, since on his view they are not natural). This is the reason for the invention of government. Once in power, rulers can also make legitimate use of their authority to resolve disputes over just what the rules of justice require in particular cases, and to carry out projects for the common good such as building roads and dredging harbors.

Hume thinks it unnecessary to prove that allegiance to government is the product of convention and not mere nature, since governments are obviously social creations. But he does need to explain the creation of governments and how they solve the problem he describes. He speculates that people who are unaccustomed to subordination in daily life might draw the idea for government from their experience of wars with other societies, when they must appoint a temporary commander. To overcome the preference for immediate gain over long-term security, the people will need to arrange social circumstances so that the conformity to justice is in people’s immediate interest. This cannot be done with respect to all the people, but it can be done for a few. So the people select magistrates (judges, kings, and the like) and so position them (presumably with respect to rank and wealth) that it will be in those magistrates’ immediate interest not only to obey but to enforce the rules of justice throughout society. Hume is vague about the incentives of the magistrates, but apparently they are so pleased with their own share of wealth and status that they are not tempted by the possessions of others; and since they are “indifferent… to the greatest part of the state,” they have no incentive to assist anyone in any crimes (T3.2.7.6). Thus the magistrates’ most immediate interest lies in preserving their own status and wealth by protecting society. (Perhaps more directly, they stand to lose their favored status if they are found by the people not to enforce the rules of justice.)

It is possible for the people to agree to appoint magistrates in spite of the incurable human attraction to the proximal good even when smaller than a remote good, because this predilection only takes effect when the lesser good is immediately at hand. When considering two future goods, people always prefer the greater, and make decisions accordingly. So looking to the future, people can decide now to empower magistrates to force them to conform to the rules of justice in the time to come so as to preserve society. When the time comes to obey and individuals are tempted to violate the rules, the long-range threat this poses to society may not move them to desist, but the immediate threat of punishment by the magistrates will.

We initially obey our magistrates from self-interest. But once government is instituted, we come to have a moral obligation to obey our governors; this is another artificial duty that needs to be explained. On Hume’s view it is independent of the obligation of promises. We are bound to our promises and to obey the magistrates’ commands on parallel grounds: because both kinds of conformity are so manifestly beneficial for all. Governors merely insure that the rules of justice are generally obeyed in the sort of society where purely voluntary conventions would otherwise break down. As in the case of fidelity to promises, the character trait of allegiance to our governors generates sympathy with its beneficiaries throughout society, making us approve the trait as a virtue.

The duty of allegiance to our present governors does not depend upon their or their ancestors’ divine right to govern, Hume says, nor on any promise we have made to them or any contract that transfers rights to them, but rather on the general social value of having a government. Rulers thus need not be chosen by the people in order to be legitimate. Consequently, who is the ruler will often be a matter of salience and imaginative association; and it will be no ground for legitimate rebellion that a ruler was selected arbitrarily. Rulers identified by long possession of authority, present possession, conquest, succession, or positive law will be suitably salient and so legitimate, provided their rule tends to the common good. Although governments exist to serve the interests of their people, changing magistrates and forms of government for the sake of small advantages to the public would yield disorder and upheaval, defeating the purpose of government; so our duty of allegiance forbids this. A government that maintains conditions preferable to what they would be without it retains its legitimacy and may not rightly be overthrown. But rebellion against a cruel tyranny is no violation of our duty of allegiance, and may rightly be undertaken.

Hume does advocate some forms of government as being preferable to others, particularly in his Essays . Governments structured by laws are superior to those controlled by the edicts of rulers or ruling bodies (“That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science”). Representative democracy is superior to direct democracy, and “free” (popular) governments are more hospitable to trade than “absolute” governments (ibid.). Hume speculates that a perfect government would be a representative democracy of property-holders with division of powers and some features of federalism (“Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth”). He defends his preferences by arguing that certain forms of government are less prone to corruption, faction (with the concomitant threat of civil war), and oppressive treatment of the people than others; that is, they are more likely to enforce the rules of justice, adjudicate fairly, and encourage peace and prosperity.

Hume famously criticizes the social contract theory of political obligation. According to his own theory, our duty to obey our governors is not reducible to an instance of our duty to fulfill promises, but arises separately though in a way parallel to the genesis of that duty. Hume denies that any native citizen or subject in his own day has made even a tacit promise to obey the government, given that citizens do not think they did any such thing, but rather think they are born to obey it. Even a tacit contract requires that the will be engaged, and we have no memory of this; nor do governments refrain from punishing disloyalty in citizens who have given no tacit promise.

In the Treatise Hume’s principle interest in the natural virtues lies in explaining the causes that make us approve them. The mechanism of sympathy ultimately accounts for this approval and the corresponding disapproval of the natural vices. Sympathy also explains our approval of the artificial virtues; the difference is that we approve of those as a result of sympathy with the cumulative effects produced by the general practice of the artificial virtues on the whole of society (individual acts of justice not always producing pleasure for anyone); whereas we approve each individual exercise of such natural virtues as gratitude and friendship because we sympathize with those who are affected by each such action when we consider it from the common point of view. As we saw, he argues that the traits of which we approve fall into four groups: traits immediately agreeable to their possessor or to others, and traits advantageous to their possessor or to others. In these four groups of approved traits, our approval arises as the result of sympathy bringing into our minds the pleasure that the trait produces for its possessor or for others (with one minor exception). This is especially clear with such self-regarding virtues as prudence and industry, which we approve even when they occur in individuals who provide no benefit to us observers; this can only be explained by our sympathy with the benefits that prudence and industry bring to their possessors.

According to Hume, different levels and manifestations of the passions of pride and humility make for virtue or for vice. An obvious and “over-weaning conceit” is disapproved by any observer (is a vice) (T 3.3.2.1); while a well-founded but concealed self-esteem is approved (is a virtue). Hume explains these opposite reactions to such closely related character traits by means of the interplay of the observer’s sympathy with a distinct psychological mechanism he calls comparison. The mechanism of comparison juxtaposes a sympathetically-communicated sentiment with the observer’s own inherent feeling, causing the observer to feel a sentiment opposite to the one she observes in another (pleasure if the other is suffering, pain if the other is pleased) when the sympathetically-communicated sentiment is not too strong. A person who displays excessive pride irritates others because, while others come to feel this person’s pleasant sentiment of pride (to some degree) via sympathy, they also feel a greater uneasiness as a result of comparing that great pride (in whose objects they do not believe) with their own lesser pride in themselves; this is why conceit is a vice. Self-esteem founded on an accurate assessment of one’s strengths and politely concealed from others, though, is both agreeable and advantageous to its possessor without being distressing to others, and so is generally approved. (Thus the professed preference of Christians for humility over self-esteem does not accord with the judgments of most observers.) Although excessive pride is a natural vice and self-esteem a natural virtue, human beings in society create the artificial virtue of good breeding (adherence to customs of slightly exaggerated mutual deference in accordance with social rank) to enable us each to conceal our own pride easily so that it does not shock the pride of others.

Courage and military heroism are also forms of pride. Though the student of history can see that military ambition has mostly been disadvantageous to human society, when we contemplate the “dazling” character of the hero, immediate sympathy irresistibly leads us to approve it (T 3.3.2.15).

Our approval of those traits that may be grouped together under the heading of goodness and benevolence, such as generosity, humanity, compassion, and gratitude, arises from sympathy with people in the individual’s “narrow circle” of friends and associates, since, given natural human selfishness, we cannot expect people’s concerns to extend farther (T 3.3.3.2). By adopting the common point of view we correct for the distortions of sympathy by entering into the feelings of those close to the person being evaluated even if they are remote from us. The vice of cruelty is most loathed because the suffering of the person’s victims that reaches us via sympathy readily becomes hatred of the perpetrator.

Although natural abilities of the mind are not traditionally classified as moral virtues and vices, the difference between these types of traits is unimportant, Hume argues. Intelligence, good judgment, application, eloquence, and wit are also mental qualities that bring individuals the approbation of others, and their absence is disapproved. As is the case with many of the traditionally-recognized virtues, the various natural abilities are approved either because they are useful to their possessor or because they are immediately agreeable to others. It is sometimes argued that moral virtues are unlike natural abilities in that the latter are involuntary, but Hume argues that many traditional moral virtues are involuntary as well. The sole difference is that the prospect of reward or punishment can induce people to act as the morally virtuous would (as justice requires, for example), but cannot induce them to act as if they had the natural abilities.

Late in his life Hume deemed the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals his best work, and in style it is a model of elegance and subtlety. His method in that work differs from that of the Treatise : instead of explicating the nature of virtue and vice and our knowledge of them in terms of underlying features of the human mind, he proposes to collect all the traits we know from common sense to be virtues and vices, observe what those in each group have in common, and from that observation discover the “foundation of ethics” (EPM 1.10). The conclusions largely coincide with those of the Treatise . Some topics in the Treatise are handled more fully in the moral Enquiry ; for example Hume’s account of the motive to just action is enriched by his discussion of a challenge from a “sensible knave.” However, without the detailed background theories of the mind, the passions, motivation to action, and social convention presented in the Treatise , and without any substitute for them, some of the conclusions of the moral Enquiry stand unsupported.

In the latter work, Hume’s main argument that reason alone is not adequate to yield moral evaluations (in Appendix 1) depends on his having demonstrated throughout the book that at least one foundation of moral praise lies in the usefulness to society of the praised character trait. We use reason extensively to learn the effects of various traits and to identify the useful and pernicious ones. But utility and disutility are merely means; were we indifferent to the weal and woe of mankind, we would feel equally indifferent to the traits that promote those ends. Therefore there must be some sentiment that makes us favor the one over the other. This could only be humanity, “a feeling for the happiness of mankind, and resentment of their misery” (EPM App. 1.3). This argument presupposes that the moral evaluations we make are themselves the expression of sentiment rather than reason alone. (The alternative position would be that while of course we do feel approval and disapproval for vice and virtue, the judgment as to which is which is itself the deliverance of reason.) So Hume appends some arguments directed against the hypothesis of moral rationalism. One of these is an enriched version of the argument of Treatise 3.1.1 that neither demonstrative nor causal reasoning has moral distinctions as its proper object, since moral vice and virtue cannot plausibly be analyzed as either facts or relations. He adds that while in our reasonings we start from the knowledge of relations or facts and infer some previously-unknown relation or fact, moral evaluation cannot proceed until all the relevant facts and relations are already known. At that point, there is nothing further for reason to do; therefore moral evaluation is not the work of reason alone but of another faculty. He bolsters this line of argument by expanding his Treatise analogy between moral and aesthetic judgment, arguing that just as our appreciation of beauty awaits full information about the object but requires the further contribution of taste, so in moral evaluation our assessment of merit or villainy awaits full knowledge of the person and situation but requires the further contribution of approbation or disapprobation. He also offers the argument that since the chain of reasons why one acts must finally stop at something that is “desirable on its own account… because of its immediate accord or agreement with sentiment…” (EPM App.1.19), sentiment is needed to account for ultimate human ends; and since virtue is an end, sentiment and not reason alone must distinguish moral good and evil.

In the moral Enquiry Hume omits all arguments to show that reason alone does not move us to act; so the Representation Argument about the irrelevance of reason to passions and actions is absent. Without it he has no support for his direct argument that moral goodness and evil are not identical with reasonableness and unreasonableness, which relies on it for its key premise; and that too is absent from EPM. On the whole in EPM Hume does not appeal to the thesis that reason cannot produce motives in order to show that morals are not derived from reason alone, but limits himself to the epistemic and descriptive arguments showing that reason alone cannot discern virtue and vice in order to reject ethical rationalism in favor of sentimentalism. However, at Appendix I.21 he does assert (without support) that “Reason, being cool and disengaged, is no motive to action,” and perhaps this is intended to be a premise in a revised version of the famous argument that reason cannot produce motives but morals can, though what he writes here is tantalizingly different from that argument as it appears repeatedly in the Treatise .

Why did Hume omit the more fundamental arguments for the motivational inertia of reason? He may have reconsidered and rejected them. For example, he may have given up his undefended claim that passions have no representative character, a premise of the Representation Argument on which, as we saw, some of his fundamental anti-rationalist arguments depend. Or he may have retained these views but opted not to appeal to anything so arcane in a work aimed at a broader audience and intended to be as accessible as possible. The moral Enquiry makes no use of ideas and impressions, and so no arguments that depend on that distinction can be offered there, including the Representation Argument. Apparently Hume thought he could show that reason and sentiment rule different domains without using those arguments.

Thus, not surprisingly, the causal analysis of sympathy as a mechanism of vivacity-transferal from the impression of the self to the ideas of the sentiments of others is entirely omitted from the moral Enquiry . Hume still appeals to sympathy there to explain the origin of all moral approval and disapproval, but he explains our sympathy with others simply as a manifestation of the sentiment of humanity, which is given more prominence. He is still concerned about the objection that sympathetically-acquired sentiments vary with spatial and temporal distance from the object of evaluation while moral assessments do not; so he addresses it in the moral Enquiry as well, and resolves it by appealing once again to the common point of view. In the Enquiry he places more emphasis on sympathy with the interests of the whole of society, in part achieved by conversation using shared moral vocabulary, as a way to correct our initial sentiments to make them genuinely moral (Taylor 2002). He also attends more explicitly to the role of reason and reflection in moral evaluation. Some interpreters see him as offering an account of how to arrive at reliable moral judgment superior to that in the Treatise (Taylor 2015).

The distinction between artificial and natural virtues that dominates the virtue ethics of the Treatise is almost entirely absent from the moral Enquiry ; the term ‘artificial’ occurs in the latter only once in a footnote. Gone are the paradoxes of property and promises intended to prove that particular virtues are devised on purpose; also missing is what some commentators think Hume’s most original contribution to the theory of justice, his account of convention. Yet Hume briefly sketches part of the same quasi-historical account of the origin of justice that he gives in the Treatise ; and while the emphasis has shifted, Hume not only tries to show that justice has merit only because of its beneficial consequences, but that “public utility is the sole origin of justice” — were we not to find it useful (and in some conditions we might not) we would not even have such a thing (EPM 3.1.1). While any explanation of this shift and these omissions is merely speculative, here it seems that Hume does not change his mind about the arguments of the Treatise but chooses to lead the reader to the same conclusions by more subtle and indirect means while avoiding provocative claims.

In the moral Enquiry Hume is more explicit about what he takes to be the errors of Christian (or, more cautiously, Roman Catholic) moralists. Not only have they elevated craven humility to the status of a virtue, which he hints in the Treatise is a mistake, but they also favor penance, fasting, and other “monkish virtues” that are in fact disapproved by all reasonable folk for their uselessness and disagreeableness, and so are in fact vices.

Primary Sources: Works by Hume

• A Treatise of Human Nature: A Critical Edition , David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (eds.), Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2007. (References to this work start with T and are followed by Book, Part, Section and paragraph number, in parentheses in the text.)
• A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford Philosophical Texts), David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (eds.), Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2000.
• A Treatise of Human Nature , L. A. Selby-Bigge (ed.), 2nd ed. revised by P.H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
• An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals , Tom L. Beauchamp (ed.) (The Claredon Edition of the Works of David Hume), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998. (References to this work start with EPM and are followed by Part, Section (if any), and paragraph number, in parentheses within the text.)
• Enquiry concerning Human Understanding , in Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals , L. A. Selby-Bigge (ed.), 3rd ed revised by P. H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975
• Essays Moral, Political, and Literary , Eugene Miller (ed.), Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985.

Secondary Sources

• Abramson, Kate, 2001, “Sympathy and the Project of Hume’s Second Enquiry ,” Archiv für Geschichte der Phiosophie , 83(1): 45–80.
• Ainslie, Donald C. and Butler, Annemarie, 2015, The Cambridge Companion to Hume’s Treatise , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Árdal, Páll, 1966, Passion and Value in Hume’s Treatise , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; 2 nd edition, revised, 1989.
• –––, 1977a, “Another Look at Hume’s Account of Moral Evaluation,” Journal of the History of Philosophy , 15: 405–421.
• –––, 1977b, “Convention and Value,” in David Hume: Bicentenary Papers , G.P. Morice (ed.), Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 51–68.
• Baier, Annette C., 1988, “Hume’s Account of Social Artifice — Its Origins and Originality,” Ethics , 98: 757–778.
• –––, 1991, A Progress of Sentiments , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2010, The Cautious Jealous Virtue: Hume on Justice , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Baron, Marcia, 1982, “Hume’s Noble Lie: An Account of His Artificial Virtues,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 12: 539–55.
• Blackburn, Simon, 1993, “Hume on the Mezzanine Level,” Hume Studies , 19 (2): 273–288.
• Botros, Sophie, 2006, Hume, Reason and Morality: A legacy of contradiction , London and New York: Routledge.
• Bricke, John, 1996, Mind and Morality , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Brown, Charlotte, 1988, “Is Hume an Internalist?” Journal of the History of Philosophy , 26: 69–87.
• Capaldi, Nicholas, 1975, David Hume: The Newtonian Philosopher , Boston: Twayne Publishing.
• –––, 1989, Hume’s Place in Moral Philosophy , New York: Peter Lang.
• Chappell, V.C. (ed.), 1996, Hume: A Collection of Critical Essays , Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
• Cohon, Rachel, 1997a, “The Common Point of View in Hume’s Ethics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 57 (4): 827–850.
• –––, 1997b, “Hume’s Difficulty with the Virtue of Honesty,” Hume Studies , 23 (1): 91–112.
• –––, 2001a, “The Shackles of Virtue: Hume on Allegiance to Government,” History of Philosophy Quarterly , 18 (4): 393–413.
• ––– (ed.), 2001b, Hume: Moral and Political Philosophy , Aldershot, England and Burlington, Vermont: Dartmouth/Ashgate.
• –––, 2008, Hume’s Morality: Feeling and Fabrication , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Coventry, Angela and Sager, Alexander, 2019, The Humean Mind , New York: Routledge.
• Darwall, Stephen, 1995, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Dees, Richard H., 1997, “Hume on the Characters of Virtue,” Journal of the History of Philosophy , 35 (1): 45–65.
• Falk, W.D., 1976, “Hume on Is and Ought,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 6: 359–378.
• Flew, Antony, 1963, “On the Interpretation of Hume,” Philosophy , 38: 178–181.
• Foot, Philippa, 1963, “Hume on Moral Judgment,” in D. Pears (ed.), David Hume: A Symposium , London: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 74–80.
• Forbes, Duncan, 1975, Hume’s Philosophical Politics , Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1977, “Hume’s Science of Politics” in David Hume: Bicentenary Papers , G.P. Morice (ed.), Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 39–50.
• Garrett, Don, 1997, Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2007, “The First Motive to Justice: Hume’s Circle Argument Squared,” Hume Studies , 33 (2): 257–288.
• Gauthier, David, 1979, “David Hume, Contractarian,” The Philosophical Review , 88: 3–38.
• –––, 1992, “Artificial Virtues and the Sensible Knave,” Hume Studies , 18 (2): 401–427.
• Gill, Michael, 2000, “Hume’s Progressive View of Human Nature,” Hume Studies , 26 (1): 87–108.
• –––, 2006, The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Haakonssen, Knud, 1981, The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Hampton, Jean, 1995, “Does Hume Have an Instrumental Conception of Practical Reason?”, Hume Studies , 21 (1): 57–74.
• Harris, James A., 2015, Hume: An Intellectual Biography , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Harrison, Jonathan, 1981, Hume’s Theory of Justice , Oxford, Clarendon Press.
• –––, 1976, Hume’s Moral Epistemology , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Hudson, W.D., 1964, “Hume on Is and Ought,” The Philosophical Quaterly , 14: 246–252.
• Hunter Geoffrey, 1962, “Hume on Is and Ought,” Philosophy , 37: 148–152.
• –––, 1963, “Reply to Professor Flew,” Philosophy , 38: 182–184.
• Hutcheson, Francis, 1742, Illustrations on the Moral Sense , Bernard Peach (ed.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Jensen, Henning, 1977, “Hume on Moral Agreement,” Mind , 86: 497–513.
• Kail, P. J. E., 2007, Projection and Realism in Hume’s Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Korsgaard, Christine M., 1999, “The General Point of View: Love and Moral Approval in Hume’s Ethics,” Hume Studies , 25 (1/2): 3–41.
• Livingston, Donald W., 1984, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Loeb, Louis, 1977, “Hume’s Moral Sentiments and the Structure of the Treatise,” Journal of the History of Philosophy , 15: 395–403.
• MacIntyre, A.C., 1959, “Hume on ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’,” Philosophical Review , 68: 451–468.
• Mackie, J.L., 1980, Hume’s Moral Theory , London: Routledge.
• Magri, Tito, 1996, “Natural Obligation and Normative Motivation in Hume’s Treatise,” Hume Studies , 22 (2): 231–253.
• McIntyre, Jane, 1990, “Character: A Humean Account,” History of Philosophy Quarterly , 7: 193–206.
• Miller, David, 1981, Philosophy and Ideology in Hume’s Political Thought , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Millgram, Elijah, 1995, “Was Hume a Humean?,” Hume Studies , 21 (1): 75–93.
• Morice, G. P. (ed.), 1977, David Hume: Bicentenary Papers , Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
• Norton, David Fate, 1982, David Hume: Common-Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 1985, “Hume’s Moral Ontology,” Hume Studies , 11 (Supplement): 189–214.
• ––– (ed.), 1993, The Cambridge Companion to Hume , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1993a, “Hume, Human Nature, and the Foundations of Morality,” in Fate 1993, pp. 148–182.
• Norton, David Fate, and Jacqueline Taylor (eds.), 2008, The Cambridge Companion to Hume , second edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Persson, Ingmar, 1997, “Hume — Not a ‘Humean’ about Motivation,” History of Philosophy Quarterly , 14 (2): 189–206.
• Radcliffe, Elizabeth S., 1996, “How Does the Humean Sense of Duty Motivate?,” Journal of the History of Philosophy , 34 (3): 383–407.
• –––, 1997, “Kantian Tunes on a Humean Instrument: Why Hume is not Really a Skeptic about Practical Reasoning,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 27 (2): 247–270.
• ––– (ed.), 2008, A Companion to Hume , Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
• Raphael, D.D. (ed.), 1991, British Moralsits 1650 — 1800 , Volume I, Indianapolis: Hackett.
• Schneewind, J. B., 1998, The Invention of Autonomy , Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
• Setiya, Kieran, 2016, “Hume on Practical Reason,” reprinted in Practical Knowledge: Selected Essays , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Smith, Norman Kemp, 1941, The Philosophy of David Hume , London: Macmillian.
• Snare, Francis, 1991, Morals, Motivation and Convention , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Stewart, John B., 1992, Opinion and Reform in Hume’s Political Philosophy , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Stroud, Barry, 1977, Hume , London: Routledge.
• –––, 1993, “Gliding or ‘Staining’ The World with ‘Sentiments’ and ‘Phantasms,’” Hume Studies , 19 (2): 253–272.
• Sturgeon, Nicholas, 2001, “Moral Skepticism and Moral Naturalism in Hume’s Treatise,” Hume Studies , 21 (1): 3–83.
• Swain, Corliss, 1992, “Passionate Objectivity,” Noûs , 26 (4): 465–490.
• Taylor, Jacqueline, 1998, “Justice and the Foundations of Social Morality in Hume’s Treatise,” Hume Studies , 24 (1): 5–30.
• –––, 2002, “Hume on the Standard of Virtue,” Journal of Ethics , 6: 43–62.
• –––, 2015, Reflecting Subjects: Passion, Sympathy and Society in Hume’s Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Traiger, Saul (ed.), 2006, The Blackwell Guide to Hume’s Treatise, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
• Whelan, Frederick, 1981, Order and Artifice in Hume’s Political Philosophy , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Wiggins, David, 1998, “A Sensible Subjectivism?” in Needs, Values, Truth , 3 rd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 185–210.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• The Hume Society
• “ Moral Theory ”, section of the entry on Hume, by James Fieser (U. Tennessee/Martin), in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .

Hume, David | property and ownership

Copyright © 2018 by Rachel Cohon < rcohon @ albany . edu >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2023 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

The Fundamental Arguments for Moral Judgement in History: An Overview

2020, Philosophical Reflections: A Collection

Related Papers

Perspectives. Socio-political journal

Nataliia Volovchuk

khairun nisa

History and morality. Values and time. Subjective factor in history

Mark Youssim

HISTORY AND MORALITY Values and time. Subjective factor in history. Abstract. The content and meaning of history as a process, its descriptions and researches are considered on the basis of the notion of subjectivity as synonymous with evaluation and goal-setting. As applied to human society, these phenomena, essential for all living nature, are described through the concept of "morality", which in its broad sense covers the whole sphere of choices, determinable by reason and value. The approach to history as a process of development, in which external factors and cognizing subject interact, is shown through characteristics of separate aspects of human activity, through the idea of economic, social, political, cultural (spiritual) evolution of society. "Morality" ultimately serves as a mechanism of species adaptation and co-improvement of man, the embodiment and field of which is history.

Jennifer Nado , Daniel Kelly

Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics

Paul Hurley

In this paper I distinguish two different senses in which philosophers speak of moral verdicts, senses that in turn invite two different senses of moral overridingness. Although one of these senses of moral verdict currently dominates the moral overridingness debate, I focus primarily on the other, and on the importance of disambiguating the two. In section II I show that it is this other sense that offers the most straightforward explanation of the apparent conceptual connections between moral verdicts and both reasons and reactive attitudes. I demonstrate in section III that it is also the central sense deployed by moral theories that recognize distinctively moral reasons, but that need not appeal to distinctive moral verdicts from a distinctively moral point of view. In section IV I show that as more sophisticated variants have been developed within the dominant sense of moral verdict they have come to deploy central elements of this alternative sense, bringing the two closer together. I suggest along the way that the recent tendency to emphasize the dominant sense to the exclusion of the alternative, coupled with the failure to properly disambiguate the two, has fundamentally skewed central debates in moral theory. Finally, in section V I sketch a proposal for understanding the relationship between these two distinct senses.

SSRN Electronic Journal

David Lyons

Journal of Political Philosophy

Serge Grigoriev

KEMANUSIAAN

Mohammad Umair Abd Rahim

The practice of moral judgement in historiography is a topic in critical philosophy of history. In general, there are two opinions on the practice of moral judgement in history: firstly, those who are against it, such as Croce, Bloch and Butterfield; secondly, those who are in support of it, such as Lord Acton, Ibn Khaldun and al-Biruni. Understanding the practice is crucial in facilitating "intellectual serenity" among historians in deciding on their research method. This article discusses al-Biruni's position and epistemic justification on the issue of moral judgement in research in history. The analysis of al-Biruni's perspective, based on his book, al-Athar al-Baqiyah 'an al-Qurun al-Khaliyah, shows that his epistemic justification on moral judgement in history was influenced by his religious tradition.

European journal of analytic philosophy

David Sackris

Recent contributions in moral philosophy have raised questions concerning the prevalent assumption that moral judgments are typologically discrete, and thereby distinct from ordinary and/or other types of judgments. This paper adds to this discourse, surveying how attempts at defining what makes moral judgments distinct have serious shortcomings, and it is argued that any typological definition is likely to fail due to certain questionable assumptions about the nature of judgment itself. The paper concludes by raising questions for future investigations into the nature of moral judgment.

Peter Miller

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

RELATED PAPERS

Cultures. Conflict - Analysis - Dialogue

Eckhart Arnold

History Education Research Journal

Everardo Perez-Manjarrez

Marcus K M Tso

David Agler

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice

Stefan Konstańczak

Brad Hooker

Sergio Rego

The Southern Journal of Philosophy

Mark Timmons

Shaun Nichols

FALSAFEH ,The Iranian Journal of Philosophy

The Iranian Journal of Philosophy , FALSAFEH

The Journal of Philosophy

Renaud-Philippe Garner

Sacha Golob

Alfred Mele

Albert Winkler

Paedagogica Historica

William Bruneau

Michael D Magee

Sacha Golob , Jens Timmermann

Partiality and Impartiality

“Judgment,” The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, ed. Michael T. Gibbons (London: Blackwell, 2014).

Linda M G Zerilli

Jeremy Wisnewski

Philosophy in Review

Hossein Dabbagh

Amna Whiston

Philosophical Studies

Chris Tucker

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — A Hanging — “A Hanging”: The Concepts of Decay and Moral Judgment

"A Hanging": The Concepts of Decay and Moral Judgment

• Categories: A Hanging George Orwell

About this sample

Words: 1092 |

Published: Jul 2, 2018

Words: 1092 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

Cite this Essay

To export a reference to this article please select a referencing style below:

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Dr. Karlyna PhD

Verified writer

• Expert in: Literature

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

3.5 pages / 1498 words

2 pages / 1022 words

3 pages / 1428 words

2.5 pages / 1035 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

“I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man.” In his essay A Hanging, George Orwell reveals his experience watching a hanging, as an imperial police in Burma. With these experiences, Orwell writes his [...]

The disregard for all ethical expectations of humanity can be a result of the pressure to execute one’s job regardless of the consequences for those in one’s vicinity. This was often the case in Europe during the 1900s when the [...]

“A Hanging” is a famous essay written by George Orwell. It is set in Burma in 1931 and recalls Orwell’s time spent as an officer in the British Imperial Police in the 1920’s. Orwell recounts in the first-person narrative the [...]

Ernest Hemingway called his novel A Farewell to Arms his “Romeo and Juliet.” The most obvious similarity between these works is their star-crossed lovers, as noted by critic Carlos Baker; another is that the deaths of both [...]

“Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories.” According to George R.R. Martin, an estimable American novelist, an individual's perspective ultimately decides whether he views himself as a [...]

“These are but the spirit of things that have been.” The metaphorical words of the Ghost of Christmas Past are typical of Dickens’ melodramatic writing style. Set in Victorian England, a time rife with greed and social [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

The Foundation of Moral and Ethical Judgment Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Philosophy is an ancient study, for centuries it has involved the most powerful minds of humanity in the discussions of the most fundamental aspects and problems of human life such as existence, the meaning of life, nature of knowledge, morals and values, the relationship between good and evil, the appearance of ideas. Philosophy is a broad study and it is divided into several different areas, are metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, besides there are such fields as philosophy of religion, political philosophy and non-western philosophy. All of these branches are interconnected, the areas they explore are related to one another, the concepts they study are not isolated and not individual for each branch, they are present in many different areas. Metaphysics is considered to be the most fundamental of all of these branches.

Ethics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the questions of morals, values, proper or improper decisions and actions, right and wrong deeds. This study explores the nature of values people have and their origin, how humans came up with a system of values and why certain things are considered good or bad. The questions ethics raises are connected to the philosophy of religion, as religions are sets of beliefs and rules of moral behavior. Ethics explores whether these rules were brought to humans together with the appearance of religions or having morals has always been a part of human nature. Ethics is important for us because our morals are the foundation of all of the decisions we make, and as it is stated by metaphysics – all actions have their causes and their results.

The concepts that are used in ethics the most are justice and crime, right and wrong, good and evil, vice and virtue. Ethics describes different points of view on the types of conduct and judgments. Philosophers explore such ethical problems as the sources of moral notions and norms, the standards of morals in society. For example, there are philosophers that see morals as the set of norms dictated to humanity from the above. The source of morals, according to John Locke, is divine. According to Immanuel Kant, human morals have a non-psychological origin; they are the so-called “categorical imperative”. Happiness is considered by the majority of philosophers as the main ethical value and the most important ethical goal of humanity. Aristotle was a supporter of eudemonistic views, according to his ideas, happiness is the main motive of a moral deed. Kant criticized Aristotle’s approach saying that modals are dictated by the feeling of duty, not by the urge for happiness.

Many philosophers argued about various aspects of ethics. Plato and Aristotle had very different views on virtue, for example. Plato has created a theory of a separately standing world of ideas, presenting virtue as an independent concept that exists on its own. In this theory, absolute virtue is the source of all other virtues. Aristotle was a supporter of materialistic views, so he denied the concept of virtue as a separate category. According to Aristotle, virtue is something that can be defined by various measurements such as quality and quantity. Both of these philosophers viewed physiological desires as something that had to be managed, but Plato considered the human body to be the prison for the soul and all the desires to be the vicious boundaries that create limits for spiritual development. According to Plato, freedom and self-improvement can only be achieved when the mind takes over the temptations. Aristotle viewed desires as the traits of the uncivilized part of the human soul. His idea of moral self-improvement lay in the development of control over the basic desires and gradual cognition.

Evaluating this argument of idealistic and materialistic views on the virtues, the sources of morals and happiness, we can see that Aristotle saw all the ethical concepts as values that could be measured. For Plato, they are more abstract. Aristotle’s practical approach is explained by his idea that happiness depends on many conditions, it is individual for everyone. Plato’s utopia does not consider individualities. He divides humans according to their social functions. It is a well-known fact that utopias are implausible, this is why, to my mind, Plato’s views are boarded with fantasies, while Aristotle’s ideas present a set of practical instructions for self-improvement and moral development.

To conclude, science still has no explanation of why, how and when the human mind started to develop the sense of morals, but, to my mind, the source of moral and ethical judgments is psychological and determined by the process of evolution of the human brain. I think, humans live according to the laws of nature and are directed by the natural instincts, yet, due to the evolutional development of our brain, we have a more advanced understanding of the laws of nature and, this is why, in general, all humans relate to the same basic set of moral standards. To explain this conclusion, I would like to compare human behavior to the behavior of a fish shoal, all of the members of that group have exactly the same reactions to various situations, it even looks like the shoal moves as a whole organism. Human ways of thinking are also very similar; this is why all over the world societies have eventually come up with the same basic moral norms.

• Ethical Reasoning - Definition, Examples, Processes
• Bayview University’s College: Ethical Behavior of Business Students
• Kant's Prolegomena Concerning Any Future Metaphysics
• Epistemology and Metaphysics in Relation to Skepticism, Rationalism, and Materialism
• Outlining Aristotle's Ethics and Metaphysics
• Ethical Virtues and Vices
• Ethic Issues: The Rampart Scandal
• Ethical Dilemmas in Business Processes
• Virtue Ethics: One Way to Resolve an Ethical Dilemma
• Consent Termination of Life and Its Ethics
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, April 5). The Foundation of Moral and Ethical Judgment. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-foundation-of-moral-and-ethical-judgment/

"The Foundation of Moral and Ethical Judgment." IvyPanda , 5 Apr. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/the-foundation-of-moral-and-ethical-judgment/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'The Foundation of Moral and Ethical Judgment'. 5 April.

IvyPanda . 2022. "The Foundation of Moral and Ethical Judgment." April 5, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-foundation-of-moral-and-ethical-judgment/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Foundation of Moral and Ethical Judgment." April 5, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-foundation-of-moral-and-ethical-judgment/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Foundation of Moral and Ethical Judgment." April 5, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-foundation-of-moral-and-ethical-judgment/.

IvyPanda uses cookies and similar technologies to enhance your experience, enabling functionalities such as:

• Basic site functions
• Ensuring secure, safe transactions
• Secure account login
• Remembering account, browser, and regional preferences
• Remembering privacy and security settings
• Analyzing site traffic and usage
• Personalized search, content, and recommendations
• Displaying relevant, targeted ads on and off IvyPanda

Please refer to IvyPanda's Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy for detailed information.

Certain technologies we use are essential for critical functions such as security and site integrity, account authentication, security and privacy preferences, internal site usage and maintenance data, and ensuring the site operates correctly for browsing and transactions.

Cookies and similar technologies are used to enhance your experience by:

• Remembering general and regional preferences
• Personalizing content, search, recommendations, and offers

Some functions, such as personalized recommendations, account preferences, or localization, may not work correctly without these technologies. For more details, please refer to IvyPanda's Cookies Policy .

To enable personalized advertising (such as interest-based ads), we may share your data with our marketing and advertising partners using cookies and other technologies. These partners may have their own information collected about you. Turning off the personalized advertising setting won't stop you from seeing IvyPanda ads, but it may make the ads you see less relevant or more repetitive.

Personalized advertising may be considered a "sale" or "sharing" of the information under California and other state privacy laws, and you may have the right to opt out. Turning off personalized advertising allows you to exercise your right to opt out. Learn more in IvyPanda's Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy .

• Undergraduate
• High School
• Architecture
• American History
• Asian History
• Antique Literature
• American Literature
• Asian Literature
• Classic English Literature
• World Literature
• Creative Writing
• Linguistics
• Criminal Justice
• Legal Issues
• Anthropology
• Archaeology
• Political Science
• World Affairs
• African-American Studies
• East European Studies
• Latin-American Studies
• Native-American Studies
• West European Studies
• Family and Consumer Science
• Social Issues
• Women and Gender Studies
• Social Work
• Natural Sciences
• Pharmacology
• Earth science
• Agriculture
• Agricultural Studies
• Computer Science
• IT Management
• Mathematics
• Investments
• Engineering and Technology
• Engineering
• Aeronautics
• Medicine and Health
• Alternative Medicine
• Communications and Media
• Advertising
• Communication Strategies
• Public Relations
• Educational Theories
• Teacher's Career
• Chicago/Turabian
• Company Analysis
• Education Theories
• Shakespeare
• Canadian Studies
• Food Safety
• Relation of Global Warming and Extreme Weather Condition
• Movie Review
• Admission Essay
• Annotated Bibliography
• Application Essay
• Article Critique
• Article Review
• Article Writing
• Book Review
• Business Plan
• Business Proposal
• Capstone Project
• Cover Letter
• Creative Essay
• Dissertation
• Dissertation - Abstract
• Dissertation - Conclusion
• Dissertation - Discussion
• Dissertation - Hypothesis
• Dissertation - Introduction
• Dissertation - Literature
• Dissertation - Methodology
• Dissertation - Results
• GCSE Coursework
• Grant Proposal
• Marketing Plan
• Multiple Choice Quiz
• Personal Statement
• Power Point Presentation
• Power Point Presentation With Speaker Notes
• Questionnaire
• Reaction Paper
• Research Paper
• Research Proposal
• SWOT analysis
• Thesis Paper
• Online Quiz
• Literature Review
• Movie Analysis
• Statistics problem
• Math Problem
• All papers examples
• How It Works
• Money Back Policy
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• We Are Hiring

Reason, Emotions, and Moral Judgments, Essay Example

Pages: 2

Words: 545

Hire a Writer for Custom Essay

Use 10% Off Discount: "custom10" in 1 Click 👇

You are free to use it as an inspiration or a source for your own work.

Moral judgments are influenced by many aspects of life; social norms, ethics, reason, and emotions. The below review will cover two of the – often contradicting – influences of human moral decisions: reason and emotion.

Most theories of moral judgment are based on rationalist models, assuming that the main influence of decisions is moral reasoning, and emotions do not play a significant role in human behavior. Rationalist models, however, do not exclude emotions in a way that they include “Affect” as one of the steps in the process of making moral judgments. Moral affects can be emotional, such as sympathy. Indeed, moral decisions are determined by one’s attitude towards the society, the people involved, the case, and learned behavioral patterns as well. All people live in the context of society, therefore, their decisions are influenced by different groups of people, beliefs, messages, art pieces, lectures, and role models.

The author of the current review argues that moral decision making cannot be simplified. When people face a new dilemma, emotions are put into work immediately. Unless a person suffers from apathy, they would sympathize with one person more than the other. This would certainly influence their moral judgment. Previous experiences, then are assessed by the rational reasoning system of the human mind, in order to justify one or another judgment. It is evident that one might feel stronger for a person if they are in the same situation. As an example: victims of child abuse would be emotionally influenced in their moral judgment when deciding whether or not to support making the names of child molesters public. People who have never been in contact with similar cases, and have only heard rational reasons regarding the issue would rely on their reasoning skills more.

Similarly, it is possible to predict that individuals who have animals would be more likely to reject animal testing of cosmetics and selling furs of exotic species than those who never had pets. However, cancer patients who have been waiting for a new drug to come out would first emotionally decide that testing drugs on animals was in the interest of the many, then justify their moral judgment by lining up facts to support their beliefs and decisions.

Finally, as it has already been mentioned, social context influences moral judgments significantly. In a way, peer pressure and group mechanisms can influence one’s decision whether or not to support a case. Authority figures within the society can influence people’s behavior and norms. Social norms and socialization patterns influence people’s judgment. What they learn as a child about the “done thing” will determine their attitude.

Overall, it is evident that it is impossible to make simply rational moral decisions. Morality is influenced by culture, society, and customs, tolerance levels, priorities vary from one country to another. Previous experiences and pre-existing knowledge also influence human behavior, as well as moral judgment. Finally, people consider the consequences of their decisions and attitudes: one might ask: would I like others to do this to me or not? If the answer is no, the individual is likely to say no to accepting the decision. While moral judgment is both rational and emotional, the process that leads to making a decision on whether or not to agree with a moral statement is different for every

Stuck with your Essay?

Get in touch with one of our experts for instant help!

Nutrition and Parkinson’s Disease, Coursework Example

The Effects of Different Type of Piston, Essay Example

Time is precious

don’t waste it!

Plagiarism-free guarantee

Privacy guarantee

Secure checkout

Money back guarantee

Related Essay Samples & Examples

Relatives, essay example.

Pages: 1

Words: 364

Voting as a Civic Responsibility, Essay Example

Words: 287

Utilitarianism and Its Applications, Essay Example

Words: 356

The Age-Related Changes of the Older Person, Essay Example

Words: 448

The Problems ESOL Teachers Face, Essay Example

Pages: 8

Words: 2293

Should English Be the Primary Language? Essay Example

Pages: 4

Words: 999

• Archive Issues

Journal of Practical Ethics

A journal of philosophy, applied to the real world.

The Morality of Reputation and the Judgment of Others

David S. Oderberg

Department of Philosophy, University of Reading

There is a tension between the reasonable desire not to be judgmental of other people’s behaviour or character, and the moral necessity of making negative judgments in some cases. I sketch a way in which we might accommodate both, via an evaluation of the good of reputation and the ethics of judgment of other people’s character and behaviour. I argue that a good reputation is a highly valuable good for its bearer, akin to a property right, and not to be damaged without serious reason deriving from the demands of justice and the common welfare. Rash judgment wrongfully damages reputation and is sometimes a seriously immoral act. Rashness is not merely about lack of evidence, but involves lack of charity and is to be avoided even in some cases where the evidence of bad character or action is epistemically sufficient for judgment. I argue that the desirability of a good name for its holder, whether the reputation is deserved or not, means that in all but a relatively narrow range of cases it is always wrong to think badly of someone, even if they are bad.

Introduction

We in the liberal, democratic West live in a society with a split personality, deriving from our own individual dissociative traits. On one hand, we spend much of our time—far more than we would imagine—morally judging the character and behaviour of others. On the other, we are also generally loath to make moral judgments about other people. Very often we are unsure of whether to judge. We do not want to appear (or even to be) judgmental, but we also know that we do judge our fellows continuously, and believe this is often justified. To judge or not to judge? Here is an area of practical ethics that receives little contemporary attention, yet it is as central to morality as judging the state of the weather is to the question of how one should dress.

Fleshing this out a little, consider first the way in which moral judgment about others is manifested in outward behaviour. The thought is the father to the deed where deeds include words. So the ubiquity of judgments about others is manifest in two of society’s greatest preoccupations, gossip and defamation (the two overlapping significantly). By gossip I loosely mean idle banter about people behind their backs, where although the content is explicitly only factual (‘I heard Alan is having an affair’, ‘You have no idea how drunk Brenda got the other night’, and so on), there is almost always an implicit, negative moral judgment. Although paradigmatic gossip is about people we know personally, gossip about ‘celebrities’ is a monstrous outgrowth, now at a level of popularity and refinement unmatched in human history. Perhaps some would count it as a central case precisely because those who gossip about celebrities (by ‘those who gossip’ I mean to include both producers and willing consumers) feel somehow close enough to the celebrity to think it’s ‘as if’ they know them. (Wrongheaded this might be, but that is not the point. If you think you know someone as virtually a personal acquaintance—even if it is through the fantasy of a media glut of personal information—you can gossip about them.)

By defamation I do not mean only—or always—the activity that is contrary to law and must satisfy certain strict legal criteria. In most cases legal defamation involves publically imputing some fault of which the victim is innocent. But defamation as a moral category involves imputations of fault or bad character both true and false. Although not all defamation involves a moral judgment on the part of the defamer, explicit or implicit, what’s more important is that defamers generally are quite aware that the hearers (or readers) of their words will make moral judgments based on what they think they have learned. Moreover, the ease with which willing audiences are found for defamation shows how common it is for us to pass judgments upon the acts of others. The motives are not hard to find, including: a sense of superiority (‘at least I don’t do what he does’); a feeling of being ‘in the know’ (‘if only she knew what I know about Fred’s behaviour!’); the sense of intimacy that comes from sharing tidbits of information about third parties; the pleasure of filling time with idle and relatively cost-free chit-chat.

Judgmentalism is rife, yet so is the reluctance to judge, or at least to be seen as judgmental. Consider that this unwillingness cuts across both objectivism and subjectivism about morality. The objectivist believes in objectively true moral principles and prescriptions, holding for all people at all times and places. But not every objectivist, especially in a liberal society, wants to be thought of as imposing an objective moral code on others given the prevailing consensus in favour of tolerance, ‘live and let live’, and the like. For an objectivist not to want to insist on such an imposition might be irrational, but succumbing to peer pressure is not. By contrast the subjectivist, for whom what is morally true is a matter of opinion, believes that judging others must entail evaluating them by a standard that may well not apply to them. For the subjectivist, passing moral judgment reeks of what she sees as objectivist tyranny: if she is true to her subjectivism, she will try to train her mind not to judge; at the very least, she will not want anyone to think that her moral opinions are intended to apply of necessity to others.

My interest here is not defamation or gossip but their primary cause. They are but outward manifestations of an internal state of mind. Most moral philosophers have come to take it as axiomatic that when they evaluate human acts they are evaluating external, observable physical movements. Far less has there been work on the morality of mental acts, in particular moral judgments about others’ deeds or traits. Why might that be? First, like everyone else, most philosophers probably think there is something unseemly about subjecting people’s personal judgments to ethical assessment: it smells Orwellian, for if some judgments can be morally bad why shouldn’t a subset of those, if bad enough, be made illegal—‘thought crimes’? In reply, there are too many implausible steps between the antecedent and consequent to make this a reasonable objection. The law does not punish states of mind; even the vilest of intentions are immune unless they eventuate in some sort of outward act, if only an attempt. So just as with many other kinds of act, both mental and bodily, we can subject moral judgments about others to their own moral assessment without requiring a legal sanction for any of them, no matter how wrong they may be. (I will from now, for brevity, call moral judgments simply ‘judgments’ without qualification, and later I will further restrict the term ‘judgment’ to ‘negative or unfavourable judgment’. Context will make this clear.)

Secondly, it might be objected that we cannot know with certainty the judgments that people make, mental contents being notoriously elusive, so we risk doing ourselves what we might end up imputing to others—making wrongful moral judgments about third parties. In reply, if there is a viable set of principles for assessing judgments, they will apply equally to second-order judgments, i.e. our own judgments about others’ judgments. Any person knows with relative certainty, and in general, the contents of their own mental states, so they ought to be able to know with relative certainty the judgments they make about others’ judgments. (I leave aside particular issues to do with self-deception, Freudian theories, and the like; for the sorts of cases I have in focus, the generalization applies.) So a person can apply the principles of judgment to their own judgments and if, for example, those principles dictate caution in judging the judgments of others, given certain circumstances, they will also dictate caution in respect of the first-order judgments those others make. Moreover, if we cannot know the judgments others make with the same certainty with which we can know our own, then those principles will dictate even greater caution when judging the judgments of others. So we ought not to fear an inordinate risk of making wrongful judgments about the judgments of others, as long as the principles are correct and we apply them well.

That slightly arcane point aside, all we need note is that we do not even need certainty in assessing others’ judgments, and though we cannot always be certain of the judgment another makes, often we can. We know it precisely from outward behaviour, both word and deed. If I see you check the weather forecast and then fetch an umbrella before going outside, I can be certain you judge it to be raining or about to rain. Similarly, if I tell you that I’m no longer having anything to do with that so-and-so Bob after what he just did to me, you can be certain I judge Bob to have acted very badly. Words and deeds are how we know about any mental states, whether beliefs, opinions, judgments, hopes, fears, and so on. And if certainty means some sort of metaphysical guarantee, why do we need it? If that is the kind of certainty we need, then all human commerce should grind to a halt immediately—not a thought that need detain us.

A third reason for reluctance to entertain an ethic of moral judgment on the behaviour of others is the fear that it will lead us into censoriousness or judgmentalism. But there is a difference between making a judgment and being judgmental. Presumably, given that we pass judgment on others all the time yet generally deplore judgmentalism, most of us think that we can pass judgments without being judgmental (cases of weakness or hypocrisy aside). Rightly so, for judgmentalism is an attitude or disposition that favours making negative judgments about people even when clearly unjustified. If we thought that by making judgments we were ipso facto being judgmental, we would tend not to make them. But we know that judgments about others can be favourable, or neutral, and if negative can be slight, or less critical than they might be.

More importantly, if judgmentalism is a vice, then presumably an ethic of judgment would rule it out! In other words, such an ethic is precisely what we need in order to have a rational basis for avoiding judgmentalism or censoriousness. If we refrain from judging because we don’t want to be judgmental, then in reality we are already operating with an ethic of judgment, albeit inchoate. Spelling it out in more detail simply systematises and adds to whatever is intuitively plausible about judging others. Indeed, while it may be—and I think it is—plausible to hold judgmentalism a vice, it might also be that judgmentalism is a virtue. That is, we should not prejudge the results of working out an ethic of judgment by assuming that one of the things it might condone is something we think we should avoid.

Reputation, defined neutrally, is simply the general consensus of judgment about a person’s character. Depending on how far knowledge—or presumed knowledge— of a person’s life and actions extends, the general consensus could be as small as that of a village or as large as that of the world. Often, though, we talk about reputation normatively, as in ‘I have a reputation to protect’, or ‘Emma’s reputation is the one thing she holds dear’. Here we mean ‘good reputation’, the general consensus that a person is of good (reputable) character. Hence reputations can also be bad. But they can also be true or false—true if the consensus agrees with the facts about a person’s character, false if not. (I will also, quite plausibly apart from highly non-standard cases, call true reputations deserved and false reputations undeserved , and vice versa.) If Fred is reputed honest and he is honest, his reputation is true; it is false if he is dishonest; similarly if he is reputed dishonest and he is in fact dishonest (true reputation) or is in fact honest (false reputation). So we have four possible combinations: (i) a good, true reputation; (ii) a good, false reputation; (iii) a bad, true reputation; (iv) a bad, false reputation. We all hold reputation to be of moral importance, but how should we rank these four? Somewhat surprisingly to many, I am going to argue that the desirability of a good name for its holder, whether the reputation is deserved or not, means that in all but a relatively narrow range of cases it is always wrong to think badly of someone, even if they are bad. The wrongful act of what has traditionally been called ‘rash judgment’, I will argue, is not about lacking enough evidence to think ill of another person; it is about thinking badly of them even when you have enough evidence, with relatively few exceptions. To see how important a good name is, whether deserved or not, and to make my case plausible, we now need to examine the value of a good name in some depth.

To begin, it is clear that having a good, true reputation is the most prized possession. We want both to be good and to be reputed good. I claim also that having an undeserved, bad reputation is in general the worst of the four. Why should that be? A person with a bad but unmerited reputation might appreciate the chance to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, seeing it as an opportunity to grow in steadfastness and overall virtue. So how can we be sure it ranks, in terms of what is bad for the individual, below having a bad but deserved reputation? My reply is that although there are some people for whom a bad but false reputation affords the chance to grow in virtue, they are relatively few in number. By contrast, there are considerably more people for whom a bad but true reputation is for them a mark of honour, especially the honour that exists proverbially among thieves. Far more important, though, is that any person with a bad but undeserved reputation suffers a serious injustice, whereas no one with a true, bad reputation suffers any injustice on that score. So the former is, because of this fact alone, worse than the latter, and in fact worst of all.

To take this a little further, there is a contrary line of reasoning that might suggest the bad, true reputation is after all worst for its holder, and this focuses on the extra power that the pressure to conform to expectation exerts in the case of a reputation that is bad and true. In that of the bad, false reputation the pressure to conform to low expectations has to overcome the opposite force of a character that is genuinely upright. When the reputation is bad and true, by contrast, the pressure to conform needs only to push on an open door: if people expect you to be X, and you are in fact X, you may well confuse cause and effect, fulfilling their expectations as a supposed inevitable result of how they see you. It is simply easier to continue to be bad than to become bad, as Aristotle famously taught. And if the desirability of a certain kind of reputation is about more than what people happen to want for themselves, we might plausibly hold that a bad, true reputation is in fact worse than a bad, false one. Overall, though, as I see it a significant conformity effect coupled with being a victim of serious injustice makes the unmerited bad reputation least desirable of all, even though the merited bad reputation has a stronger conformity effect considered on its own.

Let’s now examine the fourfold ranking in more depth. I claim that a good and true reputation is best of all for its holder, and have argued that a bad, false reputation is worst of all. But what about the other two—a good, false reputation and a bad, true reputation? Would you rather be reputed good even though you are bad, or if you are bad would you rather be thought to be bad? Here the comparison is difficult, since there are considerations for and against the relative desirability of both. Further, we have to distinguish between what many or at least some people might want—because, say, there is some limited self-interest served by having that thing—and what is really good for them. It helps to look again in more depth at the first- and last-ranked reputations to make the point. The most desirable reputation—good and true—clearly serves a person’s self-interest in the narrow sense of benefits received, since others will act positively toward the person because they judge the person good, and since the person is good their reciprocally virtuous behaviour toward others will only reinforce the already good reputation, leading to a positive feedback loop of mutual beneficence. What is more important, however, is that having a good reputation in addition to the reputation’s being true makes it more probable that a person will not only continue to be good but become better , given the simple psychological force of other people’s expectations—the well-verified phenomenon of conformity, to which I have already referred. So having a good and true reputation serves a person’s self-interest in the narrow sense but also promotes and enhances their own good character, which is more important than the benefits they happen to receive from others.

Now consider a bad, false reputation, the worst of all. No one of sound mind would want this (even though a saintly person might welcome its arrival). From the viewpoint of narrow self-interest—how someone is personally treated, the benefits or harms he receives—things will likely not go well for him if he has a name that is undeservedly bad. If people think you are bad, they are generally not going to treat you well—not in the sense of going out of their way to hurt you, but they are likely to avoid association with you, distrust you, not give you the benefit of the doubt, and so on. But might it still be really good for you to have such a reputation? Here I think the force of conformity probably overwhelms the promotion of good character in the vast majority of cases. For a small, highly motivated minority, being good but thought bad will be a spur to acting even better so as to convince others of their wrongful assessment. (Note, however, the threat posed by vainglory and posturing, which can nullify the enhancements to character coming from such behaviour.) Such a person might be encouraged to carry out highly visible acts of magnanimity so as to counteract the false judgment, good not just for others but for their own virtue. For another, even smaller saintly minority, being good yet thought bad would be a cross to bear, a mortifying and purifying experience tending to deepen their own humility and resignation. Yet for the great bulk of mankind, the power of a collective judgment against them is likely to weaken their own virtuous foundations, shaking their resolve to stay good: it is doubtful that most people feel a pressing need to exceed the expectations of others. So it does seem correct to place the good, true reputation at the top of the scale of desirability, and the bad, false reputation at the bottom—for the vast majority of people in most situations.

Returning now to our two hard cases—the good, false name and the bad, true name—we can apply similar considerations. Some small number of people probably like the idea of being both bad and thought bad— ‘tough guys’, gangsters with a ‘reputation’ to protect, certain kinds of pathological personalities. Some very narrow forms of self-interest might be served for these people by a bad, true reputation: they might enjoy the distorted admiration of like-minded individuals or of others whose approval they seek; they may get intense pleasure from being of ill repute among what they see to be a dull, conformist majority; they may receive limited, albeit highly contingent, benefits from those with whom they fraternise.

Again, though, we are not talking about the mass of mankind, for whom a bad reputation is a highly distasteful thing whether the subject of the reputation really is of good or bad character. It poisons a person’s relationships with others in all the same ways, the only consolation when the reputation is bad and true being that at least it is deserved, so the subject does not experience the added bitterness of a reputation wholly unmerited. (This consolation is one of the factors that makes the bad, true reputation slightly more desirable—rather, less undesirable—than the bad, false one.) It is hard to see, then, how—all things considered—a bad, true reputation can be more desirable than a good but false one. In both cases the subject is bad, yet in one case he is thought good and in another not. What’s not to like about being thought good if you’re bad? You can have all the interpersonal benefits of being good without the cost of actually being good. Think of an unmerited good reputation as a kind of protective field, a bit like the famous Ring of Gyges in Plato’s Republic . Just as the magic ring allowed its wearer to do bad things yet escape detection, so a good but false reputation might allow its holder, perhaps literally, to get away with murder.

It would be perverse, however, to rest the superior value of a good, false name over a bad, true one on the ground that the former can allow its holder to exploit it for nefarious ends. Perhaps this should count for nothing, but even if it counts for something it cannot be decisive. More important is what benefits a person consistently with living a moral life—even more, what might encourage them to do so. Again, it may be that a well-reputed bad person is of a brazen and non-conformist character, bridling at the very idea of being thought good and doing everything in her power to disabuse people of the illusion. In this non-standard case, a good but false reputation would seem to be of less value to the holder than a bad and true one. But we cannot use it to generalize over the bulk of humanity. I think we can safely say that, for the ordinary run of mankind, conformity effects again play a significant role: conformity will generally prolong and/or increase an ill-reputed bad person’s badness while shortening/decreasing a well-reputed bad person’s badness. Even bad characters want to please others. Now it is true that you can please others either by meeting their expectations or by overturning them and giving them a pleasant surprise (‘see, I’m not the liar you thought I was’). A bad person with a bad reputation experiences the stick of others’ negative treatment, but this stick also runs up against the pressure to conform to expectations. By contrast, the bad person with a good reputation experiences the carrot of others’ favourable treatment. (I assume the subject understands that the favourable treatment is because she is judged good, and so is not thought to be a spur to continued bad behaviour!) And that carrot does not fight against the pressure to conform, but works with it to increase the prospects of a reduction in badness or at least a shortening of its duration. For this reason, I conclude that overall, and insofar as one can make general observations about what is likely to hold in most cases, the good, false reputation—the good reputation of a bad person—is indeed better for its holder than one that is bad and true, that is, the bad reputation of a bad person.

The value of a good name

If what I have said so far is plausible, then the result is that a good reputation is better than a bad one, whether that good reputation is merited or not. How valuable is it? I would argue that it is in fact more valuable than many material goods such as property, money, and health. True, I would rather lose my good name than my leg; you would probably rather be deprived of your fine reputation than your spouse, your house and all your savings. But many of the lesser material harms of life seem far easier to bear than the loss of a good name. Consider in particular how much easier it is generally to recover a material loss than to recover one’s reputation. Once a good name has been lost, the victim has to overcome a wall of scepticism and mistrust to earn it back; and this requires much labour in the teeth of discouragement and demotivation. Again, some people would be fired up at the prospect of earning back their good name, but even the most righteously indignant among us would feel flattened by the task of whitening a generally black reputation as opposed to the lesser (though still often daunting) job of clearing one’s generally good name of certain specific and relatively minor charges.

What we should be aiming at is to earn and maintain a good name, that is, to have a good name that is true. But for it to be true, we have to be good. This certainly does not mean we should be glory-seekers or see moral goodness as a means to the final end of a spotless reputation (even as an unattainable ideal). Nor, for that matter, should we seek a good name as the means to some further end of material benefit from our fellow human beings. We should seek goodness for itself, as the final end of all our acts, but goodness is a complex thing with various constituents, some of which are good in themselves and others good as means to more ultimate ends. Here we naturally think of such things as life, health, property, knowledge and friendship, beauty, work and play. If, as I contend, a good name is one of the more specific goods at which we should aim, in what broad category of good should it be located? The most likely seems to be that of property, which Aristotle identified as an ‘external good’ that contributes to overall happiness. Property is not an end in itself, but a means to an overall good life—facilitating not just one’s own physical and mental health, but the sorts of virtuous behaviour, such as generosity, kindness, thoughtfulness, material aid to those in need, and so on, that are characteristic of good people. Similarly, a good name is a means to the end of overall goodness of character. This time, however, the means are not material but psychic or spiritual: a good reputation is a spur to continued good behaviour, setting a standard that most people are naturally motivated to meet and adhere to. Just as ownership of physical property is a sine qua non of free commerce in lesser goods among individuals and societies, so good reputations are the condition, to speak a little crudely, of the free commerce in good deeds among people. A good reputation—merited, needless to say—is like a licence or letter of credit smoothing the way for mutually beneficial exchanges among people. If the reputation is false, it is like a fraudulent roadworthiness certificate for a damaged and dangerous vehicle, or a cheque written on an overdrawn account—useful, at least for a while, to the possessor, and hence a good for them, but also highly imperfect and something they are obliged to correct as soon as they can, before others do it for them.

A right to a good name?

It is tempting now to think that, like the right to property, there is a right to a good name: within certain limits involving injustices to other people (maybe self-harm as well), everyone has a right not to have their good reputation impugned, whether they deserve that reputation or not. As we value the right to property, so we should value reputation—something that negative judgments can only damage, being a kind of theft of what rightfully belongs to a person. The issue is, however, more vexed than I have just made it seem, and a good case can be made on either side of the issue whether there is a right to a good name that is as strong as the right to property. For a start, we should be careful about just such an analogy between a good name and one’s own property. If I have a true, good reputation, I have a right to it —but how much is it like a property right? I can sell my property, but can I sell my good name? It seems I cannot unless I can also sell the identity that goes with it, because a good name is essentially that of a specific individual. The online world we inhabit so much of the time notoriously makes it easy for identities to be stolen, and what can be stolen can be bought and sold. People can and do sell their identities (if only for limited periods), though it is hard to see how the purpose could be anything other than fraudulent (e.g. to obtain some benefit through the agency of another when the seller is physically unable to get it themselves, or to help another obtain something which they could not do under their own name).

Selling your identity, however, is not the same as selling your reputation. At best, we can say that reputation is like a quality that rides on identity: if I sell you my car when you don’t already have one, you get as a benefit the ability to take a country vacation you wouldn’t otherwise be able to take. But I can’t sell you that ability; for all I know you still won’t be able to take the trip. Similarly, the possessor of a good, true name has quite a bit of control over their reputation, but it is nowhere near complete: people’s judgments are fickle and can change for reasons having little to do with the subject’s own behaviour. When a reputation is good but unmerited, moreover, the subject’s control of it is greatly diminished: one false move and they will be caught out, as it were. It is the highly contingent element in reputations that prevents us from saying that one’s right to a good name is like a property right, where the possessor exercises a near-complete dominion. (The usual qualification, very loosely, is that you can do what you like with your own property as long as you don’t hurt others — or yourself, I would argue. You can also hurt others with your good reputation, especially if it is unmerited, since they will mistakenly trust you; so hurting others cancels out on both sides, and what is left is near-total dominion over property but very imperfect control over reputation. Whether this is a difference of degree or kind does not seem to me a matter of importance.)

The question of whether the right to a good name is like a property right becomes acute when we consider a good, false name. One might argue as follows: if a bad person somehow has or gets a good name, he possesses something to which he has no right. It is like theft, or at least handling stolen property. Therefore, you don’t do anything wrong by depriving him of his reputation, say by declaring his faults to the world (assuming you know them). Where is the injustice in that? On the other side—in favour of a person’s right to their good name whether it be deserved or not —one might argue this way: possession, as they say, is nine tenths of the law. So one might think any person can keep their good reputation as long as others are willing to let them have it. No one person has the right to deprive another of his reputation: there has to be a general change of mind. Who is harmed by someone else’s good name? Where’s the injustice in that? If I lend you £100 and don’t ask for it back, then it’s yours; isn’t it the same if I lend you my favourable judgment?

Note that a bad person might not get a good reputation by false pretences: he might simply be the sort of bad character whose misdeeds are generally secretive, or whose transactions with the outside world are fairly limited. In such a case he has his good reputation by default, as a general presumption that most people make about each other. If he gets it by false pretences, though—through studied hypocrisy, deliberately whitening his name so as to deceive others—then he seems more like a thief than in the first case. Still, even in the first case the subject appears like a handler of stolen goods who knows they are stolen but does not take them to the police. If he does nothing to correct his false reputation (assuming he knows about it), is he not at fault as much the hypocrite? Furthermore, it’s all very well to say that if I lend you £100 and don’t ask for it back, it’s yours. But what if you intend to use the money to harm an innocent person? If I know about it, am I not required to ask for the money back forthwith, as a matter of justice to the intended victim? In addition, it is simplistic to require that there be a general change of mind for a person to be deprived of their good name, once we begin wondering how that is supposed to come about without some individual’s breaking ranks. If Charlie is a vicious person, and I know it but no one else does, then how can I comfortably sit back and think, ‘I’d better not warn anyone else; who am I to take away his good name if everyone else thinks he’s a good bloke?’ How is a general change of mind supposed to happen unless someone plays the role of Paul Revere? Again, if an individual finds out that someone has a good but false reputation, does he not owe it in justice to everyone else in the community to alert them to the risk of entering into transactions with the bad person? (‘I wouldn’t trust Charlie if I were you’, ‘There’s something you ought to know—Charlie isn’t what he seems’, etc.). All in all, we have what looks like a powerful case for depriving a bad person of a good name.

The question is not so easily settled, however. There is, quite simply, something odious in the idea that one person can set themselves up as the rightful arbiter of another’s reputation before the world at large. There are two kinds of case to examine.

A. Consider the accidental case first, where Delia acquires her good reputation, despite her vicious character, simply through luck—by which I mean, without any conscious reputation management on her part. She goes about her daily life, perhaps her exchanges with others are fairly few, her vices tend to be secret or for whatever reason do not manifest themselves to many other people, and so on. Who am I to disabuse the world at large of the illusion it is under? It is as if someone accidentally dropped £100 in the street and Delia picked it up. If she can easily— and with no serious inconvenience to herself — ascertain the rightful owner and return the money, she should do so. Should she take extra steps to do this, leaving no stone unturned to get the money back where it belongs, we would applaud her heroic behaviour but recognize it as just that—above and beyond the call of duty. In the case of Delia’s accidentally good reputation, what is she obliged to do—put out scores of internet posts warning people she is not as good as she seems? Take out newspaper advertisements? Apart from the absurdity of the thought (why would a bad person have the inclination to rectify the misapprehension anyway?), she simply cannot do any of this without causing herself immense damage, and were she to do the twenty-first-century equivalent of placing a massive dunce’s hat on her head, we might applaud her noble self-sacrifice but we would not, and ought not, think Delia had done what she was purely and simply required to do as a matter of justice.

She may not be so required; but mightn’t someone else? Perhaps you or I are required in justice, or at the very least allowed, to tear down Delia’s reputation? Well, it could not be because of the universal truth of a moral principle to the effect that a person is either permitted or obliged to do for another what that other is not permitted or obliged to do for themselves. There is no such principle. (I am not allowed to steal, and no one is allowed to steal for me; I am not obliged to go shopping every day, nor is anyone obliged to go shopping for me). There are specific cases in which such a principle may apply, however, but they involve some sort of higher obligation involving control or authority, or a duty to protect the common welfare. Obviously parents lawfully and dutifully do things for their children (organizing their lives in various minute ways) that their children may not do for themselves (deciding freely how to spend their money, what to wear, what to read…). So do governments: I may not build a road for my own convenience wherever I like, but the government may build roads for me. I may not take the law into my own hands: the police do it for me.

So, am I in a position of authority either over Delia or the general community? If I am not the duly constituted authority, and I am not Delia’s parent or guardian, who am I to destroy her reputation, no matter how at odds it is with the truth about her character? The government should warn people about individuals of bad character where the common welfare is at stake (dangerous criminals on the loose, rogue traders, etc.). Parents might choose to warn others about their own child’s vices where there is a danger of harm to those others or purely and simply for the child’s own correction. But neither you nor I are in a position that requires us to correct Delia by blackening her name, and if there is no manifest danger of a significant injustice to specific others (it is hard to be more precise but we must remember that, as Aristotle insisted, ethics is not mathematics), how can we justify taking away from her a possession, namely her reputation, that is more valuable than money or other wealth?

As far as the general welfare goes, in many cases causing damage to reputation is not merely a governmental obligation but one that devolves on us all as common citizens. Both the media and individuals broadcast reputation-destroying information about shoddy tradesmen, and they do us a service. If you suspect the likelihood of a specific injustice against someone due to a person’s unmerited good reputation, you are right to warn the potential victim. (‘You shouldn’t ask Fred to house-sit for you—he breaks promises like pie crusts’, and the like). Needless to say, if you are the potential victim of injustice, you might report your suspicions to someone else (some regulatory body, or to a friend for advice on whether you should transact further with the person concerned).

On the matter of correction, note that there are two ways a good, false reputation can be corrected—by correcting the reputation or by correcting the character. As I suggested, a person with some sort of lawful authority over another might choose, without wrong, to harm their reputation for the subject’s own benefit, i.e. to encourage them to earn it back. Without the relevant authority, however, and given the high value of a good name, in all other cases a person of bad character should be corrected privately : their reputation is not something over which another person has lawful dominion, so the only route left open is to try to get the person to change their behaviour to meet the reputation, not to lower the reputation to meet the behaviour.

B. Yet even if what I have said about an accidental good reputation is plausible, what about the case of reputation management, where by hypocrisy and other devious means a person engineers a fine reputation that does not correspond to reality? What makes this a more galling situation than that of a reputation got by luck is the added unfairness: not only does the subject have a vicious character but she has exploited one of her vices, namely hypocrisy, to ensure that her other vices remain generally unknown! She has filched her reputation as surely as a burglar. And what she has filched, we might think, is ours to snatch as we see fit, in order to restore the justice harmed by her deception.

My question, however, is: by what right does anyone else take it upon themselves to remedy the admittedly unfair state of things? There is no general obligation of the part of anyone—not even the government or the public as a whole—to rectify every injustice. If Gregory sees Helen trespassing on Ian’s land, absent some special situation Gregory has no obligation to evict Helen. A special situation might be family ties, friendship, a promise or contract, guardianship of the land, Gregory’s position as a law enforcement officer, and the like. But in general, not only is there no obligation to interfere, but there might even be a duty to refrain for fear of causing more harm than that done by the original trespass. The maxim of minding one’s own business does not really capture what is at issue here. In the case of reputation, a person’s hypocritical massaging of their good name might well be my business, especially if I have been a victim of their deceitfulness. It still does not follow that my duty is to warn others, and given the status of a good name as the valuable possession it is, I am not even permitted to do so, again absent some special situation. Consider again the property analogy: in the case of theft, I am morally entitled to deprive the thief of his ill-gotten goods and hand them over to the police or their rightful owner to remedy a specific injustice against the owner. If I see the thief on the verge of stealing your wallet, I am at the very least permitted to take the wallet first and hide it. Similarly, if I am in the position where I know of an actual or likely specific injustice against an individual resulting from dealing with some person of bad character, I am at least entitled, and may be obliged, to warn the potential victim. But all I am allowed to do is warn them , and only about those aspects of the subject of the reputation that affect the transaction at hand. For instance, if Mike knows that Nancy is about to invite her friend Olivia over for dinner, and that Olivia is secretly having an affair with Nancy’s husband, Mike is entitled (perhaps obliged as a trusted confidant) to warn Nancy. But even here, I submit, he would not be permitted morally just to tell Nancy about the affair; there would have to be the likelihood of Nancy’s being further wronged by Olivia, say because Mike knows Olivia is only looking for an excuse to find out more about her husband’s personal life so as to determine whether the affair can safely be continued. Moreover, even if Mike is allowed to tell Nancy (perhaps obliquely, so as to lessen the shock), he is not thereby permitted also to indicate that Olivia is, say, an alcoholic, or a shoplifter, or reveal some other vice that blackens her name more than the revelation of adultery will already harm it. Further, he most certainly is not entitled to tell the world at large about the affair or about any other of Olivia’s misdeeds. No private individual is entitled indiscriminately to correct false reputations any more than to return all the world’s stolen goods, even if he is capable of doing so.

Again, reference to the common welfare is a significant qualification of the general rule. This comes into play most often when the subject is a public official, whose character is rightly held to a higher standard than private citizens, especially in matters of trust and decency, given the proportionately greater influence he has over the fate of the populace. It is one thing to tread carefully in private matters between private citizens, and another when a public official relies on deceit and hypocrisy to whiten a disreputable character. Assuming that matters involving trustworthiness (fidelity, loyalty, the keeping of promises, general honesty) are of great importance in government, any private citizen is free to reveal defects of character relating to these matters when the subject is a public official. By contrast, much as it probably galls many people to hear it, it would be unjust to damage the reputation of a celebrity who manipulates the media and deceives the public to preserve an unmerited good name. Where, indeed, is the injustice that needs remedying? What harm is being done? That the celebrity-addicted public thinks it has a ‘right to know’ says more about celebrity-mania than it does about celebrities themselves.

In all of these matters one must also consider the good done by damaging a reputation, however undeserved, versus the harm to the person whose reputation is damaged. The revelation of a major vice, in order to remedy a trifling wrong, can hardly be considered just. (‘He overcharged you by £5? That’s nothing—he’s embezzled millions!’) Broadcasting another’s faults beyond the proper borders is also unjust: why tell the world that Bob is a lying cheat when only a handful of people (e.g. business associates) need to know? Again, declaring someone’s defects with utter certainty when there is room for legitimate doubt shows a lack of respect for one’s neighbour that can only poison social relations. We all want people’s reputations to be in accord with their true characters, as a reliable guide to social exchanges. We also want people to have use and dominion only of what is rightfully theirs. But there are good and bad ways of promoting these desirable states of affairs. Which brings me to the topic of judging others.

Rash judgment

To judge someone rashly is to possess the firm conviction that they are guilty of some morally wrong act, or defect of character, based on insufficient warrant. It is more than a mere suspicion, supposition or the entertaining of a possibility. It is not simply an assumption that you might make for prudential reasons. If I am walking through a large city late at night and a stranger comes up to me asking for directions, I might avoid him on the ground that he may be—or even probably is —a mugger. But I don’t—or at least ought not, if rash judgment is wrong—make a firm judgment that he is; still less do I make a judgment about his true motives or the state of his conscience. This is not to say that there cannot be rash suspicions as well, for example suspecting as a potential thief a friend I have known for years who has a spotless record of honesty. My main concern here, however, is the morality of judgment, characterized as a firm assent of the mind.

If what I have outlined so far is plausible, then we can immediately see why rash judgment should be considered wrong: reputation-destroying behaviour is its natural outward expression. A firm judgment usually translates into external actions proportionate to the judgment. The more certain our judgments of others, the more fixed and overt our behaviour toward them. If harmonious social relations are a prime good, then people’s moderation of their judgments about each other can only serve that good.

Further, one might consider rash judgment as a wrong in and of itself, not just because of its effects. Again, the liberal ear will find this strange if not slightly menacing—how can we condemn anyone’s state of mind? By judging rash judgment, are we not indulging in the very sort of poisonous behaviour we ought to avoid? Leaving aside the earlier discussion about second-order judgments, I want to advance some further considerations. First, to countenance a morality of just judgment is not ipso facto to propose that anyone go about judging the judgments of others. It is simply to enunciate a set of rules that each person ought to apply to themselves in order to judge their own judgments—something they can do using their own reason, and examining their own conscience, even if we suppose that no person has a right in any way to judge any judgment but their own. Secondly, given that what we ought to be avoiding is rashness in our judgments, there is moral space for individuals to judge each others’ judgments, as long as the higher-level judgments are not rash. Thirdly, the application of morality to states of mind is hardly novel. Even liberal-minded people disapprove morally of hatred, spite, jealousy, and other corrosive states of mind—and presumably not just because of their tendencies to outward manifestation. We can make sense of a society of hate-filled people who nevertheless managed to get along well due to certain firmly built-in codes of proper conduct. But would the neutralization of external manifestation equally neutralize the internal states themselves, morally speaking? It might be countered that a person whose internal peace of mind is eaten away by such states is more to be pitied that judged. Yet the pity stems from the psychic damage they inflict on themselves, and no one thinks a person is morally entitled to harm themselves by indulging in such states of mind except insofar as we all agree that a person cannot be coerced into this or that mental state. I am not morally permitted to force you (e.g. with some special drug) not to indulge in hateful emotions—absent some special situation such as my guardianship of you or the risk you will harm others—but that doesn’t mean you are morally entitled to do yourself the psychic harm that hatefulness brings about.

In any case, whether you concur with this latter consideration or not, it remains that every rash judgment puts a dent or hole in someone else’s reputation (given that a reputation just is the sum total of opinions everyone has about an individual), and if reputation is a highly valued good, that good is thereby, however slightly, undermined. So should we not say, with little fuss, that the rules of just judgment do not differ from—in fact are only a specific case of—the general rules for proportioning one’s belief to the evidence? At the most abstract level, if you have sufficient warrant for believing p, then you should believe that p, and if you don’t then you shouldn’t. What’s special about the rules for judgment as I have defined judgment here?

Note first that the high-level rule connecting warrant and belief has familiar counter-examples if it is construed as an unqualified, exceptionless requirement. Fred may have overwhelming evidence, hence overwhelmingly sufficient warrant, for believing he has a terminal illness that will carry him off in a month. But given what we know about the role of the mind in physical healing, it might well be prudent for Fred to believe with all his heart that he will get better, perhaps even suppressing all knowledge of the evidence against. Gina, faced with a torrent of evidence that her vote makes no difference to who ends up governing her, might still permissibly believe that it does, if so believing is a spur to her continued involvement in political activity. People rarely go through a conscious process beginning with the thought that a belief is wholly unjustified and concluding with the resolution to hold it anyway because of its utility. This does not imply that the process is irrational. It can be prudent; it can even be morally respectable. We should, of course, tread very carefully when it comes to these sorts of belief, and in no way think that they are more than an exception to a general rule. Categorising them and providing rules for when epistemically unjustified beliefs might be morally or prudentially justified is an important general exercise which I cannot explore here. Still, by focusing on rules for the judgment of others we can flesh out one class of belief where exceptions to the general rule of proportionality make an appearance.

The heart of the problem in working out rules of judgment is the tension between, on the one hand, the intellectual virtue of judging according to evidence, with all the usefulness that entails, and on the other the moral virtue of being charitable toward other people, with all the usefulness that entails. Note a couple of important points. One: in no way do I mean to reduce either virtue to its utility. Rather, there are two components, on either side of the line of tension, to the overall case for devising the right sorts of rule—something virtuous in itself, and something useful. Two: in no way do I mean to separate moral from non-moral components to the question. I take the provision of rules for judgment to be a moral issue—how we ought to judge, where the ‘ought’ is a moral one. The considerations going to its resolution are themselves moral. Exercising one’s intellect in a rational way, i.e. cultivating an intellectual virtue, is itself a moral activity, just like preserving and promoting one’s health. The utility of doing so, at least for a large part, involves various personal and social goods connected with the harmonious negotiation of the world and peaceful social relations. Exercising charity is a moral activity, and there is a large moral component to the various goods that follow from it as well.

But how is the tension to be resolved? If there is no obligation of charity, then we can just say that everyone is morally bound to judge the character of another according to the evidence: if you are justified in judging Henry to be a scoundrel, then so you should judge. Such a judgment would be rash only insofar as it departed from any evidential justification. This cannot, however, be the end of the story. For charity is an obligation. It is traditionally defined in terms of love of neighbour, but we can equally speak of a general benevolence toward others. Now we cannot read off from this obligation any duty, for example, to hold off on judgment of others, at least in some cases, but we have to admit it as a possibility given that (i) judging another—where I am speaking exclusively of negative judgments—is necessarily damaging to the good of reputation and (ii) judging another can have bad effects on the one judged and/or on others, including the person making the judgment. Can we fill in the gaps enabling us to argue from the general obligation of charity to the specific one of avoiding certain kinds of judgment even when epistemically justified?

Although it is quite true that everyone without exception does morally wrong things at many times in their lives, it is also the case that most people are good—or so I shall argue. It is as well to note first that I have been speaking throughout of good and bad people, virtuous and vicious characters, as though these were uncomplicated, easily graspable matters. Of course they are not. I don’t presuppose that they are essentially sharp phenomena (that is, non-vague), as though there were a precise borderline between good and bad people; many people, both philosophers and others, would vehemently deny it. In fact I believe it, but I do not need to assume it. All I claim is that such people exist, and that a rough characterization is all we need. People who habitually violate many basic moral norms are bad; those who do not are good. We used to have a rich vocabulary for the former, but for cultural reasons that are no doubt fascinating most have faded away: ‘scoundrel’; ‘blackguard’; ‘knave’; ‘miscreant’; ‘rascal’; ‘reprobate’; ‘villain’; ‘ne’er-do-well’; and others. The vocabulary for good people was always thinner. (Try to think of some single terms to stand in for rather dull compounds like ‘good bloke’, ‘terrific chap’, ‘ a true gentleman’, ‘ a real lady’, and a handful of others.) I submit that the reason for the asymmetry is precisely that—as I have suggested—most people are good. We only devise simple (non-compound) terms for things that are either objectively uncommon relative to the rest of what exists, or are at least uncommon relative to our everyday experience of the world.

I will leave aside for the moment the obvious question that comes to mind: since the multifarious terms for bad people have largely faded from use, can we now still safely assume that most people are good? Let us also set linguistic evidence to one side. I claim that most people are good. If they were not, society could not function. So at least where a society does function, most people have to be good overall. Let’s put it more concretely: for all their vices, most people are still not habitual liars, thieves, cheats, bullies, physical aggressors against others, lazy good-for-nothings, spongers, hypocrites, slanderers…and the list goes on. We need to be clear: all people, without exception, engage in behaviour that comes under these headings, such that if they habitually did the things that come under all of these headings and more, they would be bad. But they do not. Or so I am claiming—for now.

The claim is not that most people are good simpliciter , as though they are, right now, candidates either for Heaven or its secular equivalent (if there is one). My assertion is that they are good overall (which is what I mean by ‘good’)—good characters mixed with a decent, perhaps generous, helping of bad. If this is true, it creates in my view a presumption. We need not be capable of fixing a statistic to the presumption: the moral life does not work like that. All we need to know is that most people are good, and that therefore in any particular case we are bound both rationally and morally to presume that the person under our consideration is good.

How strong is the presumption? Potentially both weak and strong—weak in one respect but strong in another, more important, respect. If everyone were good, we would have an immediate strong presumption. But we know there are many bad people. So suppose that only a slender majority of people are good. That creates a weak presumption of goodness in any particular case. Nevertheless, that weak presumption converts to a strong presumption when we realise that judging a person good or bad does not depend solely on judging external behaviour; it also depends crucially, perhaps most importantly, on judging a host of inner states—motives, beliefs, hopes, fears, anxieties, and many more—along with an array of external circumstances to many of which we are unlikely to have enough epistemic access to be able to factor them into our judgment. All of this complexity, I submit, turns a weak presumption of goodness into a strong one.

Suppose, for analogy’s sake, I have a sack full of two superficially similar kinds of object—bingles and bongles. Fifty-one per cent of the objects are bingles and forty-nine per cent are bongles. I ask you to reach into the sack and hold one, then think about judging whether it’s a bongle. You can’t tell just by touch, and even if you looked at it you couldn’t tell. Suppose it turns out that there is no crucial experiment to determine whether something is a bingle or a bongle—no one fact that settles the matter. Rather, you have to make an overall judgment based on a large range of diverse characteristics. Moreover, it is very difficult to determine for any one characteristic whether the object has it or lacks it. To make the case even more apposite, suppose not even our best technology can determine whether some of the characteristics are present or not, even though there is a fact of the matter in respect of each feature. For you to judge with certainty that the object in your hand is a bongle you have a massive load of work to do. Someone smart enough and resourceful enough could do it, but that person probably isn’t you. Can you presume the object is a bingle? There is a weak presumption because a slender majority are bingles. But that converts into a strong presumption given the monumental task of proving it to be a bongle. For it to be a strong presumption that something is the case is precisely for you to have a lot of work to do proving it to be otherwise.

I think this is roughly where we stand with people. Even if there is only a weak presumption of their goodness based on a slender majority, that converts to a very strong presumption given how hard it would be to prove any individual bad. You might say that we should all be agnostic given that it is equally hard to prove anyone good just as, in my analogy, it was equally hard to judge something to be a bingle or a bongle. But the question at issue is not about the rules for judging people good; it is about the rules for judging people bad. (In the analogy, I asked you whether you were holding a bongle, not a bingle.) If there were a presumption that people were bad, we would need rules for judging them good. We might even need them if the presumption is that people are good, since a presumption is not a judgment. Harmful effects can come from people’s over-zealously judging others to be good, so I don’t want to trivialise the issue. But damaging their reputation is not one of those harmful effects, and I am concerned here with the morality of reputation.

So, if I am right, there is a strong presumption that people are good. I said earlier, however, that we should not have scruples about judging others’ judgments simply because we can’t know their inner states. We can know their judgments by their outward manifestations, just as we know other mental states such as hopes and fears. But I am now making a different point about the difficulty of judging character based partly on a knowledge of others’ internal states. The presumption of goodness does not rely on our never being able to know another person’s motives, reactions to circumstances, hopes, fears, and the like. We can know at least some of these in many cases, by the usual external criteria—not least of which is simple linguistic evidence, i.e. what people tell us about themselves. In particular, cases that are what we might call notorious do not pose a problem. When a person, through their own behaviour, manifests their immorality to the world, they do not have a reputation to lose—hence judging them in accordance with the evidence is unlikely to be rash. A person does not need to display or admit to their vices before a large number of people in order for these to be notorious. If Nancy does not care that a handful of her work colleagues know she is cheating on her husband with her boss, she cannot expect her colleagues to refrain from judging her behaviour (assuming they disapprove, of course). This does not mean they are entitled to gossip about it, but Nancy should expect this, in other words if she finds that friends and neighbours are soon aware of her adultery she cannot legitimately claim that her private behaviour is no one else’s business. Notoriety can be achieved by manifesting one’s vices to a large number of people, or in a public place, or by boasting, or due to a public judgment (by a court or official inquiry). Of course we all think of the media when it comes to making vices notorious, but we must remember that counter-balancing the noise the media make is the fact that their investigations and exposes apply to a very tiny minority of people in any society—nearly all of them celebrities, public officials, and those caught up in the judicial process. Of these cases I would echo fairly widespread views: any celebrity who uses or willingly benefits from positive media reports of their character and behaviour cannot complain of negative reports as long as they are true; the character and behaviour of public officials is a matter of legitimate public interest; and, as long as fairness in procedure is maintained, those caught up in the judicial process cannot complain of unjust notoriety. The vast majority of people, however, are untouched by media intrusion into their lives and can rightly complain if the media, having made their character or behaviour notorious, claim that its notoriety has deprived them of any protection for their reputation.

The presumption of goodness, then, is not based on the impossibility of ever knowing the state of a person’s character, or the nature of their actions in terms of their motives, desires, and so on. We can even know the state of a person’s conscience with some accuracy, especially when we are an intimate of that person. We might be able to judge that a person is so beyond hope, having delivered themselves over to vice, that only a miracle could turn them around. Nevertheless, the difficulty of these sorts of judgment, given that we are dealing with a myriad internal states interacting with complex external circumstances, coupled with the need to preserve goodwill among people for the sake of harmonious social relations, means that we have a large burden to discharge if we are safely to make a judgment — by which, remember, I mean negative judgment—about another person’s character or behaviour.

It should be fairly clear now what it means to call a judgment rash. In moral matters, rashness does not consist in a simple disproportion between judgment and evidence. We cannot say: a person judges another rashly if and only if she lacks enough evidence to warrant her judgment. Certainly, if she lacks enough evidence she will almost always be judging rashly. But she might still judge rashly even when possessing sufficient warrant, if all we mean is epistemic warrant—something like a straight proportion between evidence and judgment. If I have enough evidence to judge with certainty that the post office will be open tomorrow, my judgment that it will be open can hardly be called rash. But when it comes to moral matters, there is a weighty presumption in favour of good character: I cannot rest easy in judging that Bob is a cheat—say, that he plagiarised an essay—solely because I have evidence of the sort that would be commensurate with a closely related non -moral judgment—say, that he worked hard on an essay. In moral matters I must have what used to be called ‘moral certainty’, in other words evidence that conclusively rules out any reasonable, competing explanation that preserves Bob’s good name. Moreover, there is what might be called a ‘double lock’ on such judgments because, unless I am in a specific position that obliges me to inquire into Bob’s behaviour—because, say, I am the person marking his essay—I do not even have any business concerning myself with it. If there was a presumption that people were permitted to inquire willy-nilly into the behaviour of others, this would undermine the very social harmony the original presumption of goodness is designed to protect. It would licence ‘fishing expeditions’ for the sake of blackening others’ reputations, which is directly opposed to charity and goodwill.

At this point the reader will be thinking that what I propose looks very much like the presumption of innocence that exists in the criminal law, requiring ‘proof beyond reasonable doubt’ to defeat it. This is no accident, since the legal presumption of innocence is itself founded on the moral presumption. The legal presumption was a product of the fusion of Roman and canon law in the early Middle Ages, and these were founded on what all jurists recognized as the natural law — universal moral prescriptions that mandated, among other things, how a person accused of some crime was to be treated. Even Adam and Eve, said the medieval lawyers, had their day in court, having pleaded innocence, and God (for whom their crime was in fact notorious!) summoned them to account for their behaviour. From this, concluded the jurists, we were given the model for treating all criminal defendants.

We need to separate two points, however. Having your day in court (the right to a fair trial) and being presumed innocent are not the same. A court might presume a defendant guilty yet still give him a fair trial, with the burden of proof now resting on him to prove his innocence. What the medieval theorists meant with their biblical explanation is that Adam and Eve were naturally to be presumed good, having later been corrupted by the serpent. The model is then supposed to require treating all accused in the same way—innocent until the prosecution can provide specific, incontrovertible evidence to counteract this natural view of the accused’s character or behaviour.

When it comes to reputation and rash judgment, the trial scenario does not apply. So the extra reasons for justifying the legal presumption of innocence are irrelevant, specifically the importance of the presumption in counteracting the power of the state (it being much harder for an individual to prove their innocence than for the state to prove them guilty). What we are left with is the bare presumption, founded in the nature of things, that people, overall, are good, overall.

Specific applications

From the general principles I have laid out, we can draw some more specific applications. Consider the question of what is ‘your business’. To go back to the plagiarism case, it is clear that if you have no need to know whether Bob plagiarised his essay, you have no need to form a judgment. This is just an application of the principle that we are not only not obliged, but are not even permitted, to go about inquiring into other people’s behaviour or character, let alone the state of their conscience, without a sufficiently good reason. Satisfying one’s curiosity is not such a reason; still less is the desire of feeling superior to others. In fact, I can think of only a few classes of sufficiently good reason. One would be a special relation of trust, whereby one person consents to another’s examination of her conscience (priest/penitent, counsellor/patient, intimate friends). Another would be where this sort of close inquiry into another’s behaviour or character was necessary for assessing their suitability for a particular job or role (employer/potential employee, principal/potential agent). Another would be where we have a special position of authority to make such an inquiry. If I am Bob’s lecturer I need to know, for academic reasons, whether he plagiarised his essay. If I am his personal tutor, I need to know for pastoral reasons. A parent has the right and duty to inquire into the state of conscience of their child, assuming first the absolute duty of parents to bring their children up to be good people. In these sorts of cases, the issue is always one of either potentially helping (by correction, admonition, punishment) the person into whose state of character one is inquiring, or else protecting against potential injustice to oneself or third parties.

What if information comes to you about someone’s character or behaviour, even though you have no need to know and would never have been permitted to inquire into it yourself? If a highly reliable witness tells me, without any doubt in her mind, that some bare acquaintance of mine has been stealing from his employer, may I judge that this is so? Strictly, it seems, I may do so without being rash. It would not be wrong of me to do so, but that does not make it a duty for me to form my judgment in this way. Again, from the point of view of social harmony, surely it is better for me only to entertain strong suspicions, raising them perhaps with others but only if they need to be informed. In other words, if I am to take the duty of charity seriously, shouldn’t I bend over backwards to avoid firmly assenting to an unfavourable characterization of someone when it is not a direct concern of mine and there is no concrete interest to be served by such assent?

Notice the point we have reached. What I am now suggesting is that, even if we are permitted in good conscience to form a judgment about another person’s character or behaviour—having overcome the weighty presumption in their favour—it still does not follow that we ought to do so. In fact, in situations where there is no direct need—for the benefit of ourselves or others with whom we have some concern, or for the benefit of the subject of potential judgment—we ought, I submit, to find ways to minimise the behaviour of the person about whom we are considering our judgment, to moderate our judgment so that it is either less than certain, or if certain that its object is less serious. For example, if you can reasonably attribute a less bad motive (say, greed rather than cruelty) or a good motive instead of a bad one (kindness rather than malice), you should. Again, if you have a choice between judging someone guilty of doing something bad or something worse, consistently with the evidence, then you should judge the lesser offence. If all I see is Fred breaking into a house, with no further background knowledge, I may judge that he is intent on burglary but not murder. Circumstances are often capable of multiple interpretations, but even if none are favourable this does not mean we may put the worst interpretation on them.

In so acting to minimise the faults of others, don’t we open ourselves up to a plethora of false beliefs? If true belief were the only value at stake, we ought to be concerned. But the duty of charity or benevolence ranks no less high than that of believing the truth. Indeed, it ranks higher inasmuch as morality is about our character and behaviour, not merely our beliefs. If the perfection of our own character, and indirectly that of social relations, requires making a weighty presumption in favour of the goodness of others, then if we take the presumption seriously we have to accept the perhaps significant risk of false belief. Hence believing well of someone, even falsely, should take precedence over believing ill of them truly. As noted already, however, where another’s vices are manifest or notorious—on display, as it were—we may without further inquiry judge them negatively, and ought to do so since the general rule in favour of believing the truth applies immediately. The reason for the exception, it seems to me, is that when a person’s bad behaviour is so manifest as to make a negative judgment inevitable, it is as though we are not choosing to judge them at all. Rather, their behaviour forces a judgment on us, and if we resist it we ourselves have to do violence to our own rationality—itself a form of self-inflicted harm for which we are morally responsible.

By now, it may seem that the boundaries and presumptions I have erected against negative judgments of others imply that a person who judges rashly always does something seriously wrong. It is one thing for us to remind ourselves of the singular importance of reputation and the need to preserve social harmony, but quite another to elevate rash judgment to the level of a taboo rivalling the many grosser forms of immorality with which we are daily confronted! The worry is justified, which is why we need to dial back a little and put matters in context. Not every wrong that a person does is serious. This does not negate one of the prime moral principles—do no wrong —but it does indicate the need for caution and context. It is one thing to judge rashly in a minor matter—say, that Betsy is thoughtless when it comes to birthdays—and another to judge rashly in a serious matter—say, that she is thoughtless about her children’s welfare. Here, the seriousness of the wrong is measured by the content of the judgment, which itself reflects the damage to reputation. But context and circumstance also matter: it is one thing to judge that a celebrity is wasteful with other people’s money but far worse to judge that a public official is, given the responsibilities of their job. To judge your neighbour a liar is bad; to think the same of a priest or a police officer is far worse, since the more that is expected of someone, the greater the damage to their good name by even a relatively slight discredit. Again, if a person has a good name but many genuine questions have been publicly aired about their character, to judge them negatively would not in general be a serious wrong. The point is that even if rash judgment, which harms both charity and justice, is a form of immorality, sound moral principles cannot entail that we are all guilty of multiple serious wrongs pretty much all of the time, given human weakness and the all-too-familiar temptation to indulge in such judgment. This does not mean we should treat rash judgment lightly, only that assessing its moral gravity requires, as in all things, sensitivity to circumstance.

Looking in the mirror

So far I have not mentioned a separate class of reasons that on their own ought to warn us against being too quick to make judgments about others. These all have to do with the inherent unreliability of such judgments, in other words their very tendency to be judgments that do the most damage—contributing to someone’s having a bad but false reputation. For all that most people are good overall, we each still, without exception, have vices in our character that supply enough material for a lifetime’s meditation. One of the things these vices cause is precisely a weakening of our ability correctly to judge the characters of each other. Probably the meta-vice, as it were—the granddaddy of them all—is pride. By pride I do not mean proper satisfaction and contentment in one’s own (or others’) achievements, but an excessive estimation of one’s own character, behaviour, abilities and capacities—including, of course, the capacity to judge others. We all like to think we are good judges of character, but this is precisely what makes us generally bad judges: we assume first impressions are correct, we think that what we take ourselves to be perceiving is what we are in fact perceiving, we presume that we have enough experience dealing with others to be quite reliable when it comes to summing them up (we are all ‘street wise’, ‘savvy’, ‘in the know’). In fact, this latter presumption can cause havoc. Many people do, unfortunately, have long and bitter experience dealing with their fellows, and it is a truism that the older you get, the more bitter and cynical you tend to become. But it would be a mistake to project that cynicism far and wide, viewing all human behaviour through a bottle of vinegar—as though there had to be a wicked motive behind every deed and every person was simply not to be trusted. The same applies to any individual who has experienced a series of disappointments in life.

Being prone to vice as we all are, we tend to spread it around liberally. If I am vicious, finding pleasure in all sorts of wrongdoing, surely I will be surprised if others don’t find the same enjoyment? And won’t I find it too much of a reproof to think that although I cheated in these circumstances, and someone I know was in the same situation, they did not cheat as well? Many people, for all sorts of reasons, bear within themselves hatred, envy, malice, anger: for them it will take only the slightest provocation, no matter how objectively trivial, to judge someone else guilty of this or that moral outrage. Furthermore, it is likely that people who have a particular character flaw are more prone than those without it to find the same flaw in others. One reason would be the natural tendency we have not to think of ourselves as unusual in some significant respect—abnormal or singular. Another is the barely conscious thought that by taking our vices to be common, we somehow minimise their seriousness. Again, these inclinations can significantly skew our judgment of others.

One of the most promising ways of reversing this imbalance in our attitudes to other people, the strong presumption of innocence aside, is to reflect carefully on our own case. Before making a judgment about someone else, it is useful to ask how we would want to be judged by others in a similar case. If we judge rashly, can we complain if others judge us equally rashly? If we would wither at the self-application of our own standard of judgment, why should we apply it with equal rigour to our fellows? Only special pleading could make for a difference. Perhaps more important, though, is the simple fact that we can on the whole do far more good to ourselves and society by devoting the vast majority of time we currently spend on judging others to meditating on, with a view to correcting, our own faults. Clearly, we are far more likely to succeed in correcting ourselves than in correcting others, except perhaps for those totally under our authority—children, in particular. So if it is good for people to be good, and you can do your part to help make people good, it makes perfect sense to start with yourself. And given that this is a lifetime project for most of us, we are unlikely to have much time left over for reflecting on the faults of others.

Note that this recommendation is not to be construed as an invitation to narcissism. It is not a question of endless self-analysis but of endless self-correction. Psychoanalytic speculations aside, it does not usually take much reflection to work out our faults, vices, and weaknesses. Knowing what they are is not the problem so much as doing something about them. And doing something about them is essentially tied to outward behaviour, involving practical implementation of techniques for improving ourselves and, as a necessary consequence, our actions toward others.

Furthermore, having suggested that we should not be more severe with others than we would be with ourselves, I am still allowing that we might be more severe with ourselves all the same. This is something we ought to consider as a natural consequence of our self-knowledge. True, we might crumple at a level of self-judgment we rightly refrain from applying to others, but it still may be a price worth paying for our own benefit, if it leads to self-improvement rather than self-paralysis.

The days of Noah?

What if I have built all of the foregoing considerations on an overly rosy view of human nature? What if the strong presumption of goodness, on which the right not to be judged rashly depends, is itself an illusion? Most people might have been mostly good once, but maybe now they are mostly bad? (Recall the disappearance of all those wonderful terms for referring to people of bad character.) This is not the place to assess the truth of extreme moral-cultural pessimism. The question here is simply whether it would affect the ethics of judgment.

On this I will make only a couple of brief remarks. First, if things—rather, people —really are that bad, then what would have counted as rash judgment had the situation been as I have outlined above, would no longer do so. Moreover, a situation so dire would involve the notoriety of much vicious behaviour, so both the presumption of goodness and the appeal to non-notoriety would vanish. So much for the principle; but, secondly, would this impose an obligation of judgment? If the situation is as I have suggested earlier, judgment is the exception, not the rule. Its obligatoriness derives not just from the duty of believing what is true, but from the salutary and corrective effects of such judgment—warning potential victims, preventing or reversing injustice, helping the subject of judgment overcome their faults, and so on. But when, due to universal, manifest vice, judgment becomes the rule, not the exception, what interests are served? Would we seriously expect anyone to benefit, except in occasional cases? Would hearts so hardened against virtue be responsive to correction? Is there much to be gained by telling the thief that he is about to be robbed by someone else, while at the same time you expose yourself to being pillaged by both? Does anyone seriously think that by painting over a world of vice with a thin layer of ‘righteous’ judgment mankind could pull itself back from the brink? The reader may not take the story of Noah to be more than that — a story, albeit edifying all the same. She should still, however, take note: Noah did not spend his time judging all the reprobates soon to be swallowed up in a torrent. Instead, he built an ark.

The preceding discussion has undoubtedly raised as many questions as it has attempted to answer. I do not pretend to have said anything close to the last word on a much-neglected topic. On the contrary, that the morality of judging others has been so little discussed, at least among contemporary ethicists, leaves the field open to debate — over both first principles and their application. It will be enough for present purposes to have persuaded some readers that judgment as I have defined it is not a taboo subject for ethical speculation; that, on the contrary, it is important for many reasons; and that it is possible to work out something like a framework of rules for handling the cases that come under it. As practical ethicists we should, I submit, not read the adjective ‘practical’ so narrowly that we confine ourselves, as we nearly always do, to the ethical assessment of outward behaviour only.

Acknowledgements: I am grateful to an anonymous referee for many helpful comments that have greatly improved this paper, and to the editors of the Journal of Practical Ethics for their invitation to contribute.

How Do We Make Moral Judgments?

How do humans make moral judgments? This has been an ongoing and unresolved debate in psychology, and with good reason. Moral judgments aren’t just opinions. They are the decisions with which we condemn others to social exclusion, jail, and even violent retaliation. Given their weight, moral judgments are often assumed to be rational, though recent psychological research has suggested that they may be more like gut feelings. While debates about whether moral judgments are deliberate, conscious attributions, or automatic intuitions have been fruitful both theoretically and practically, the next direction in moral research needs to take a pragmatic turn. Rather than continue to ask whether morals are deliberate or affective, it’s time to ask when moral judgments are deliberate and when they are affective, and how these different types of reasoning both inform judgment.

Evidence for deliberate moral judgment, such as research by Cushman and Young, argues for a model of moral judgment in which people utilize rational cognitive processes to assess the cause of the potential moral wrong and that wrong’s effects.  Their research presented situations to participants in which one person acted in a way that affected another person. The researchers manipulated information about who caused a wrong, whether they intended to cause the wrong, and what harm has been caused. These facts were shown to change the moral judgment of the participants, suggesting deliberate moral judgment. This theory emphasizes the ‘correct’ assessment of moral facts, in which the goals of minimizing harm and maximizing well-being serve as the two aims of morality. It is ultimately a theory of rational decision-making; people observe the world, determine if their facts match their overall moral code, then make moral judgments. This model probably matches how many people think about their own moral stances; reasonable, fact-based, and most importantly, correct.

Intuitionist theorists such as Jonathan Haidt, however, have demonstrated that our moral reasoning is sometimes quite unreasonable. Haidt argued that affective responses, such as feelings of disgust, serve as the primary motivator for moral judgment (Haidt, 2001). In this theory, there are natural or socially learned intuitions of what is right or wrong that prompt snap judgments of a given moral situation. Rather than deliberating over the causes, intent, and effects of harmful actions, Haidt argues that situations that provoke prohibitive moral judgment often come from harmless, hard-to-justify situations. For example, a scenario in which a man has sex with a dead chicken and then cooks and eats it provokes negative moral judgments despite no clear harm being caused. Participants, when faced with such an evocative but harmless scenario, couldn’t come up with a rational justification beyond “it’s wrong”. This moral dumbfounding is used as evidence to suggest that affect is primary in moral judgment, and that the rational justifications are just posthoc reasoning.

If this debate sounds philosophical, that’s not a coincidence. In some ways, these two theoretical camps mirror the philosophical traditions of deontology and consequentialism. Deontology is the philosophical view that morality comes from a central tenet or rule, which is then applied invariably to an observed moral situation to create judgment. A deontological view of morality would hold that lying is always wrong, even if it means lying in a way to protect someone. This contrasts with consequentialism, which argues that moral assessment comes after events, in which the causes, effects, and other circumstances are evaluated together to form a judgment. In a consequentialist view of morality, a lie is only bad if the person lying hurts someone else. If the lie would protect someone’s feelings or safety, then the positive consequences of the act make the act acceptable or even compulsory. For Cushman and Young, the logical assessment of intent, cause, and effect are all part of the harm calculation that consequentialist morality is based upon. By contrast, Haidt’s moral dumbfounding is meant to demonstrate that people have emotional probations that act even when harm is explicitly made absent. A moral prohibition that keeps its moral valance despite circumstance has the hallmarks of deontological moral reasoning, the rules of which Haidt argues come from cultural history and emotional reactions based in human evolutionary history. So while this debate is contemporary and relevant to our day-to-day lives, it has a long history. No surprise it’s still unresolved!

While it may seem like we’re doomed to debate these points into eternity, there may be another way. Ditto and Liu complicate this theoretical dichotomy with work that focuses on moral conflict and the relation of moral convictions with moral facts. While agreeing with the premise that affect plays a strong role in moral judgment, Ditto and Liu argue that consequentialist moral judgments, like the kind studied by Cushman and Young, do require factual assessment in order to justify themselves. Further, failure to do so can create cognitive dissonance within an individual, which in turn can alter moral affect. One way in which this is resolved is a disputation of facts, in which people with strong moral convictions (such as being anti-death penalty) tend to also be highly invested in discounting or ignoring evidence that may undermine their view that their position is morally superior. An example they give is people who advocate for or against the death penalty. A person with a vested interest in ending the death penalty does so not just because they believe it is the right thing to do (i.e. killing is wrong), but because it is the best thing to do (the death penalty does not deter crime). Ditto and Liu call situations in which deontological intuition and consequentialist fact clash moral conflict. In their view, morality may indeed be the product of deontological intuitions, but humans do not perceive or assess their morals as simple rules that they have chosen but as reflections of the factually best way to live. In this way, moral rules move from simple prohibitions to a collection of prudential, logical ways of living and not living.

This accounts for how we may anecdotally experience our moral beliefs. It also suggests that the facts we consider central to our moral judgments might be subject to motivated reasoning, or the biased consumption of facts.  Further research has shown the process by which this moral realism can be manipulated, providing some evidence for a moral system based on deontological rules that are rationalized in a post hoc manner. By manipulating the deontological rules on which the affective moral judgments are hypothesized to be based (i.e. killing a person as punishment is wrong), participants would temporarily alter or soften their position. Specifically, participants were randomly assigned to conditions in which they read essays that argued for or against capital punishment, but did so by arguing in ways that did not deal with facts about capital punishment. For example, a pro-capital punishment essay would be about the importance of justice, casting people guilty of premeditated murder as subhuman monsters and stating that the death penalty was the only closure that was good enough for families. Participants later were asked their views on capital punishment, in which those exposed to the pro-essay were more favorable to the practice than those assigned to the against-essay. More importantly, these participants would then discount evidence that contradicted the position they were manipulated into supporting. For example, people in the pro-death penalty condition expressed that the death penalty was a good deterrent to crime, and downplayed the harm. This suggests we’re quite deliberate in our moral reasoning, but only when the facts make us look right.

If we believe that this model of deontological fact-seekers is a fitting one, what then? Are deontological judgments just affective feelings? While Ditto and Lui’s work suggests that they may be, that question is still somewhat open. One clue to answering this question may lay in the impact of moral wrong on emotional expression, as studied by Paul Rozin and colleagues. Rozin et al. found evidence to suggest that specific types of moral violations, such as harming someone or lying, provoked predictable emotional responses in participants such as anger. Rozin and colleagues argue that these findings suggest the importance of affect in moral reasoning. If moral emotions are linked to moral violations, and moral judgments are based on intuitive deontological stances, then is it the case that manipulating the emotional state of a participant could manipulate their moral judgment? Would this manipulation also alter the way in which individuals make attributional assessments about relevant facts and how those facts contribute to the moral justification of their judgment? Research into this question would not only contribute to the debate about how deliberate and intuitive reasoning initiate moral judgment, but also suggest a new way of assessing moral decision-making. If being angry can alter the assessment of facts about an important moral issue, are those judgments really as informed and rational as we would like to hope? If a lawmaker has a bad flight, might they be more likely to disregard new facts about a contraception bill? Better understanding how affect influences moral decision-making and relevant factual assessment can help better understand how much our day-to-day context alters moral decisions we treat as core to religious, civic, and personal identity.

Joseph Tennant is a PhD student in Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the cultural psychology of religion and its effects on morality, learning, and theories of causality. His upcoming dissertation is a comparative study of Evangelical Christians and Atheists, and the differences in their moral reasoning.

Cushman, F., & Young, L. (2011). Patterns of moral judgment derive from nonmoral psychological representations.  Cognitive Science ,  35 (6), 1052-1075.  

Ditto, P., & Liu, B. (2012) Deontological Dissonance and the Consequentialist Crutch. In Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Morality: Exploring the Causes of Good and Evil (pp. 51-71). Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association  

Ditto, P. H., & Lopez, D. F. (1992). Motivated skepticism: Use of differential decision criteria for preferred and nonpreferred conclusions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 63 (4), 568.  

Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment.  Psychological review ,  108 (4), 814.  

Rozin, P., Lowery, L., Imada, S., & Haidt, J. (1999). The CAD triad hypothesis: a mapping between three moral emotions (contempt, anger, disgust) and three moral codes (community, autonomy, divinity).  Journal of personality and social psychology ,  76 (4), 574.  

Shweder, R. A., & Haidt, J. (1993). The Future of Moral Psychology: Truth, Intuition, and the Pluralist Way. Psychological Science, 4(6), 360-365.  

Related News

Did "the apprentice" propel trump into the white house in 2016.

You Disagree? Then You are Not Listening to Me!

Friendship Fallout and Bailout Backlash: The Psychology of Borrowing and Lending

ADVERTISEMENTS:

Essay on Nature and Subject of Moral Judgement

Nature of Moral Judgement:

The mental form of a sentence is called Judgement. But Judgements are of many types. Moral Judgement is different from every other judgement. Compared to others, it has the following characteristics:

image source: f38127902844d2d310ca-1df1a87cae2ea2c629203abf3b29fb44.r8.cf2.rackcdn.com/39F56AF6-24AC-4B0A-8646-1BFE55CA17E3.jpg

(i) Moral Judgements are axiological, not factual:

The Judgements of psychology, physics etc are related to facts. That the sun rises in the east is a factual judgement. Mahatma Gandhi was a man of character is an axiological Judgement.

In this way, moral judgement is what ought to be and not what is. It is imperative not descriptive. It is a mental process which discusses the goodness or badness of an activity.

(ii) Moral Judgements are normative:

Science is either normative or positive. Ethics is a normative science. In the words of Muirhead, “It is concerned with the Judgement upon conduct, the judgement that such and such a conduct is right or wrong. It deals with conduct as the subject of judicial judgement, not with conduct merely, as predicated in time.

(iii) Moral Judgement is ‘on’ an activity not about:

According to Mackenzie, the nature of moral Judgement is not just like the one called physical, it does not pronounce judgement about but upon something. In moral judgement, we judge the goodness of some activity on the basis of a special criterion.

(iv) Moral Judgement is internation:

Before pronouncing a moral judgement on act we place it upon the ethical standard and then we judge its goodness or badness from it. But this does not mean that argument is necessary on every subject. In common matters we know the ethical or moral value of an art by insight or intuition. Only in profound and doubtful subject it is necessary to present the criteria distinctly in order to apply it.

Subject of Moral Judgement:

According to Mackenzie, the subject of moral Judgement is the point of view from which an action is judge to be good or bad. Whenever a subject is willing to do some act, he has a particular view point.

his view point is the subject of moral judgement. But to say what is the subject of moral judgement is to inquire about the person who declares the moral judgement. The subject of moral judgement is ratinal or the ideal self and it pronounces judgement upon the motive and intention of others on less than his own.

Shaftesbury’s Opinion:

Shaftesbury’s credited the moral connoisseur with being the subject of normal judgement. According to him, it is only this connoisseur which can judge an act in regard to its beauty or ugliness. Here, either this connoisseur is intellectual self or distinct from it. If it is the intellectual self, then the subject of moral judgement is the intellectual self. Even if it is not the intellectual self, the latter must still be the subject of moral Judgement because if the connoisseur is true then its judgement must be acceptable to the rational or the ideal self.

Opinion of Adam Smith:

According to Adam Smith, the individual himself is the subject of moral judgement in the form of an impartial spectator. This impartial spectator is the highest determinant or Judge of our actions. It is no other than the intellectual or ideal self of man.

Moral and religious persons consider this as an element of God in man. It is this that was Christ to St. Paul and Rama to Gandhiji, Religious people take direction from this in times of trouble. In the words of Adam Smith, ‘When I endeavour to examine my own conduct, I divide myself, as it were, into two persons, I, the examiner and Judge represents, a different character from the other I, the person whose conduct is being examined and judged. The first is the spectator, the second is the agent.

The first is the judge, the second the person Judged of. The rational or ideal self is the subject of moral Judgement and it is from this stand point that morality of actions is judged.

Related Articles:

• What is the Object of Moral Judgements?

Privacy Overview