Sympathy and moral altruism in David Hume

Abstract

The issue dealt with in this article concerns the relationship between sympathy and altruism in the moral philosophy of the Scottish philosopher David Hume. In the book Investigations on human understanding and on the principles of morality (2004), the term sympathy is pointed out by Hume as being an individual’s ability to be affected by particular situations of other individuals, such occurrence of affectation being the necessary condition so that a moral edifice can be erected. Thus, in seeking to clarify the relationship between sympathy and altruistic moral theory, we will first try to demonstrate that in Hume there is no primacy of reason over feelings, but rather the opposite. In a second moment, a deepening of the sympathy in the Hume’s moral theory will be realized. Finally, after such realizations, the aim will be to demonstrate how the elucidations about an altruistic ethic have their roots in Hume and his conceptual elaborations on an ethics based on feelings, where our moral distinctions are prefigured as, rather than mere rational elaborations, coming from the sympathetic capacity that is our own and allows us to separate what we like and dislike while making us act in an interested way in the well-being of others and the human community.