Book: An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals

Overview
David Hume’s 1751 An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals offers a clear, empirically grounded account of why we approve or disapprove of human actions and character. Rejecting rationalist attempts to deduce morality from abstract principles, Hume argues that moral distinctions arise from sentiment: the feelings of approval and disapproval that naturally occur in well-placed observers. He seeks a criterion for virtue in the tendency of qualities to promote happiness and social good, emphasizing utility and agreeableness as the chief sources of moral approbation.

Method and Key Thesis
Hume applies an experimental method to morals, collecting observations from common life, history, and psychology. He maintains that reason, while indispensable for discovering facts and drawing inferences, is inert with respect to motivation and cannot by itself generate the peculiar warmth of moral approval. Moral judgment emerges when we adopt a general point of view that corrects for personal bias and allows sympathy to transmit the pleasures and pains of others to us. From that standpoint, we take a steady survey of character traits and evaluate them according to their effects on human welfare.

Natural and Artificial Virtues
A central distinction runs between natural and artificial virtues. Natural virtues, such as benevolence, generosity, gratitude, and friendship, are immediately prized because they are directly agreeable or useful to ourselves and others. Artificial virtues, notably justice, fidelity to promises, and allegiance to government, depend on human conventions and institutions. Their moral worth rests on their broad and indispensable utility, especially in large societies where cooperation cannot be secured by personal affection alone. Hume catalogs virtues by their tendency to be useful or agreeable to the agent or to others, thereby unifying moral appraisal under the principle of their contribution to human happiness.

Justice, Property, and Government
Hume explains justice as a convention that emerges under circumstances of moderate scarcity, limited generosity, and rough equality of human needs. Rules concerning stability of possession, transfer by consent, and the obligation of promises arise because they preserve social order and mutual advantage. He notes that in extreme conditions, shipwreck, siege, or miraculous abundance, the rationale for strict justice can vanish, showing its dependence on utility. Government, in turn, is justified not by an original contract but by its service in maintaining these institutions when numbers, distance, and time weaken the effects of private benevolence. Allegiance is owed on account of the public interest in stable authority, cemented by habit and a sense of common good.

Utility, Benevolence, and Motivation
Hume defends the reality of disinterested benevolence against egoistic theories that reduce all virtue to self-love. We approve benevolence because sympathy allows us to feel the happiness it produces in others; we also admire prudence and industry for their usefulness to the agent. The appeal of utility is not cold calculation but a sentiment informed by reason: we ascertain consequences by reasoning, then feel moral approval when those consequences promote welfare. The problem of the sensible knave, who would secretly violate justice for gain, is met by arguing that such knavery erodes character, trust, and the stable satisfaction that flows from integrity, and cannot be vindicated from the general point of view.

Scope and Legacy
Hume extends moral evaluation to traits often excluded by earlier moralists, including natural abilities like wit, judgment, and memory, since they influence happiness and elicit similar approvals. The Enquiry thus offers a secular, human-centered ethic grounded in shared sentiments, corrected by reflection and stabilized by convention. Its synthesis of moral sentiment and public utility shaped later sentimentalist and utilitarian traditions and remains a touchstone for accounts of morality rooted in human nature and social life.