Hume was the first thinker to point out the implications of the “representative theory of perception. ” He had inherited this theory from both his rationalist and empiricist predecessors. According to this view, when one says that he/she perceives something such as an apple, what it actually means is that the one has in the mind a mental idea or image or impression. Such a datum is an internal, mental, subjective representation of something that I assume to be an external, physical, fact. But there are, at least, two difficulties inherent in ascribing any truth to such perceptions.
If truth is understood as the adequacy between the image and the object, then it is impossible to infer that there is a true world of objects since the only evidence. From this fundamental point, human reason loses its contingency in moral issues and decision making, letting feelings come to the first place. Hume emphasises the utility of knowledge as opposed to its correctness and suggests that morality begins with feeling rather than thought. In this case, Hume also believes that sympathy plays an essential role in morality. Sympathy is a fundamental feature of the human nature, that motivates us to make decisions.
Sympathy can be described as an attempt to find or see one’s own nature in another object. Hume states that it is the start for all other human feelings. Reason becomes inactive in moral considerations, and sympathy starts playing a primary role in ethical behaviour. Human reasoning appears to be a photographic apparatus which passively apprehends the immediate facts of a situation, while sentiment acts. Feeling becomes both the judge and the capacity for judgement. Sympathy, as a fundamental human feeling, becomes a moral centre. Hume says that the sympathy comes from the heart.
In human nature, the heart is the lodging for the inner quality. One with sympathy is susceptible to other’s emotions, imbued with that important quality of fellow-feeling. The “heart” dictates moral principles, “for one’s innate goodness allows one to take directives from one’s own body. ” Hume devoted the second book “Treatise” to an account of the human passions and a discussion of their role in human decision making. “It is our feelings or sentiments,” Hume claimed, “that exert practical influence over human volition and action.
Observation does reveal a constant conjunction between having a motive (not a reason) for acting and performing the action in question. The notion of morals implies some sentiment common to all mankind, which recommends the same object to general approbation, and makes every man, or most men, agree in the same opinion or decision concerning it. ” Reason is impossible without feeling, they are like two sides of a coin. They constantly affect each other. Hume’s analysis of human belief starts with a distinction between our mental contents. Impressions and emotions appear to be the direct and vivid products of immediate experience.
Sympathy is an original impression that later create its product in the form of ideas. Being a part and lying at the foundation of human nature, sympathy becomes the basis for the human actions and also beliefs. In this case, rationality has no place in the account of morality. Although reason may judge relations of ideas and matters of fact, its most clear results never compel a human to act as even the weakest of feelings may do. “No compilation of facts ever entails a moral obligation or results in action. Reason is, and ought to be, only the slave of the passions,” Hume held.
All human actions flow naturally from human feelings, without any interference from human reason. As it was already mentioned, such inference about morality from emotion rather than from reason appear to be subjective at first glance. Hume’s view our confidence in causal efficacy has a similar source: “I do what is morally right in the same way that I believe there is an external worldby following my natural inclinations in the absence of rational evidence. I do what I feel is right. And this is my only justification. ” Hume provided morality with a status no less significant in human life than that of natural science.