WorkDavid Hume

An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals

Hume's own favourite among his books, and the one nobody noticed: virtue as what is useful, tested against a knave who prospers by cheating.

by David Hume162 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1751(aged 40)
Original language: English

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Overview

Book Three of the Treatise had gone almost unread, and in 1751 Andrew Millar published in London a rewriting of it that keeps its conclusions and hardly any of its sentences. The question is where moral distinctions come from, and two answers held the field. Francis Hutcheson, whom Hume admired and corresponded with, grounded them in a benevolence built into human nature; Hobbes and Mandeville had reduced them to self-love in a disguise. This book takes neither. We call a quality a virtue when it is useful or agreeable, to the person who has it or to those around him, and the approval we then feel is a sentiment that reason can inform but never generate. What follows is a clearance. Celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification and silence serve nobody and belong in no catalogue of virtues; cheerfulness, wit, good manners and a talent for friendship serve people daily and belong. Then the argument turns on itself. The ninth section stands up a sensible knave — a man who keeps the reputation of honesty and breaks the practice of it whenever breaking it pays — and asks what can be said to him; the answer offered, that he has cheated himself out of the enjoyment of his own character, has been picked at ever since as the weakest page in the book. It came into the world unnoticed; the same year, the chair of logic at Glasgow went to another man, and Hume never held a university post. In the short account of his life that he wrote four months before he died, he named this book the best thing he had written in any kind.

Key concepts

How does Hume distinguish natural from artificial virtues?

Natural virtues arise from human dispositions, while artificial virtues depend on socially established practices. Benevolence, generosity and compassion can move people without a prior convention; justice, fidelity and allegiance require rules that regulate possession, promises and public order. “Artificial” therefore does not mean fake or deliberately invented by one person. It means that social arrangements give certain motives a stable moral function.

Why does Hume judge character from a general point of view?

Hume adopts a general point of view to correct the distortions of personal advantage and private allegiance. A quality counts as virtuous when its usefulness or agreeableness can be recognized beyond the immediate interests of the person judging it. Sympathy helps make that shift possible: it carries the effects of a character beyond one’s own case and supports a shared standard of approval.

How does Hume separate self-love from benevolence?

Hume treats benevolence as a genuine concern for others, not merely disguised self-interest. Self-love can explain some conduct, but it cannot account for the pleasure taken in another person’s happiness or the disapproval directed at cruelty when no personal gain follows. Benevolence may be limited and mixed with other motives; it nevertheless belongs to human nature as an independent source of action and esteem.

What does Hume mean by an artificial virtue?

An artificial virtue gains its moral character from a convention that serves a recurring social need. Justice illustrates the point: where possessions are limited, generosity incomplete and cooperation necessary, communities develop rules governing property and conduct. Those rules are not arbitrary, because their value depends on the order they produce; but they are not natural impulses either. Their authority grows from their social usefulness.

Why does Hume compare moral judgment with aesthetic taste?

Hume compares moral judgment with aesthetic taste because both arise through sentiment rather than through demonstrative reasoning alone. Yet moral evaluation concerns character and conduct, whose effects reach other people and society. The comparison explains why moral distinctions feel like approval or disapproval while still allowing standards to form: human beings share patterns of response, and sympathy widens those responses beyond private preference.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Sentiment and social virtue

How can approval bind us when reason alone cannot move the will? Hume locates morality in sentiments shaped by sympathy and judged partly through their usefulness to human life.

Hume rejects the attempt to derive virtue from reason alone: reason can discover facts and relations, but sentiment makes a character admirable or blameworthy and supplies motivation. In the 1751 Enquiry, sympathy enlarges concern beyond self-interest, while utility explains why justice, benevolence, and other traits win approval: they sustain people and social order. Moral judgment therefore rests on perception, emotion, and shared standards, not on obedience to a command issued by abstract reason.

virtue
human nature
ethics
utility
sympathy
justice
character
benevolence
reason
property
judgment
social order
moral sentiment
admiration
moral judgment
moral psychology
sentiment
motivation
social norms
self-interest
social utility
humanity
self-love
aesthetics
social virtues
happiness
personal merit
virtue and vice

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 162
distinct concepts: 303
by passages held, corpus-wide: #391

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “justice” and “property”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 24 pairings. 81 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
justice	property	14
benevolence	moral sentiment	13
benevolence	sympathy	13
moral sentiment	sympathy	11
justice	utility	8
benevolence	moral psychology	7
moral psychology	sympathy	7
moral judgment	sympathy	6
moral sentiment	utility	6
sympathy	utility	6
benevolence	justice	4
benevolence	utility	4
justice	moral psychology	4
moral psychology	moral sentiment	4
moral psychology	utility	4
property	utility	4
benevolence	moral judgment	3
moral judgment	moral sentiment	3
benevolence	property	2
moral judgment	utility	2
moral psychology	property	2
justice	moral judgment	1
justice	moral sentiment	1
justice	sympathy	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1739 A Treatise of Human Nature
The quarry from which nearly everything else on this shelf was cut, and now the most read of Hume's books — which is the opposite of what he wanted.
EN
1741 Essays
Not one book but a collection under a single title, and the place on this shelf where Hume writes for the general reader — on politics, trade, taste and manners — rather than for philosophers.
EN
1748 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Shorter, sharper and re-argued: the first part of the Treatise remade for a general reader, and carrying two sections on religion that the earlier book had deliberately left out.
EN
1751 An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals you are here EN
1752 Hume's Political Discourses
Twelve essays on money, trade, taxes, public credit and population, published in 1752 and later folded into his collected essays — economics before there was a word for it.
EN
1757 The Natural History of Religion
Written for a volume that lost two of its essays to a threatened prosecution, this one asks where religion came from rather than whether any of it is true — the historical half of a question the Dialogues take up philosophically.
EN
1779 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
A conversation in three voices that its author kept by him for a quarter of a century, revising it three times and letting nobody print it while he lived.
EN

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