A Treatise of Human Nature · Chapter
Section VII: Of Vice and Virtue explained
Hume examines the causes of pride and humility, focusing on vice and virtue as the most obvious causes.
What happens
Hume examines the causes of pride and humility, focusing on vice and virtue as the most obvious causes. He argues that regardless of whether moral distinctions are natural or derived from interest and education, they produce pleasure or pain, which are the necessary impressions for pride and humility. He demonstrates that both moral hypotheses—one based on self-interest and the other on natural sentiment—support his system of double relations of impressions and ideas. He also extends the analysis to other qualities like wit, which produce pride or humility through the sensation of pleasure or uneasiness, and clarifies his definitions of pride and humility as impressions, not necessarily virtues or vices.
Themes in this chapter
Morality as Sentiment
Hume argues that vice and virtue are distinguished by the pleasure or pain they produce, aligning with the view that moral distinctions are based on sentiment.
Passions and the Self
The chapter explores how pride and humility, as passions, are caused by qualities related to the self that produce pleasure or uneasiness.
Characters to notice
- David Hume
Author and narrator, presenting his system on the causes of pride and humility.
Key passages
“For granting that morality had no foundation in nature, it must still be allowed, that vice and virtue, either from self-interest or the prejudices of education, produce in us a real pain and pleasure; and this we may observe to be strenuously asserted by the defenders of that hypothesis.”
Even if morality is not natural, vice and virtue still cause real pain or pleasure, as proponents of the self-interest theory claim.
Hume shows that his system works under both moral hypotheses.
“The very essence of virtue, according to this hypothesis, is to produce pleasure and that of vice to give pain.”
Virtue is defined by its tendency to produce pleasure, and vice by its tendency to produce pain.
This supports the double relation of impressions and ideas.
“Now what is this taste, from which true and false wit in a manner receive their being, and without which no thought can have a title to either of these denominations? It is plainly nothing but a sensation of pleasure from true wit, and of uneasiness from false, without our being able to tell the reasons of that pleasure or uneasiness.”
Taste is simply the feeling of pleasure from true wit and uneasiness from false wit, without knowing why.
Hume extends his analysis to wit, showing it also causes pride or humility through pleasure or uneasiness.