How Does Hume Contribute To Moral Sense

The first line of criticism is reasonable. Because we apply moral criticism to someone’s moral sentiments, on the assumption that they are capable of improvement, and that they reflect moral credit or discredit on a person . Hutcheson tries to explain some criticisms of a particular agent’s moral sense, by reference to the moral sense of the ‘normal’ observer. For Hutcheson ‘normal’ just means ‘statistically most frequent’. Though Smith objects this, he never put forward something more to explain the standard of normality.
The second objection to an appeal to the moral sense is more relevant to Hume than to Hutcheson. Though Hume follows Hutcheson in appealing to a moral sense, he does not rely as strongly on an analogy with the other senses. Often he speaks of a certain kind of feeling. Smith is right to suppose that this account of moral judgment requires the relevant feeling to be introspectively similar in all moral judgments. If we were to claim that the identity of the moral sentiment consists in the judgment on which it is based, we would no longer make the moral sense primary; hence Hume assumes that introspective similarity is the common feature of all expressions of the moral sense. Against this assumption Smith points out that the sentiments connected with approval of different kinds of actions and characters vary with the …show more content…
The successive stages in our reactions help us to answer both of the main questions of ethical theory, about which traits are virtues, and about how we judge that they are. A trait is a virtue insofar as it arouses sympathy from different points of view; and we judge that a trait is a virtue insofar as we react to it sympathetically. The close connexion between Smith’s answers to these two questions raises even more doubts about his claim that the first is practically important and the second is