Hume's Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals › Legacy and Influence

Hume's influence on subsequent ethics is immense, though often unacknowledged. The utilitarian tradition, developed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, owes much to Hume's emphasis on utility and his naturalistic approach to ethics. Mill explicitly acknowledged his debt to Hume's analysis of justice and benevolence. Emotivism, the twentieth-century view that moral statements express attitudes rather than describe facts, is Hume's sentimentalism in analytic dress. A.J. Ayer and Charles Stevenson developed sophisticated versions of this view, arguing that "X is wrong" expresses disapproval rather than stating a fact. Contemporary moral psychology, led by figures like Jonathan Haidt, has returned to Hume with enthusiasm. Haidt's "social intuitionist model" argues that moral judgment is primarily driven by intuition and emotion, with reasoning serving mainly to justify conclusions already reached. This is recognizably Humean, updated with modern experimental evidence. The effective altruism movement, despite its emphasis on rational calculation, ultimately depends on Humean sentiments. You cannot reason your way to caring about strangers' suffering; that caring must come from somewhere else. What reason can do is extend and direct the caring you already have. Even Kant, Hume's great philosophical opponent, was shaped by the encounter. Kant famously said that Hume awoke him from his "dogmatic slumber." The entire Kantian project of grounding morality in pure reason can be read as a response to Hume's challenge. Whether Kant succeeded remains contested, but the terms of the debate were set by Hume.