Hume's Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals › Sympathy: The Engine of Morality

How do we come to care about others' welfare? Hume's answer is _sympathy_, a psychological mechanism that allows us to share in the feelings of those around us. Sympathy, for Hume, is not quite what we mean by the word today. It is a process by which we come to experience, in attenuated form, the emotions of others, rather than simply feeling sorry for someone. When we see someone in pain, we feel a faint echo of that pain ourselves. When we see someone joyful, we share in their joy. This mirroring of feeling is automatic and largely involuntary. Sympathy explains why we approve of qualities that benefit others. When someone's benevolence produces happiness in those around them, we sympathize with that happiness. The pleasure we feel through sympathy becomes associated with the quality that produced it. We come to approve of benevolence because contemplating it produces pleasant sentiments in us. But sympathy has limits. We sympathize more easily with those close to us, those similar to us, those whose situations we can vividly imagine. A child drowning in front of us produces far more sympathy than thousands dying in a distant famine. This is not necessarily a moral failing; it is simply how human psychology works. Hume acknowledges this partiality and argues that moral judgment requires correcting for it. When we make moral assessments, we adopt a "general point of view," abstracting from our particular position and considering how a quality would appear to anyone. This doesn't eliminate sympathy; it extends and generalizes it. We imaginatively take up the perspective of all those affected by an action, including those outside our circle of care.