84 Moral Philosophy: Ideas of Good and Evil, Right and Wrongtion of compassion, but a general tendency to feel whatever
emotions or passion we observe in others. Our perception of
what another person is feeling is turned into a corresponding
impression of what we observe. We can feel moral approval for
a quality according to its usefulness or pleasantness, or moral
disapproval for a disagreeable or unpleasant quality we observe
in others. We can do this as disinterested spectators. Thus, we
can evaluate acts from two different standpoints, as interested
actors, and as impartial spectators. As participants, we evaluate
our acts and the acts of others as good or bad as they cause us
pleasure or pain. But we also feel pleasure and pain through'
sympathy, and thus are able to evaluate acts as impartial specta
tors.
It is also through sympathy that social ethics evolve. We not
only can feel through sympathy, approval or disapproval, but we
can see the utility of certain virtues. Hume maintains that justice
is the result of its utility value. Actually, “Public utility is the sole
origin of Justice.” If everyone were able to have all the goods he
needed, if everyone were good to one another, and if there were
no selfishness in man, justice would be quite unnecessary.
Justice, then, is an artificial device created by man to prevent
men from interfering with another’s property, or another’s well
being, and thereby serves as a remedy for human selfishness.
Justice depends on the utility which people feel. Men estab
lish the laws of justice out of a concern for their own and the
public good. This concern is derived not from reasoning about
the eternal and necessary relation of ideas, but from our impres
sions and feelings. Men feel it is in their interest to establish a
scheme of justice, and they approve of customary conventions
which remedy the inconveniences that accompany human life.
Reason enters the issue when particular rules are needed, but
those rules are designed to produce good feelings. Once again,
“reason is the slave of passion.”
Hume’s skepticism, mentioned earlier, was based on his
concept of sense experience, the limitations of reason, and his
belief in metaphysical nihilism. He was a skeptic in metaphysics
because he believed that man could not know ultimate reality
because he could not have knowledge beyond sense experience.
This belief in sense experience alone made him a skeptic about
the use of reason in ethics. Also, he was a skeptic about the