Remy Debes

Humanity, sympathy and the puzzle of Hume's second enquiry

Here is a well-known and curious puzzle of Hume’s second Enquiry: After going to great lengths to develop his associationist account of sympathy in Book II of the Treatise, and then using this account to argue for extensive sympathy as the source of our moral sentiments in Book III of the same work, Hume not only seems to replace extensive sympathy with the principle of humanity as the source of our moral sentiments in the second Enquiry, but he appears to drop the Treatise account of sympathy altogether. Almost of equal interest is the variety of proposed solutions to this puzzle. Some simply do not address it or have ignored it by virtue of ignoring the Enquiries altogether. Others, such as Selby-Bigge, have thought that Hume merely decided to abandon the associationist account of sympathy and consequently replaced it with a different principle. Similarly, John Rawls suggests Hume might have realized that he had made too much of the associationist mechanism and that such an account of sympathy yielded only ‘imparted feeling,’ a result that did not satisfy Hume’s philosophical needs, for it could not by itself explain the ‘peculiar’ moral sentiment that Hume thought underwrote the possibility of general moral agreement. Rawls adds that the account of sympathy in the Treatise depended on a ‘dubious’ idea of the self, which Hume himself later rejected, and which thus might also have led him to reject the Treatise account of sympathy altogether.

Which empathy? Limitations in the mirrored “understanding” of emotion

The recent discovery of so-called “mirror-neurons” in monkeys and a corresponding mirroring “system” in humans has provoked wide endorsement of the claim that humans understand a variety of observed actions, somatic sensations, and emotions via a kind of direct representation of those actions, sensations, and emotions. Philosophical efforts to assess the import of such “mirrored understanding” have typically focused on how that understanding might be brought to bear on theories of mindreading (how we represent other creatures as having mental states), and usually in cases of action. By contrast, this paper assesses mirrored understanding in cases of emotion and its import for theories of empathy and especially empathy in ethical contexts. In particular, this paper argues that the mirrored understanding claim is ambiguous and ultimately misleading when applied to emotion, partly because mirroring proponents fail to appreciate the way in which empathy might serve a distinct normative function in our judgments of what other people feel. The paper thus concludes with a call to revise the mirrored understanding claim, whether in neuroscience, psychology, or philosophy.

Has anything changed? Hume's theory of association and sympathy after the Treatise

Anyone who has carefully worked through both Hume’s Treatise and his two principal later works, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, must have noticed a remarkable gap in those later works: the associationist account of sympathy from the Treatise has gone missing. This mysterious disappearance is all the more puzzling given Hume’s obvious fondness for this part of his theory in the Treatise. The general principle of the association of ideas is pronounced in the Abstract to the Treatise to be the greatest discovery of that work, and once the application of this principle to sympathy is made in Book 2, the account which results is simply utilized too many times in the remainder of the Treatise to bother counting. Indeed, not only does Hume end up crediting sympathy as the source of our moral sentiments in the Treatise, he also remarks in the conclusion to Book 3 that it is his account of sympathy