"Cemented with Diseased Qualities": Sympathy and Comparison in Hume's Moral Psychology

Abstract

The key to unlocking the mystery of human passions, according to Hume, lay in the interaction between two fundamental psychological mechanisms or principles: sympathy and comparison. Both our sociality and our asociality find their psychic origins in the complex interaction of these principles. Due to the operation of these principles, justice is necessary for social life. It channels and controls the passions in contexts of social interaction; they in turn generate resources from which the structures of justice and the foundations of political society can be built by intelligent and sympathetic human beings. This essay explores Hume's account of sympathy and comparison and some of the passions they generate, in the hope of gaining a better understanding of his unsentimental and unblinkered view of our social asociality.

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