Term Paper on "David Hume in an Enquiry Concerning"

Term Paper 4 pages (1310 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

David Hume

In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, David Hume suggests that our sense of morality -- what is right and wrong to do -- is based on our desire to have others think about us positively. We seek approval from others and do not want to be rejected by them, so we attempt to behave in ways that please others. He believes that the behaviors people disapprove of tend to make others happy. This means that morality may actually have less to do with right and wrong than we sometimes think it does. He also argues that it is just part of human nature to feel sympathy for others, and that everyone possesses sympathy to some degree.

While most people may possess some degree of sympathy for others, the existence of such people as John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy, both ruthless serial sexual predators and murderers, suggests that not everyone sympathizes with others. However, they may be balanced out by people who go to extraordinary lengths to help humankind -- for example, Mother Theresa.

The best argument in favor of Hume's view of morality might be that different cultures have different senses of what is right and what is wrong. In our culture, fidelity between spouses is considered important. Faithfulness within a marriage is viewed as morally right, and infidelity is viewed as morally wrong. However, this is not true in all cultures. This in turn suggests the idea of Hume's social pressure.

Many of us can relate to the complex nature of social forces combined with moral standards, because probably most of us know someone who cheated on a test in high school. My best friend did, and he told me how he did it. He felt it was justified because "everybody does it," which sounds as if society expects cheating and therefore condones it. However, at the same time, we were all required to sign a pledge that said that we would not cheat and that we would report any cheating we knew about.

In the four years I attended that school not one case of cheating was reported by other students, but we all knew it happened. If I had reported my friend's cheating, I would not have received recognition from my peers for doing the right thing. Even though the spoken standard was that students weren't supposed to cheat, there was a different standard among my peers that it wasn't our job to act as the moral police and turn in students we thought or knew to be cheating. The standard was that you don't interfere with someone else's life to that degree, and that it was their choice whether they cheated or not. Even the students who never cheated agreed with this: no matter what the school said, it was not their job to spy on their classmates and turn in offenders. So I stayed quiet. Among the other students, that was the morally right thing to do, and made my behavior acceptable to them.

Is cheating wrong? Of course it is, and it hurts others. We were all in competition to get into colleges, win scholarships, and to get end-of-year honors. My friend raised his grade from a low C. To a low B. It wasn't that much help to him. He only got a 2 on the AP exam, so he couldn't count it for college credit. His earning a B. In chemistry instead of a C. didn't threaten any honors or scholarships I might have been considered for. It didn't bump his grades up enough that he became Valedictorian instead of someone else. But it was still wrong.

In spite of the fact that it was wrong, it didn't bring him any social sanctions. In spite of the fact that the stated policy was that I would be "right" to turn him, I would have faced far more severe censure among our classmates… READ MORE

How to Reference "David Hume in an Enquiry Concerning" Term Paper in a Bibliography

Related Term Papers:

David Hume Philosopher, Historian, and Economist Term Paper

David Hume

Philosopher, historian, and economist David Hume (April 26, 1711 - August 25, 1776) was born in Scotland (Penelhum, 1993). He was seen to be a very prominent figure… read more

Term Paper 15 pages (4488 words) Sources: 5 Style: MLA Topic: Philosophy / Logic / Reason

---

Hume and Descartes Essay

Hume Descartes

Hume, Descartes and God

A great many ideologies produced through human history are generally connected to divinity and the idea that God or some other divine force will… read more

Essay 5 pages (1484 words) Sources: 2 Topic: Religion / God / Theology

---

Rousseau David Hume Book Report

Rousseau stated that "Discourse is motto" in his book Discourse on Inequality. Does this quotation guide Rousseau's argument in the Discourse? If so, to what extent?

I actually do not… read more

Book Report 2 pages (755 words) Sources: 0 Topic: Philosophy / Logic / Reason

---

Concept of Faith Essay

Faith

When Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that "the concept of faith, however, is uniquely suspended between a truth claim that lags behind knowing and a certainty that knowing lags behind," he… read more

Essay 5 pages (1881 words) Sources: 5 Topic: Philosophy / Logic / Reason

---

Rationalism vs. Empiricism Term Paper

Plato and Hume

A Comparison of Humean Empiricism and Platonic Rationalism

Richard Weaver (1984) describes the breakdown of rational thought in the modern world as stemming from Occam's razor --… read more

Term Paper 2 pages (673 words) Sources: 2 Topic: Philosophy / Logic / Reason

---

View 100+ more related papers  >>