ABSTRACT
Men approve of certain things and disapprove of others, and Hume finds that that approval or disapproval alone can lead them to act. He also explains, with some equivocation, what making a moral judgment is, how it is related to approving or disapproving of something, and how and why it leads to action. A further, and perhaps the most important, task for the science of man is to explain why we come to approve or disapprove of the sorts of things that we do. Despite the more sophisticated version of his theory of moral judgments outlined at the end of the previous chapter, Hume usually takes this task to be that of discovering what sorts of things produce actual sentiments of approval or disapproval in us, and how they have those effects. To explain what it is in human nature that leads us to have certain sentiments when confronted with certain sorts of phenomena is for Hume to explain ‘the origin of virtues and vices’. We saw that regarding something as virtuous or as vicious is not simply a matter of having an actual sentiment towards it, but Hume tends to forget that when he tries to catalogue the different sorts of things that we approve or disapprove.
