ABSTRACT
This chapter explains David Hume’s understanding of passions, morality, and how these are related. It also explains why Hume relegates the faculty of reason to the level of slave, particularly in issues of life and death. In Hume's opinion, passions arise in the mind from two major sources, namely: from some original impressions of sensation, and from ideas which are replicas or images of their correspondent impressions of sensation. This further justifies why Hume calls passions impressions of reflexion. Rational inferences are drawn from premises that are involved in systematic or casual reasoning, never in morality. When Hume maintains that the reasonableness or unreasonableness of moral actions, as talked about by some of his fellow philosophers, is meaningless, he must be understood to be right. Moral actions neither belong to the domain of the faculty of reason, and are, therefore, neither rationally based nor dependent on rational reasoning.
