Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals
Section I
Of the General Principles of Morals

Overview:

In this section Hume focuses on the contributions that moral sense and reason make in moral judgments that we make every day. He argues that moral sense is the tool that enables us to make the distinction between vice and virtue but both moral sense and reason contribute to the formation of our moral judgments. Reason becomes very useful when a judgment needs to be made weather something is useful or not. Basically reason enables us to determine how and why something is useful to us or others.
Further in the section Hume talks about what moral judges tend to include in their lists of virtues, what is left out and how those lists are being created. Towards the end of the section he goes back to the classification of virtues he proposed in the Treatise of Human Nature.

p. 169, 133 – All humans are obviously very different and same concept applies to our morality. Hume explains it by the example of a stubborn person who likes to argue just to “show off”. He concludes that the only way for such person to realize that he/she is an antagonist of the group is by leaving him/her alone. Through observation or experience the given individual will realize that in general more people are on the common sense and reason side.

p. 170, 134 – Here Hume starts to discuss the “foundation of morals”. He refers to ancient philosophers and points out that their belief in virtue being a conformity to reason creates a confusion because in general they believed that morals had their origins in taste and sentiment. Two kind of contradict each other.

p. 171, 135 – The most important thing that Hume does here is making it clear that “truth is disputable and taste isn’t”, “what exists in the nature of things is the standard of our judgment,