Paixões propulsoras e razão diretiva na ciência moral de David Hume

Abstract

This work is intended to show that David Hume‟s moral philosophy associated reason to feeling, both in mental and social domains, like an inseparable compound in moral action and distinction. He believed that the artificiality of institutions did not implicate the negation of nature, but its extension. Thus, virtues and vices are recognized by humans as actions which respectively please and unplease them. This is because we share a nature in common that enables us to discern the utility of behavior for our survival according to the circumstances of time and space. Then, it means a refusal of the methaphysical objectivism and the religious authority as the foundation of morality. Hume understood his project as a complement to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, extending the use of experimental method in the field of morality.