How Does David Hume Controls Morality

Morality is important for the functioning of a healthy society. David Hume would not dispute this point. It helps people control behavior that is destructive to individual and the society as whole, bring stability and peace. Adversely, during times of conflict, moral authority is often claimed, inciting a greater wish to obliterate he “evil” enemies. Claims of moral right are bandied about indiscriminately by people of all cultures and walks in life, and, often, many of these views on morality contradict each other. For example, one culture might say that suicide is never correct, that it is an affront to God. At the same time, those in another culture might find suicide to be, in certain situations, the height of honor. In this world where morality can seem so questionable and confusing, David Hume believed he had the answer. And he did. He had an answer that stripped morality of reason and made the situation even more confusing. Hume does not believe that reason controls
Reason can tell how to do things, but not what to do; morality’s purpose is to tell a people what to do. Hume concludes that, therefore, morality is not under the domain of reason and must be controlled by the passions. And this is where Hume give up hope in inborn moral laws. “No matter how much you may find out about how things are…you will never by such reasoning discover anything at all about morality. Any such investigation can only ever tell you what is and is not the case; but morality is concerned, not with how things are, but with how they ought to be” (Francks, 244) Therefore, goodness and evil, right and wrong, those are not laws of nature, but a portion of the human reaction to nature. Due to this, descriptors like nice, mean, virtuous, and corrupt are words used for the sake of simplicity and to describe our emotional reaction to a situation rather than a true description of an individual and their