ARTICLE HUMANITY,SYMPATHY AND THE PUZZLE OF HUME’S SECOND ENQUIRY Remy Debes Here is a well-known and curious puzzle of Hume’s second Enquiry: After going to great lengths to develop his associationist account of sympathy in Book II of the Treatise, and then using this account to argue for extensive sympathy as the source of our moral sentiments in Book III of the same work, Hume not only seems to replace extensive sympathy with the principle of humanity as the source of our moral sentiments in the second Enquiry, but he appears to drop the Treatise account of sympathy altogether. 1 Almost of equal interest is the variety of proposed solutions to this puzzle. Some simply do not address it or have ignored it by virtue of ignoring the Enquiries altogether. 2 Others, such as Selby-Bigge, have thought that Hume merely decided to abandon the associationist account of sympathy and consequently replaced it with a different principle. 3 Similarly, John Rawls suggests Hume might have realized that he had made too much of the associationist mechanism and that such an account of sympathy yielded only ‘imparted feeling,’ a result that did not satisfy Hume’s philosophical needs, for it could not by itself explain the ‘peculiar’ moral sentiment that Hume thought underwrote the possibility of general moral agreement. Rawls adds that the account of sympathy in the Treatise depended on a ‘dubious’ idea of the self, which Hume himself later rejected, and which thus might also have led him to reject the Treatise account of sympathy altogether. 4 1 This particular puzzle of the second Enquiry was discussed at least as early as 1893, when Selby-Bigge made note of it in his introduction to the Enquiries (Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975) xxvi–xxix). Most recently, this puzzle is the focus of Kate Abramson’s ‘Sympathy and the Project of Hume’s Second Inquiry’ (Archiv fu ¨r Geschichte der Philosophie, 83 (2001) No. 1: 45– 80), and Rico Vitz’s ‘Sympathy and Benevolence in Hume’s Moral Psychology’ (Journal of the History of Philosophy 42 (2004) No. 3: 261–75). 2 As to the former, see, for example, John Bricke, Mind and Morality: An Examination of Hume’s Moral Psychology (Oxford, 1996) and Barry Stroud, Hume (London, 1977). As to the latter, see Abramson’s discussion of the point, p. 45. 3 See n1. 4 John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, 2000) 101–2. Actually, at the point where he makes these remarks Rawls does not clearly explain why he thinks imparted feeling was philosophically insufficient for Hume. But given what Rawls says in British Journal for the History of Philosophy 15(1) 2007: 27 – 57 British Journal for the History of Philosophy ISSN 0960-8788 print/ISSN 1469-3526 online ª 2007 BSHP http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09608780601087954