Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

by Sarah Bakewell

His theory owed a lot to humanists of the Enlightenment era, such as David Hume, because he thought—as they did—that morality probably emerged from our tendencies to fellow feeling and “sympathy.” These in turn emerged from our nature as group animals. Like all social species, early humans had to negotiate the interpersonal challenges of the group; this has made us sensitive to others’ responses. When they treat us positively, we feel good. Other animals share such sensitivity, but in our case, we also have language, so we can go further in expressing feelings in terms of praise or blame. Our moral world deepens, because we can also look back on past situations to make comparisons between the things we have done before and the responses they evoked. Out of this, general ethical opinions begin to form, and these are shared with others. Thus, emerging from a combination of “habit, example, instruction, and reflection,” a moral system comes into being.