David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche both launched critiques of Christian values and ethics. While they disagreed on positive ethics, they shared a descriptive view of human agency. They rejected the idea of an autonomous rational will and argued that reason is subordinate to passions. Both were determinists who believed human behavior is causally determined rather than freely chosen. They differed in that Hume advocated an ethics based on compassion, while Nietzsche worried compassion could undermine human flourishing, especially for more talented individuals.

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The Moral Visions of David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche
By: Jonathan Udell
For thousands of years, many of the world’s greatest minds have exhausted their energies
in pursuit of what is perhaps the holy grail of human intellectualism: Moral Truth, that
foundational law (or maybe, body of laws) which governs all civilized interaction on Earth. The
ancient Platonists and Aristotelians squabbled over its form in Athens; and later, their intellectual
descendants, the Augustinians and Aquinians, brought a theologically tinged, but similar debate,
into the scholastic halls of Christendom.
After the development and spread of rationalism and empiricism, many sought to put
aside theology as the sole basis of moral belief, and vindicate their society’s ethical doctrines by
uncovering some body of natural, logically necessary principles which their current beliefs had
been rationally, and legitimately, deduced from. For Kant, this was the Categorical Imperative,
for Bentham and Mill, the Principle of Utility. However, the simultaneous appearance to many of
chinks in the façade of Christian dogma also led some to mount devastating attacks on many of
the West’s dominant values, and the purportedly shoddy systems that had been built to support
such values.
In this paper, I will show that David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche both emerged from
within the above cultural context to launch stinging critiques of the Christian values they found
most detrimental to human flourishing and the ethical systems that had been built over the years
to provide those values with a rational foundation. Furthermore, I will argue that while these two
intellectual titans ultimately possessed profoundly different positive ethical visions (resulting
from the opposing views they held of compassion and human nature), they both held

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fundamentally similar descriptive accounts of human agency, which committed them to
accepting broadly comparable theories of morality.
In “Hume and Nietzsche: Naturalists, Ethicists, Anti-Christians,” Craig Beam reveals
how Nietzsche and Hume “combine historical inquiry into the origins of religion (or religion-
based morality) with moral critique,” and came to “identify religion with cruelty and destructive
sacrifice” (Beam 303). Interestingly, the historical examination ultimately led the two
philosophers to equate the demands of Christian theology (and its doctrine of original sin, in
particular) with earlier forms of human sacrifice that had once occurred in the days of the
“primitive” religions. While the specific type of sacrifice that these religions require certainly
differs greatly, “Christianity,” Beam explains, still “carries on the peculiar dialectic of worship
and destruction, service to the divine and injury to self” (Beam 304). Hume and Nietzsche did
not, in fact, merely equate these two forms of sacrifice, but rather argued that the sacrifice
(presumably) asked by the Christian God was greater than that which was asked by the gods of
the ancients; for while the gods of the ancient polytheistic religions demanded the occasional
sacrifice of some human beings sometimes, the Christian God demands of all its followers
always: abandon your true impulses, denounce your natural self.
Such a rejection of one’s self entails a variety of negative consequences. In the words of
Nietzsche, it is “a sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of the spirit” (Nietzsche
65). In a similar vein, Hume proclaimed a century earlier,
Where the deity is represented as infinitely superior to mankind, this belief,
though altogether just, is apt, when joined with superstitious terrors, to sink the
human mind into the lowest submission and abasement, and to represent the
monkish virtues of mortification, penance, humility, and passive suffering, as the
only qualities which are acceptable to him. (Hume 339)

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However, in the eyes of Hume and Nietzsche, the meekness and servility induced by
Christianity is not its sole deleterious contribution to humankind. In what is perhaps an even
more lurid consequence of its acceptance, the all-encompassing metaphysical and ethical basis of
Christianity’s systematized theology almost inevitably forces the true believer (one who would
accept all the teachings of their church) to abandon the honest intellectual pursuit of truth when it
conflicts with religious dogma (Beam 305). In so doing, the efforts, talents, and potentialities of
countless people are squandered in fruitless intellectual efforts. Furthermore, the broad
acceptance of dogmatic Christian theology also tends to hamper the efforts of more free-minded
thinkers; for, as Hume writes,
[theology] bends every branch of knowledge to its own purpose, without much
regard to the phenomena of nature, or to the unbiased sentiments of the mind,
hence reasoning, and even language, have been warped from their natural course,
and distinctions have been endeavored to be established where the difference of
the objects was in a manner, imperceptible. (Beam 307)
So, it can be said with a fair degree of certainty that both Nietzsche and Hume saw it as
their life’s work to untangle the warped, twisted branches of knowledge that they inherited as
latecomers to a theologically-tinged philosophical past. They must inevitably have seen it as their
lonesome burden to relieve humankind of the unjust albatross that it had unwittingly pressed
upon its own back with the advent of Christianity; and the two were in agreement that perhaps
the most notoriously tangled branch of knowledge involved the supposed dichotomy placed
between reason and natural inclination. As a result, both presented strong arguments intended to
portray the rational will (popularly conceived as autonomous above the self) as a simple mirage,
a mere (albeit persuasively realistic) marionette whose strings are deftly tugged upon off-stage
by natural forces.

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David Hume summed up his belief in this maxim in his sometimes esteemed, often
maligned, but always-famous assertion, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the
passions.” In “A Treatise of Human Nature,” Hume sets out to prove two propositions: “that
reason alone can never be a motive to any action” and “that it can never oppose passion in the
direction of the will” (Cohon). In order to drag the reader’s rationality out of its homely Cave,
and lead it into the blinding daylight where it will be forced to confront its enslavement, Hume
presents us with several arguments grounded in his understanding of human rationality.
According to Hume, human reason has two, and only two, functions. First, it is capable of
comparing abstract ideas, and thereby presenting us with similarities and differences between
them. Secondly, it seeks to understand the causal relations embedded in the events it experiences
(Cohon1
). Since the first type of reasoning only uncovers similarities and differences between
ideas, it is incapable of providing a motivation for action. In contrast, Hume maintains the
second type of reasoning can motivate one to act, but not by itself. This is because having
knowledge that event A will bring about result B can only move someone to act if that person
has already assigned value to A and B, and also calculated that such a sequence of events would
result in a net-value gain (Cohon). In other words, the predictive faculty of reason motivates us
to act by telling us, “This is a good thing to do because it will produce this good thing, which is
good because it will, in turn, produce this good…” However, this chain of reasoning cannot, of
course, go on ad infinitum, but must rather be targeted toward something (or things) that are
deemed good in-themselves, independent of reason.
1
Where page numbers are not listed in an in-text citation, the article being referenced is taken
from the online version of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which does not have page
numbers.

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For Hume, the ultimate locus of value is found in our personal experiences of pleasure
and pain. When people experience pleasure, they implicitly and mechanistically place value in
the abstract idea underlying what they perceive as the cause of that feeling (Cohon). (Likewise,
the perception of pain leads to a diminishment of value.) As soon as value is assigned to certain
ideas through the experience of pleasure and the process of causal linkage, the comparative
capacity of reason goes to work, distributing like-value to like-ideas. Thus, an ever-evolving
framework of value-laden ideas is produced, one that utilizes reason but ultimately has the
instinctual urges of pleasure and pain at its foundation. Because of the mechanistic nature of this
framework, and particularly the subordinated role of reason within it, Hume commits himself to
a determinist worldview. In fact, he concludes that a sort of mechanistic determinism is
necessary for morality, because in a world devoid of causation, we would be unable to impute
blame (Cohon). Like Hume, Nietzsche is also a believer in determinism; but while Hume views
determinism as morality’s saving grace, Nietzsche argues it is but a nail in conventional
morality’s coffin.
According to Nietzsche, the validity of conventional morality is dependent on three
descriptive premises pertaining to human agency, which must all hold true if morality can have
an objective basis. First, humans must “possess a will capable of free and autonomous choice”;
otherwise, we would be unable to justifiably assign them blame for their failure to act morally
(Leiter). Second, the ego must be sufficiently transparent that we can decipher what has truly
motivated an action. Lastly, the human species must be similar enough that one moral code is in
the interest of all, which would thus allow the follower to tell any skeptically-minded individual
that they should consent to it (Leiter).

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Nietzsche roundly attacks the notion of an independent, detached, and rational will
capable of autonomous choice throughout his writing, claiming such a will would need to be
causa sui, a term roughly translatable to self-caused, or in other words, the will must not be
affected by anything other than itself (Leiter). At several points, Nietzsche seems to argue that
the notion of a causa sui will is a logical impossibility, calling it “the best self-contradiction that
has been conceived so far… a sort of rape and perversion of logic,” and a mere reflection of “the
desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God,
the world, ancestors, chance, and society… to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of
the swamps of nothingness” (Leiter). Such an argument taken by itself could certainly be
subjected to an abundance of warranted criticism. Even if it was granted that individuals do not
possess “entire and ultimate responsibility” for their lot in life, it would not necessarily follow
that they can never be objectively judged in how they respond to the circumstances they were
thrust into.
However, Nietzsche buttresses his argument through his explanation of human agency,
an account that in many ways mirrors the decision-making process sketched out by Hume a
century earlier. Nietzsche, part of the first generation of writers seeking to incorporate evolution
into their work, adhered to what some now call a “Doctrine of Types,” which stipulates that all
persons have a certain “psycho-physical constitution, which defines [them] as a particular type of
person” (Leiter). Whether we can or cannot actually group individuals into specific type-classes
is not of importance here. What is important to the big picture is that every person possesses their
own (somewhat) unique psycho-physical constitution, which is dictated by their genetic
composition and determines the a priori guidelines they use to sort through and process
information.

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Such a view of agency results in a deterministic outlook. The individual’s psycho-
physical constitution is the sole factor that determines the lens which one views the world
through, or the specific form of evaluative procedure which they will use to assess the facts they
confront. Since the same evaluative procedure applied to the same facts always produces the
same result (which is true by definition), and we could not have thought differently than we did
(for this would require a cause that evidently did not exist) or known other than we knew, the
only possible act to choose is the act chosen. Nietzsche argues that the same subconscious
process that determines people’s actions also controls the generation of their thoughts, noting,
“that a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish” (Nietzsche 24). Therefore,
reason, in the eyes of both Hume and Nietzsche, is broadly subservient to the passions.
However, the similarities between Nietzsche and Hume’s thought largely ends at their
rejection of ascetic Christian ideals and descriptive understanding of moral reasoning. Despite
Hume and Nietzsche’s shared deterministic outlook and rejection of reason’s moral supremacy,
both (somewhat paradoxically) put forward their own unique positive ethical visions, which
could not be any more different.
David Hume argued the morality of an action is determined by the character trait that
motivated it. These traits are separated into vices and virtues, the former producing pangs of
displeasure in impartial observers, and the latter producing good feelings in the unbiased. Our
feelings of approval or disapproval towards certain traits are generated by the psychological
mechanism of sympathy, a natural extension of the comparative function of reason (Cohon).
Since, for Hume, “mankind are so much the same, in all times and places,” (to the extent that
history’s “chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature”),
the self naturally comes to be cognitively grouped together with other people, and even more so

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with people who are most similar to oneself (via nationality, religion, etc.) (Beam 301; Cohon).
So, when a person encounters someone else who is in excruciating pain, the comparative
function of reason extends the sensation of pain to the bystander, and they feel disapproval for
whatever caused the other to feel pain. Therefore, compassion, for Hume, is a natural and
necessary component of moral decision-making.
As a result of his view of humans as fundamentally dissimilar beings, which are defined
by their own unique psycho-physical constitution, Nietzsche argues that the spread of certain
moral beliefs is bound to benefit certain individuals at the expense of others. Compassion,
Nietzsche argues, has been artificially promoted by Christianity to help the less talented
members of society at the expense of the most capable (Leiter). However, the fact that
compassion (or sympathy) has been artificially held up by many as if it was an objectively
necessary value is not what makes it despicable. The reason Nietzsche argues so vehemently
against unrestrained sympathy for others is that he believes it prevents people, particularly the
most talented among them, from reaching their greatest potential and a state of flourishing
(Leiter).
In Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche asks, “What if a symptom of regression lurked in the
‘good,’ likewise a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic, through which the present lived at
the expense of the future? Perhaps more comfortably, less dangerously, but at the same time in a
meaner style, more basely?” (Leiter) Nietzsche worried the norm of compassion would
undermine self-reliance and, when taken to its logical extreme, could potentially eliminate, or at
least significantly diminish, the suffering experienced by potentially great humans, which would
thereby eliminate their potential for flourishing artistically (Leiter). According to this line of
reasoning, efforts to bring about the ultimate and total spread of happiness would thus

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paradoxically eliminate the artistic geniuses that are necessary for people to experience the
deepest levels of happiness. Likewise, if ancient societies held the same moral norms many do
now, the great pyramids of Egypt and temples of Rome would never have been built. Thus, while
this moral code would have benefited the slaves who were forced to toil on these projects, it
would have harmed the multitudes of people who never would have experienced these
monuments and understood what humankind was capable of. In other words, Nietzsche worried
that our desire to please everyone in the present would have the unintended consequence of
harming the greatest of us (those who are able to appreciate and create the highest forms of art)
in the future.
In summary, Hume and Nietzsche rebelled strongly against many popular Christian
values of their day, and sketched non-cognitivist visions of moral decision-making, where the
ego is a mere conglomeration of instinctual drives, rather than a rational force set in opposition
to other natural forces. As we have seen, the two philosophers had opposing views regarding the
type of morality that would most benefit humanity, but given their views about the role of
reason, this should have been largely unsurprising to them. In contesting every descriptive claim
he believed ethical theories (in the traditional sense) were beholden to, Nietzsche recognized his
positive ethical vision carried no special epistemic status; and, since reason, for Hume, is
subservient to the passions, it stands to reason that if the relative motivational power of a passion
differs from person to person, two equally intelligent philosophers will come to reasonable, but
different, moral beliefs. Thus, we can see the difference between Hume and Nietzsche’s ethical
visions is not based at all in the logic of their ethical theories; it is rather found in the fact that the
two men’s egos were tugged upon most strongly by different passions. While Nietzsche
explicitly aimed to benefit the “highest” types of humans (a category he surely would have fit

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himself within), Hume, as a result of his view that humans are essentially similar, wanted to help
all humans, unless, of course, there skin wasn’t white and they weren’t born in Europe like
himself.

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Bibliography
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XXII.2 (1996): 299-324.
Cohon, Rachel. “Hume’s Moral Philosophy.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010
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Hume, David. “The Natural History of Religion.” Ed. T.H. Gross. The Philosophical Works of
David Hume. Ed. T.H. Green. Vol. 4. Darmstadt: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1964.
Leiter, Brian. “Nietzsche’s Moral and Political Philosophy.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition). Ed. Edward N. Zalta.
Nietzsche, Friedrich W. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Helen Zimmern. New York: MacMillan,
1907.