Chapter 6 - Hume on Talents and Moral Virtues

Summary

While moral philosophers have traditionally distinguished between moral virtues like benevolence and talents like wit and eloquence, Hume blurred the line between the two, arguing that such talents indeed count as genuine moral virtues. His position was inspired by Cicero, and he defended it by arguing that there is no adequate criterion to distinguish talents from virtues. I argue that Hume’s view of talents is misguided, and the source of the problem is his conception of publicly agreeable qualities. Hume devised a four-pronged test designating that a moral actor’s mental quality is a genuine virtue if it proves either (1) useful to others, (2) useful to oneself, (3) agreeable to oneself, or (4) agreeable to others. Talents like wit and eloquence fall into the fourth category. The problem is that all of the agreeable mental qualities that Hume lists are also useful ones, and it is more reasonable to see utility as the sole source of a quality’s morality, and agreeableness as only an extra feeling of nonmoral admiration experienced by the spectator. I suggest that Hume could have avoided the problem of grouping talents with virtues if he dropped down to a two-pronged test.