Can natural habit count as justification?
Explaining why people expect the future to resemble the past does not by itself show that the expectation is rationally warranted.
Early modern philosophy · 1711–1776
David Hume
Hume asks human reason to account for its habits, showing how causation, self and morality depend on practices that argument alone cannot manufacture.
David Hume was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian and essayist. His empiricism and scepticism reshaped debates about causation, personal identity, religion and the sources of moral judgement.
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The question he enters
The question David Hume enters
How much of what you call knowledge is a rational proof—and how much is a well-trained expectation?
The central move
Trace the idea back to experience
Hume distinguishes relations of ideas from matters of fact and asks what experience could justify our concepts. We observe one event followed by another, not a necessary connection floating between them. Custom carries expectation forward. His scepticism is therefore both disruptive and naturalistic: humans keep reasoning, but with less metaphysical swagger.
Key ideas
Terms that carry the argument.
- Hume's fork
- The distinction between demonstrable relations of ideas and contingent matters of fact.
- The problem of induction
- Past regularity cannot non-circularly prove that unobserved cases or the future will resemble it.
- Bundle theory
- Introspection reveals changing perceptions but no separately observed, enduring self that owns them.
- Moral sentiment
- Moral judgement depends on human feeling and shared points of view, not reason operating alone.
Where the view strains
Objections and limits.
Whose shared sentiment?
An appeal to common feeling must explain prejudice, disagreement and the social training of sympathy.
Sources and routes
Read the work. Follow the argument.
Primary texts
Where to meet the position.
- Project GutenbergAn Enquiry Concerning Human UnderstandingWebCausation, induction, scepticism, freedom and testimony.Project Gutenberg transcription of an English public-domain edition; no translator is involved and the catalogue does not identify an editor. · Readable online with downloadable ebook formats from the catalogue page. Checked Aug 2026.
- Project GutenbergA Treatise of Human NatureWebA systematic science of human understanding, passion and morals.Original English text in a Project Gutenberg transcription; the catalogue does not identify a modern editor or translator. · Readable online with downloadable ebook formats from the catalogue page. Checked Aug 2026.
- Project GutenbergAn Enquiry Concerning the Principles of MoralsWebUtility, sympathy and moral judgement.Project Gutenberg transcription of the 1912 reprint of Hume's 1777 edition; original English text. · Readable online with downloadable ebook formats from the catalogue page. Checked Aug 2026.
On this site
Continue in a usable resource.
Are we genuinely free to choose?RelevantInquiry · A compatibilist account of liberty within causal regularity.Philosophy ProfileAppears hereGame · Test empiricism, scepticism and the continuity of the self.Who Said It?Appears hereGame · Distinguish Hume's arguments from claims that overstate his scepticism.