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Hume on Adultery
President of Yale college Timothy Dwight IV’s polemical 1799 twin sermons “The Nature and Danger of Infidel Philosophy” repeatedly claim that David Hume claims that “adultery must be practiced” a pretty severe mischaracterization of Hume’s position. What did Hume actually claim?
Dwight’s sermon is hard to read because of his bad faith approach. He keeps projecting his own shortcomings onto his rivals, for example he says “Many readers of this Philosophy are ignorant; many impatient of thorough investigation and accustomed to depend for their opinions on others” after leaving footnotes about how he got all his information about the Deists he dislikes from Philip Skelton’s 1751 Deism Revealed, an Attack on Christianity. Or Dwight writes “All hypocrisy is detestable. I know of none so detestable as that which is coolly written, with full premeditation, by a man of talents, assuming the character of a moral and religious instructor, a minister, a prophet, of the truth of the infinite God.” This kind of obnoxious hypocrisy is why all these Deists and non-conformists had the integrity to step outside the bounds of orthodoxy, because orthodoxy was ripe for criticism, with self-righteous, pompous blowhards like Dwight who puff up their chest and blow a bunch of hot air copied from other people. When an intellectual giant like Hume comes along, he is mischaracterized and distilled into a few idiotic straw man sound bites, where the orthodox are really not his audience.
(Since this does not matter for the purposes of the higher-level argument, but rather to counter Dwight and Horne’s obnoxious bad-faith lengthy footnote written by someone else with a more truthful lengthy footnote written by Claude AI as an answer to the the top parapgrah.)
What Hume Actually Claimed
Hume treated chastity (particularly female chastity and marital fidelity) as an “artificial virtue”—meaning a socially constructed virtue that depends on conventions rather than a natural virtue | Hume, David (1711–76) - Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In Book 3, Part 2, Section 12 of his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume argued that:
- Female chastity arose as a social convention to ensure that men could be confident their wives’ children were actually their biological offspring, since “it is hard to tell whether the child is really that of the father” | Ucdavis 1
- Hume presented (though somewhat skeptically) an argument that society needs women to develop “some preceding backwardness or dread” toward sexual activity to counteract strong immediate temptations | Ucdavis 2
- This virtue is maintained through “education” and “general rules” that are “inculcated in the minds of women from birth,” and enforced by social disapproval and shame | Ucdavis 3
Crucially, Hume never claimed that adultery “must be practiced.” Instead, he was explaining why societies develop rules against adultery as a matter of social utility—he was describing the origins and function of sexual morality, not prescribing that it should be violated.
The Mischaracterization
That Hume would claim “adultery must be practiced” appears to be a severe mischaracterization. Dwight’s 1797-1800 sermons warned against “infidel philosophy” including Hume | Wikipedia, and Skelton’s Deism Revealed (1751) was one of the earliest critiques of Hume | Wikipedia | IrishPhilosophy.com.
The likely source of confusion stems from Hume’s sentimentalist moral philosophy: Hume argued that “reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will” and that moral distinctions are derived from sentiment rather than reason | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 1 | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2. Religious critics like Dwight interpreted this as moral relativism or nihilism—if morality isn’t grounded in divine reason or natural law, they feared it would collapse.
But Hume’s actual position was that virtues are character traits that are “useful” or “agreeable” to oneself or others | Wikipedia, and he thoroughly explained why chastity serves important social functions. He was doing descriptive moral philosophy, not advocating for adultery.
The polemical leap from “Hume says chastity is artificial/conventional” to “Hume says adultery must be practiced” is exactly the kind of inflammatory distortion common in 18th-century religious polemics against Enlightenment philosophers.
Hume’s actual project was far more intellectually honest. He was trying to understand how morality actually works in human societies—where it comes from, why we feel moral sentiments, what social functions these norms serve. This is descriptive ethics, the hard work of careful observation and analysis. Hume wasn’t saying “adultery is good” any more than a biologist describing how viruses spread is advocating for pandemics.
But for someone like Dwight, that nuance is dangerous. If you acknowledge that Hume is doing something more sophisticated than simply advocating immorality, you have to actually engage with his arguments. It’s much easier to reduce him to “Hume says adultery must be practiced” and then perform moral outrage for your Yale students and congregants.
The tragedy is that Hume was offering tools for understanding morality that could have enriched even religious thinking—his insights about sympathy, sentiment, social utility, and how moral norms emerge could have deepened theological ethics rather than threatened it. But that would require intellectual humility, which seems to be precisely what Dwight lacked. It’s the same pattern that repeats across intellectual history: careful, nuanced thinking gets flattened into caricature by people who are more interested in maintaining their authority than in pursuing truth.
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