Social Comparison in Hume: Theory of Cognition and Moral Psychology

Abstract This article presents Hume’s insights into the mechanics of social comparison. It attends to the overlooked role of comparison in Hume’s theory of cognition and its bearing on his moral psychology of social comparison. This article identifies three main meanings of comparison in Hume: (a) the comparative principle of reasoning, b) acts of comparison, and c) a comparative disposition. It also identifies four modes of comparative valuation: (1) intrinsic valuation, (2) experiential valuation, (3) subjective social valuation, and (4) objective social valuation. This provided taxonomy of comparison across Hume’s theory of cognition helps us better understand the moral psychology of social comparison by grounding it in his theory of cognition. Consequently, this article challenges the view that comparison plays a secondary role to sympathy in Hume and corrects scholarly positions on social comparison’s primary dependency on the principles of context, contrast, and “reversal-comparison.”