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David Hume's direct and indirect arguments constitute a sustained, sophisticated, and compelling attack on standard moral cognitivism and its many variants. With moral conativism as his foundation, Hume must find ways to incorporate a consonant treatment of those moral ‘judgements’ and ‘opinions’ that moral conativism does not itself touch, moral ‘judgements’ and ‘opinions’ that, not being practical in the intended sense, are not to be identified with moral desires. Sympathy's correction introduces the universality and impartiality, and thus the intersubjectivity, of moral desires. Attention to the two elements in Hume's explanatory account — attention both to sympathy and to its correction — will help confirm that the analysis this chapter offers of moral desires is Hume's. This chapter also discusses Hume's views on moral affections and moral language.

Specifically moral desires, just as the partial desires of which they are impartial variants, are person-implicating: their contents make essential reference to the actions and qualities of human persons. More narrowly, they are mind-implicating: their contents make essential reference to the mind-displaying actions and qualities — the conative characteristics, the traits, the intellectual talents and abilities — of such individuals. Some moral desires are desire-implicating desires. Within the framework of David Hume's expanded moral conativism, it follows that some propositional moral affections are likewise desire-implicating ones. In his Artificiality Argument, Hume contends that desire-implicating moral desires implicate natural — that is to say, non-moral — desires. He also distinguishes two types of desire-implicating moral desires. Moral desires of one of these types implicate natural non-moral desires, desires that do not require conventions. Moral desires of the other of these types implicate artificial non-moral desires, desires that require the presence of conventions.

This chapter reflects on the many properties that David Hume assigns to moral agents and examines the interrelations of those properties. The goal is to summarize the central elements in the closely argued, and intricately articulated, moral psychology presented by Hume. A typical moral agent is, more primitively, a non-moral one. Her specifically moral desires (and so also her specifically moral affections) aside, she is an individual with non-moral desires and affections, and with a host of other physical, psychological, and social features. For Hume, what makes an individual an agent, whether non-moral or moral, makes her a free agent as well. This can be seen from a consideration of his views about freedom to act and about free action. In the Treatise of Human Nature, he distinguishes two notions of liberty or freedom, allowing the legitimacy of the first. Hume's moral agents are free agents fully subject to nature's causal laws; they are also rational agents.