The first part of the paper expands and strengthens the criticism of appeals to human or natural rights in After Virtue. It is argued that Gewirth’s responses to various objections are inadequate and that Flathman’s historical analysis is incompatible with the evidence. Baier’s charge that the treatment of Hume in After Virtue is inadequate is acknowledged to be true. A comparison of an Aristotelian account of rational cooperation with a Humean account is made the basis for a rejection both of (...) Baier’s assimilation of the two standpoints and of the treatment of the concept of a practice by both Miller and Doppelt. Doppelt’s rival account of the moral structures of modernity is held to be undermined both by facts which he himself recognizes and by the Marxist critique of liberal individualism. Marxism’s positive moral stance, as defended by Nielsen, is too impoverished to achieve what Nielsen claims for it. (shrink)

There are various forms of teleological thinking central to debates in the early modern and modern periods, debates in which David Hume (1711–1776) is a key figure. In the first section, we shall introduce three levels at which teleological considerations have been incorporated into philosophical accounts of man and nature, and sketch Hume’s criticisms of these approaches. In the second section, we turn to Hume’s non-teleological ‘science of man’. In the third section, we show how Hume has an account of (...) human flourishing that is not dependent on teleology. In the fourth section, we shall speculate as to the relation between Hume’s account of human nature and contemporary evolutionary accounts of morality and reasoning. (shrink)