Why did such highly abstract ideas as truth, knowledge, or justice become so important to us? What was the point of coming to think in these terms? This book presents a philosophical method designed to answer such questions: the method of pragmatic genealogy. Pragmatic genealogies are partly fictional, partly historical narratives exploring what might have driven us to develop certain ideas in order to discover what these do for us. The book uncovers an under-appreciated tradition of pragmatic genealogy which cuts (...) across the analytic-continental divide, running from the state-of-nature stories of David Hume and the early genealogies of Friedrich Nietzsche to recent work in analytic philosophy by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker. However, these genealogies combine fictionalizing and historicizing in ways that even philosophers sympathetic to the use of state-of-nature fictions or real history have found puzzling. To make sense of why both fictionalizing and historicizing are called for, the book offers a systematic account of pragmatic genealogies as dynamic models serving to reverse-engineer the points of ideas in relation not only to near-universal human needs, but also to socio-historically situated needs. This allows the method to offer us explanation without reduction and to help us understand what led our ideas to shed the traces of their practical origins. Far from being normatively inert, moreover, pragmatic genealogy can affect the space of reasons, guiding attempts to improve our conceptual repertoire by helping us determine whether and when our ideas are worth having. (shrink)

The tendency to see English utilitarianism as a fundamentally different enterprise from that of the so-called Scottish Enlightenment is mistaken. One must read Hume backwards, which, despite Hume’s own advice, is rarely done by Hume scholars. In doing so, one more fully appreciates the importance of utility to Hume, and Bentham’s subsequent employment of Hume’s ideas.

The shortage conditions created by the COVID-19 pandemic have been changing our ordinary way of life around the world since the beginning of 2020. Such conditions pose a challenge for shaping a cohesive theory of justice—one that takes non-ideal circumstances as necessary for the model. These conditions also interfere with agents’ moral capacity in ways that make it difficult for them to tell what is morally relevant, which impairs their ability to identify what actions are just. To shed light on (...) these problems, I turn to David Hume’s theory of justice as a test case to portray how outer conditions shape an agent’s inner conditions and affect the foundation of our moral perception of what is just. (shrink)

The shortage conditions created by the COVID-19 pandemic have been changing our ordinary way of life around the world since the beginning of 2020. Such conditions pose a challenge for shaping a cohesive theory of justice—one that takes non-ideal circumstances as necessary for the model. These conditions also interfere with agents’ moral capacity in ways that make it difficult for them to tell what is morally relevant, which impairs their ability to identify what actions are just. To shed light on (...) these problems, I turn to David Hume’s theory of justice as a test case to portray how outer conditions shape an agent’s inner conditions and affect the foundation of our moral perception of what is just. (shrink)

An epistemic account of the circumstances of justice allows one to make three important claims about the Humean and Rawlsian ‘standard account’ of those circumstances. First, and contrary to Hume, the possibility and necessity of justice are rooted not in limited beneficence or confined generosity, but in the epistemic insight that the knowledge relevant to deciding what to do with the fruits of social cooperation is for a variety of reasons uncentralisable. Second, and regardless of whether Rawlsian ethical disagreement is (...) more persuasive as a circumstance of justice than Humean confined generosity, it does not explain the possibility and necessity of justice, for the uncentralisability of social knowledge would be decisive even under conditions of unanimity. Finally, the epistemic account not only shows what the circumstances of justice are but, contra Cohen’s critique of the standard account, also provides at least some guidance as to what justice itself may be. (shrink)

An epistemic account of the circumstances of justice allows one to make three important claims about the Humean and Rawlsian ‘standard account’ of those circumstances. First, and contrary to Hume,...

O objetivo do presente artigo é discutir os vínculos existentes entre a teoria humeana e o Utilitarismo. Nesse contexto, mencionando a divergência existente entre os comentadores de Hume a respeito de seu lugar diante do Utilitarismo, conclui-se que, embora o caráter descritivo de fato predomine na teoria humeana, ela não é inteiramente desprovida de pretensão prescritiva. Será ainda necessário discutir em que consiste essa pretensão, isto é, o que ela busca prescrever.

Scholars have long posited justice as a core value of public relations. However, that value has been criticized as being improbably idealistic. Philosopher David Hume locates the origins of justice within the need for property and the reliable exchange of resources. Hume thus embeds the origins of justice within a staple of public relations theory: resource dependency theory. Additionally, Hume believes a respect for justice to be the foundation of a positive reputation. This grounding of the quest for justice in (...) resource dependency and reputation helps establish a realistic basis for accepting justice as a core value of public relations. (shrink)

I reply to commentaries by Justin Bruner, Robert Sugden and Gerald Gaus. My response to Bruner focuses on conventions of bargaining problems and arguments for characterizing the just conventions of these problems as monotone path solutions. My response to Sugden focuses on how the laws of humanity present in Hume’s discussion of vulnerable individuals might be incorporated into my own proposed account of justice as mutual advantage. My response to Gaus focuses on whether or not my account of justice as (...) mutual advantage can incorporate deep differences in values across subgroups of a larger society. (shrink)