In the world according to Hume, people are complicated creatures, with convoluted, often contradictory characters. Consider, for example, Hume's controversial assessment of Charles I: "The character of this prince, as that of most men, if not of all men, was mixed .... To consider him in the most favourable light, it may be affirmed, that his dignity was free from pride, his humanity from weakness, his bravery from rashness, his temperance from austerity, his frugality from avarice .... To speak the (...) most harshly of him, we may affirm, that many of his good qualities were attended with some latent frailty, which, though seemingly inconsiderable, was able, when seconded by the extreme malevolence of his fortune, to disappoint them of all their influence: His beneficent disposition was clouded by a manner not very gracious; his virtue was tinctured with superstition; his good sense was disfigured by a deference to persons of a capacity inferior to his own; and his moderate temper exempted him not from hasty and precipitate resolutions." This sketch shows Charles in all his complexities, with his virtues, near virtues, and contradicting virtues. I have quoted it at length because it is hard to summarize without losing the subtleties that lie within it. Hume's moral theory is based fundamentally on judgments of character, 2 so those subtleties are important to his view. The character sketches that pervade the.. (shrink)

In this much-anticipated book, Jonathan Dancy offers the only available full-scale treatment of particularism in ethics, a view with which he has been associated for twenty years. Dancy now presents particularism as the view that the possibility of moral thought and judgement does not in any way depend on an adequate supply of principles. He grounds this claim on a form of reasons-holism, holding that what is a reason in one case need not be any reason in another, and maintaining (...) that moral reasons are no different in this respect from others. Ethics Without Principles offers detailed treatment and criticism of opposing positions of all sorts, with useful summaries. It also contains three chapters on the nature of what Dancy calls 'contributory' reasons, which, though the topic of much interest at the moment, are not often discussed in anything like the detail given here. And it offers a distinctive form of value-holism to go with the holism of reasons. As Dancy's definitive statement on particularism, the book will be required reading for all those working on moral philosophy and ethical theory. (shrink)

Having no recourse to ways of knowing about the natural world, ethical non-naturalists are in need of an epistemology that might apply to a normative breed of facts or properties, and intuitionism seems well suited to fill that bill. Here I argue that the metaphysical inspiration for ethical intuitionism undermines that very epistemology, for this pair of views generates what I call the defeater from cosmic coincidence. Unfortunately, we face not a happy union, but a difficult choice: either ethical intuitionism (...) or ethical non-naturalism, but not both. (shrink)

This book defends a form of ethical intuitionism, according to which (i) there are objective moral truths; (ii) we know some of these truths through a kind of immediate, intellectual awareness, or "intuition"; and (iii) our knowledge of moral truths gives us reasons for action independent of our desires. The author rebuts all the major objections to this theory and shows that the alternative theories about the nature of ethics all face grave difficulties.

As I write this, in November 1971, people are dying in East Bengal from lack of food, shelter, and medical caxc. The suffering and death that are occurring there now axe not inevitable, 1101; unavoidable in any fatalistic sense of the term. Constant poverty, a cyclone, and a civil war have turned at least nine million people into destitute refugees; nevertheless, it is not beyond Lhe capacity of the richer nations to give enough assistance to reduce any further suffering to (...) very small proportions. The decisions arid actions of human beings can prevent this kind of suffering. Unfortunately, human beings have not made the necessary decisions. At the individual level, people have, with very few exceptions, not responded to the situation in any signihczmt way. Generally speaking, people have not given large sums to relief funds; they have not written t0 their parliamentaxy representatives demanding increased government assistance; they have not demonstrated in the streets, held symbolic fasts, or done anything else directed toward providing thc refugees with the means to satisfy their essential needs. At thc government level, no govcrmmcnt has given the sort of massive aid that would enable the refugees to survive fm: more than a few days. Britain, for instance, has given rather more than most countries. It has, to date, given £14,750,000. For comparative purposes, B1~itain’s share of thc nonreccverabla development costs of the Anglo-French Concorde project is already in excess of £275,000,000, and on present estimates will reach £440,000,¤00. The implication is that the British government values a supersonic transport more than thirty times as.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:53 HUME ON ARTIFICIAL LIVES with a Rejoinder to A.C. Maclntyre The variety of human cultures fascinated Enlightenment thinkers and evoked certain problems for philosophical discussion. Wide experience of other societies, as well as the study of history, disclosed moral systems interestingly different from modern European mores. Also a student of other cultures, historical and contemporary, David Hume is a moderate pluralist on the matter of alternative moral systems. (...) He acknowledges that there are systems of values other than that shared by his readers which qualify as moralities; but more interestingly, he also holds that there are some such systems which, despite the claims of their adherents, fail to qualify as moralities. Thus Hume opposes forms of relativism that allow any system which a community deems to be a moral code has to be acknowledged as constituting a genuine morality. In this paper I address the question of how Hume can discriminate among value systems and declare some to be moralities, some not. Given the design of his philosophical approach to morals, addressing this question is a matter of some importance for Hume, since he maintains that moral reflection takes its departure from everyday moral beliefs and sentiments. This being the case, we might expect that what should count as 'everyday moral beliefs and sentiments' would be whatsoever any individual or group puts forward as a morality, and that Hume's pluralism impedes him from raising a critical challenge to any system advanced, no matter how strange it might be. But Hume holds that certain systems advanced for the guidance of life which are sharply opposed to 54 everyday beliefs and sentiments do not constitute a morality, even if they number many as adherents. It is instructive to observe that A.C. Maclntyre believes that Hume's position is deeply flawed. He asserts that the treatment of rival tables of the virtues constitutes a most serious weakness in Hume's 2 theory of morals. Maclntyre contends that Hume's spurning of the monkish virtues, for instance, or his preference of Cicero's Offices over the Christian Whole Duty of Man, is devoid of theoretical justification and amounts to a matter of personal idiosyncrasy and eighteenth-century class elitism. Thus this seems a problem worthy of discussion. In what follows I shall: (a) lay out the problem of artificial lives as it arises in A Dialogue; (b) describe five points of differentiation between artificial lives and nonartificial lives; (c) review some less than fully satisfactory solutions to the problem; (d) introduce what I take to be the chief considerations supporting Hume's rejection of artificial lives; and finally (e) discuss whether Maclntyre 's objections to Hume's treatment of artificial lives are sustainable. 1. The Context of the Problem Hume deals with diversity of morals most expressly in A Dialogue, the short work appended to the second Enquiry. The essay records an exchange between one Palamedes, a lover of the novel and the striking, and his interlocutor, referred to merely as "I". Palamedes confounds the interlocutor by narrating a story about a distant people (the inhabitants of 'Fourli") whose mores include practices, apparently deemed moral by them, which sharply offend his, and presumably our, moral A sensibilities. Having elicited the interlocutor's 55 felt disapproval of those practices, Palamedes delights in revealing that the people of whom he has been speaking in cloaked terms are none other than the interlocutor's beloved Greeks of classical antiquity. Not satisfied with astonishing the interlocutor, he goes on to draw a strongly relativist conclusion about morals in general. The interlocutor confronts the choice of either abandoning his moral admiration of the civilization of the Greeks or of accepting some measure of the relativism in morals that Palamedes is advocating. The interlocutor does neither. He distinguishes between the principles of moral approbation or disapprobation and specific examples of approval or disapproval (E 333). He grants that there are examples of practices of which the ancients apparently approved and contrariwise we disapprove, but he denies that the existence of some such instances warrants the serious sort of relativism that Palamedes would foist on him. Obviously the number of such discrepancies cannot be overwhelming, otherwise the... (shrink)

This edition contains the thirty-nine essays included in Essays, Moral, and Literary, that made up Volume I of the 1777 posthumous Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. It also includes ten essays that were withdrawn or left unpublished by Hume for various reasons. The two most important were deemed too controversial for the religious climate of his time. This revised edition reflects changes based on further comparisons with eighteenth-century texts and an extensive reworking of the index. - Publisher.

The foundation for a system of morals, this 1749 work is a landmark of moral and political thought. Its highly original theories of conscience, moral judgment, and virtue offer a reconstruction of the Enlightenment concept of social science, embracing both political economy and theories of law and government.

It is not unusual now for Hume to be read as part of a virtue ethical tradition. However there are a number of obstacles in the way of such a reading: subjectivist, irrationalist, hedonistic, and consequentialist interpretations of Hume. In this paper I support a virtue ethical reading by arguing against all these interpretations. In the course of these arguments I show how Hume should be understood as part of a virtue ethical tradition which is sentimentalist in a response-dependent sense, (...) as opposed to Aristotelian. (shrink)

Contemporary realist theories of value claim to be compatible with natural science. In this paper, I call this claim into question by arguing that Darwinian considerations pose a dilemma for these theories. The main thrust of my argument is this. Evolutionary forces have played a tremendous role in shaping the content of human evaluative attitudes. The challenge for realist theories of value is to explain the relation between these evolutionary influences on our evaluative attitudes, on the one hand, and the (...) independent evaluative truths that realism posits, on the other. Realism, I argue, can give no satisfactory account of this relation. On the one hand, the realist may claim that there is no relation between evolutionary influences on our evaluative attitudes and independent evaluative truths. But this claim leads to the implausible skeptical result that most of our evaluative judgements are off track due to the distorting pressure of Darwinian forces. The realist’s other option is to claim that there is a relation between evolutionary influences and independent evaluative truths, namely that natural selection favored ancestors who were able to grasp those truths. But this account, I argue, is unacceptable on scientific grounds. Either way, then, realist theories of value prove unable to accommodate the fact that Darwinian forces have deeply influenced the content of human values. After responding to three objections, the third of which leads me to argue against a realist understanding of the disvalue of pain, I conclude by sketching how antirealism is able to sidestep the dilemma I have presented. Antirealist theories of value are able to offer an alternative account of the relation between evolutionary forces and evaluative facts —
an account that allows us to reconcile our understanding of evaluative truth with our understanding of the many non-rational causes that have played a role in shaping our evaluative judgements. (shrink)

Appeals to utility permeate Hume's account of morality. He maintains, for which have this tendency to the public advantage and loss" (T. 578-79).

Most people believe that there are limits to the sacrifices that morality can demand. Although it would often be meritorious, we are not, in fact, morally required to do all that we can to promote overall good. What's more, most people also believe that certain types of acts are simply forbidden, morally off limits, even when necessary for promoting the overall good. In this provocative analysis Kagan maintains that despite the intuitive appeal of these views, they cannot be adequately defended. (...) In criticizing arguments for limited moral requirements as well as those for unconditionally prohibited acts, Kagan offers a sustained attack on two of the most basic features of ordinary common sense morality. (shrink)

In this paper, I begin by outlining some basic features of the version of virtue ethics I espouse, and then turn to exploring what light may be shed on our understanding and interpretation of Hume when he is viewed from that perspective.

Hume argues that respect for property (“justice”) is a convention-dependent (“artificial”) virtue. He does so by appeal to a principle, derived from his virtue-based approach to ethics, which requires that, for any kind of virtuous action, there be a “first virtuous motive” that is other than a sense of moral duty. It has been objected, however, that in the case of justice (and also in a parallel argument concerning promise-keeping) Hume (i) does not, (ii) should not, and (iii) cannot recognize (...) such a motive. This paper defends Hume’s argument against these three objections. (shrink)

Moral philosophy has long been dominated by the aim of understanding morality and the virtues in terms of principles. However, the underlying assumption that this is the best approach has received almost no defence, and has been attacked by particularists, who argue that the traditional link between morality and principles is little more than an unwarranted prejudice. In Principled Ethics, Michael Ridge and Sean McKeever meet the particularist challenge head-on, and defend a distinctive view they call "generalism as a regulative (...) ideal.". (shrink)

Jay Rosenberg introduces Immanuel Kant's masterwork, the Critique of Pure Reason, from a "relaxed" problem-oriented perspective which treats Kant as an especially insightful practicing philosopher, from whom we still have much to learn, intelligently and creatively responding to significant questions that transcend his work's historical setting. Rosenberg's main project is to command a clear view of how Kant understands various perennial problems, how he attempts to resolve them, and to what extent he succeeds. At the same time the book is (...) an introduction to the challenges of reading the text of Kant's work and, to that end, selectively adopts a more rigorous historical and exegetical stance. Accessing Kant will be an invaluable resource for advanced students and for any scholar seeking Rosenberg's own distinctive insights into Kant's work. (shrink)