Hume: Normative Ethics

The new two volume edition of Hume’s Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, edited by Tom Beauchamp and Mark Box, is the first critical edition.[3] What primarily distinguishes a critical edition is that it collates the copy-text with all other editions and provides a complete record of variations in the texts. Beauchamp and Box provide readers with detailed, informative notes and annotations that describe the variations and revisions that have been made to the Essays published within Hume’s lifetime. They also provide (...) a table that catalogues the contents of the various editions from 1741 to 1771 and several helpful appendixes relating to their publication. The final text of the essays has been carefully edited and annotated. The second volume contains the editors’ extensive annotations, which are both informed and illuminating. All the editorial work has been done with enormous attention to detail and precision.... (shrink)

In contemporary ethics, moral expert as a person who can recognize sound behaviors in complex situations and be the ideal moral agent. This matter is not new and can be found in Hume's moral philosophy, but it is not as well-known as it should be. If we look at Hume's works, not only we will find a lot of evidence in this issue, but also there is correspondence between it and the true judge, the famous doctrine of Hume’s aesthetics. As (...) there is true judge as a person in aesthetics that with Strong sense, delicate sentiment, practice, comparison, and free from all prejudice Gains general principles of art and recognizes real beauty; In morality, there is a man of temper, preserve himself from illusions, has the command of himself and can separate feelings in complex situations. he determines the right behavior, virtue, and vice. Also, both true judge and moral expert recognize common mistakes and are considered as ideal figures. (shrink)

Julian Baggini’s Great Guide is an attempt to introduce and popularize the works and wisdom of David Hume to nonacademic audiences. One of Baggini’s goals is to show that much of Hume’s work is pra...

In this paper, I summarize Hume's moral theory as it is developed in the Treatise on Human Nature and pay particular attention to the question how evil is possible in Hume's theory.

This is a fascinating collection of Hume's texts and essays by experts on Hume. It introduces students and general readers to a panorama of his moral and political philosophy in a readable and informative way. The collection consists of the following sections: Introduction by Andrew Valls, Index of Names, "Texts," and "Essays." The texts include the entirety of An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, and selected essays from "Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary." This is followed by four "interpretive essays" (...) by Mark G. Spencer, Elizabeth S. Radcliffe, Frederick G. Whelan, and finally Peter Vanderschraaf and Andrew Valls. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Enlightenment sentimentalism’s greatest potential contribution to scholarship today is not a matter for moral philosophy alone, but rather an agenda for fruitful collaboration between fields across the humanities and social sciences. This interdisciplinary program for both understanding an improving human nature is contrasted with alternative approaches, and defended against objections that it cannot produce a moral code categorically binding on any rational being as such. The chapter concludes with some sociological and psychological hypotheses that might help (...) explain why the interdisciplinary and sentimentalist approach to ethics, for all its intellectual virtues, has not been adequately appreciated. (shrink)

Artykuł jest próbą odpowiedzi na pytanie, jakie miejsce powinny zająć osoby gorzej sytuowanew społeczeństwie. Autor wykorzystuje etyczną teorię Hume’a oraz współczesną zasadępriorytaryzmu do stworzenia nowego projektu polityki współodczuwania. Celem projektujest całkowite odwrócenie ról z uwzględnieniem obopólnych korzyści: wszyscy ci, którzy dotej pory byli wykluczeni, stają się administratorami dóbr, a reszta społeczeństwa przekształcasię w osoby od nich zależne.

Mandeville writes that it was said of Montaigne “that he was pretty well vers’d in the Defects of Man-kind, but unacquainted with the Excellencies of human Nature,” adding, “If I fare no worse, I shall think my self well used.” Mandeville transformed Montaigne’s suggestion into a methodology for his systematic attempt to “anatomize the invisible Parts of Man”. His tale of “the grumbling hive,” and his extensive commentary on it, were designed to demonstrate that “if Mankind could be cured of (...) the Failings they are Naturally guilty of, they would cease to be capable of being rais’d into such vast, potent and polite Societies, as they have been”. (shrink)

Samuel Johnson has an interesting comment on consequences and the telling of “white lies.” For example “Sick People and Children are often to be deceived for their Good.” David Hume apparently endorses this concept in one of his letters. Both Johnson and Rousseau anticipate Kant’s argument about consequences in that one is to tell the truth under all circumstances. Hume, I argue, would take issue with this claim in that there are cases that warrant telling white lies. Elsewhere he speaks (...) about “harmless liars” who indulge in “lying or fiction... in humorous stories.” And he says “Noble pride and spirit may openly display itself when one lies under calamity [defamation or slander] or opposition of any kind,” especially if the opposition puts one’s life in grave danger, so one’s self-preservation is threatened. Under situations like these, lying is justified. In regard to fiction, if lying is for the purpose of entertainment and where “truth is not of any importance,” it is permissible. These cases are discussed in some detail, and they offer, along with their analysis, a pragmatic defense of Hume’s position. (shrink)

Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments has long been recognized as importantly influenced by, and in part responding to, David Hume’s earlier ethical theory. With regard to Smith’s account of the foundations of morals in particular, recent scholarly attention has focused on Smith’s differences with Hume over the question of sympathy. Whilst this is certainly important, disagreement over sympathy in fact represents only the starting point of Smith’s engagement with – and eventual attempted rejection of – Hume’s core moral theory. (...) We can see this by recognizing the TMS’s account of moral foundations as predicated upon a rejection of Hume’s distinction between the natural and artificial virtues. Smith is in turn revealed as generating a major break with Hume – a break which, if based on a superior theory of moral foundations has important consequences for how we treat Smith and Hume in both the history of philosophy and contemporary moral theory. (shrink)

Worries about the possibility of consent recall a more familiar problem about promising raised by Hume. To see the parallel here we must distinguish the power of consent from the normative significance of choice. I'll argue that we have normative interests, interests in being able to control the rights and obligations of ourselves and those around us, interests distinct from our interest in controlling the non-normative situation. Choice gets its normative significance from our non-normative control interests. By contrast, the possibility (...) of consent depends on a species of normative interest that I'll call a permissive interest, an interest in its being the case that certain acts wrong us unless we declare otherwise. In the final section, I'll show how our permissive interests underwrite the possibility of consent. (shrink)

David Hume's sympathetic principle applies to physical equals. In his account, we sympathize with those like us. By contrast, Adam Smith's sympathetic principle induces equality. We consider Hume's “other rational species” problem to see whether Smith's wider sympathetic principle would alter Hume's conclusion that “superior” beings will enslave “inferior” beings. We show that Smith introduces the notion of “generosity,” which functions as if it were Hume's justice even when there is no possibility of contract.

Hume considered An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals incomparably the best of all his writings. In the argument advanced here, I propose that Hume's preference for the Enquiry may be linked to his admiration of Cicero, and his work, De Officiis. Cicero's attempt to discover the honestum of morality in De Officiis had a particular relevance and appeal for philosophers of the early eighteenth century who were seeking to establish what they called the foundation of morality. One of those (...) philosophers was Francis Hutcheson; his differences with his contemporaries and with Hume are reviewed in the second and third parts of the essay. In the fourth and final section, I examine Hume's attempt to reconcile the foundation of morality, as he under-stood it, the sentiment of humanity, with the principles of utility and agreeableness. And an attempt is made, finally, to explain why Hume's critics perceived Hume's Enquiry to be the work of an Epicurean and a sceptic. (shrink)

David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are often viewed as contributors to or participants in a common tradition of thought roughly characterized as ‘the liberal tradition’ or the tradition of ‘bourgeois ideology’. This view, however useful it may be for polemical or proselytizing purposes, is in some important respects historiographically unsound. This is not to deny the importance of asking what twentieth-century liberals or conservatives might find in the works of, say, David Hume to support their (...) respective ideological persuasions. It is only to insist that attempts to use selected arguments, or parts of arguments, from great eighteenth-century thinkers to shore up twentieth-century programmatic political positions must be categorically distinguished from attempts to understand what Hume, Smith, Bentham or Mill actually meant, or could imaginably have meant, to say. (shrink)

Why did Hume drop sympathy as a key concept of his moral philosophy, and why—on the other hand—did Smith make it into the ‘didactic principle’ of his Theory of Moral Sentiments? These questions confront us with the basic issue of ethical theory concerning human nature. My point in dealing with these questions is to show what views of human nature their respective choices involved. And my procedure will be to take a close look at the revisions they made to their (...) ethical theories to bring out the contrasting aspects of their views of human nature. (shrink)

... In Virtue byConsensus Vincent Hope sets out to correct this "serious imbalance in the usual estimation of the relative merit of Hutcheson, Hume and Smith" (p. 3). He argues that "Hume has been given too much prominence and his importance has been exaggerated" (p. 3). Hope is especially concerned to place more emphasis on Smith who, he says, "has received far less attention than he deserves" (p. 3). Hope suggests that his claim to offer something new on the work (...) of these thinkers rests, ultimately, on his "insights into the significance of the impartial spectator and the nature of the person he is meant to represent" (p. 2). In the final chapters of this book Hope sets out to develop "a new theory of virtue" on the basis of his critical analysis and discussion of the ideas of these three thinkers. According to Hope, the "main idea" of Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith "is that morality, and more particularly virtue, depends on a consensus based on the similarity of pleasure and displeasure which people respectively enjoy or suffer in observing how they treat each other. They assume that people's appreciation of virtue rests on shared feelings. Because of this individuals can check their moral judgments against each other: this is the only way in which they can confirm or correct their moral assessments"(p. 2). In relation to this matter, Hope argues that "the view which has prevailed for so long ... that Hutcheson and Hume [and Smith] are non-cognitivists, is wrong" (p. 3). These thinkers, Hope argues,"are neither objectivists nor in the simple sense 'subjectivists"('p. 5). They regard virtue and vice as qualities which are "subjective with respect, not to the individual, but the human species, or society,or the fair-minded"(p. 3). In other words,they advance and defend what Hope describesas "intersubjectivism"(p. 8). According to this account, our shared emotional makeup, and our capacity to take up a disinterested or impartial perspective on actions and characters,makes it possible for us to reason in this sphere and arrive at true moral judgments. Smith, Hope maintains, provides a considerable advance on both Hutcheson and Hume. .... (shrink)

In the opening chapter of this book, Timothy Costelloe develops an interpretation of Hume's doctrines in "Of the Standard of Taste" and then proceeds, in the second chapter, by extending that interpretation to Hume's moral philosophy. According to Costelloe, the "real value" of his attempt to clarify Hume's essay is to be found in the broader application. But since that value will not be real unless the interpretation of the essay has merit, the first chapter is clearly vital to the (...) enterprise, and so deserves particular attention.Costelloe sides with those who emphasize, on Hume's behalf, the rules of art rather than the joint verdict of true judges, and he wants to. (shrink)

This essay treats the final version of Hume’s Essays, Volume 1, as an artfully shaped whole. Framed by essays on taste that address the interaction of personal and social dynamics, the volume is organized into loose clusters of political and moral essays that share a common pattern of offering multiple approaches to the issues they examine and pursuing a given idea until it reaches a point of excess that generates a salutary correction. This activity circumscribes an inexact range of balance, (...) which is left for the reader to resolve or, better, to continue. In this, Hume’s Essays invite readers to participate in the interaction between self-formation and cultural forms that is motor of Hume’s post-skeptical philosophy and the genre of the essay alike. (shrink)

Do the moral sentiments move us to act, according to Hume? And if so, how? Hume famously deploys the claim that moral evaluations move us to act to show that they are not derived from reason alone. Presumably, moral evaluations move us because (as Hume sees it) they are, or are the product of, moral sentiments. So, it would seem that moral approval and disapproval are or produce motives to action. This raises three interconnected interpretive questions. First, on Hume’s account, (...) we are moved to do many virtuous actions not by the sentiments of approval and disapproval, but by other sentiments, such as gratitude and parental love; so when and how do the moral sentiments themselves provide motives to act morally? The second question arises as a result of a position I defend here, that the moral sentiments are best understood as Humean indirect affections. Hume says that the four main indirect passions (pride, humility, love and hatred) do not directly move us to act. The second question, then, is whether their status as indirect affections nonetheless allows moral approval and disapproval to be or provide motives. Finally, if we make a natural assumption about how Hume thinks belief about future pleasure is connected to the desire to obtain it (I call it the signpost assumption), it turns out that the mechanisms for producing motives that most naturally come to mind are ones that are equally available to reason alone. This introduces the third question: given the constraints Hume imposes on the nature of the moral sentiments, is there a way in which they can move usto act that is not also a way in which reason alone does? I argue that, given the signpost assumption, while Hume has greatly constrained his options, his moral sentiments do have one very limited way of moving us to act that is not available to reason alone. However, there are reasons to doubt that Hume endorses the signpost assumption. Without it, our moral evaluations have a far greater capacity to produce motives to act. One important objection arises; but this problem can be solved by rejecting a further assumption about what counts as being produced by reason alone. (shrink)

Hume's project, in Book 3 of the Treatise, of showing that virtue and vice are discerned by feeling, not reason, is notorious for its contradictions. Armies of Humean scholars have fought valiantly, ingeniously, but unsuccessfully, to resolve them, and in the first half of Hume's Morality, Cohon shows herself an admirably doughty follower in their footsteps. The second half concerns Hume's division between natural and artificial virtues. We learn how self-interest is redirected, and moral sentiment strengthened to provide artificial virtues (...) with the motives they lack naturally, so as to enable them to facilitate impersonal co-operation, though a particular virtuous act may benefit no-one. The author explains why .. (shrink)

Earlier versions of the four articles which follow were presented at a book panel session, on Rachel Cohon's Hume's Morality: Feeling and Fabrication, at the Hume Society meetings in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in August 2009.I am deeply grateful to Lívia Guimarães and Donald L. M. Baxter for planning this session, and to Elizabeth S. Radcliffe and Don Garrett for serving as my critics. I have been asked to begin by summarizing my book in a few minutes.Hume's Morality: Feeling and Fabrication (...) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), is primarily an analytical, interpretive work about two main issues: the nature of ethical evaluation, according to Hume, and the artificial virtues. The book has two parts: "Feeling Virtue" .. (shrink)

Hume's Morality: Feeling and Fabrication 1 is a most useful and agreeable book. It contains a wealth of analysis, argument, and insight about many of the most central elements of the moral theory of one of the greatest moral philosophers in human history: David Hume. The book is well-conceived, well-argued, stimulating, informative, clear, precise, thorough, balanced, nuanced, and ingenious, while evincing—especially in its concluding chapter, when considering possible extensions of Hume's theory—a certain subtle but pleasing "warmth in the cause of (...) virtue." As Hume would be the first to recognize, these traits of the book are indications of the personal merit of its author: Rachel Cohon. Indeed, if Cleanthes. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that the notion of moral progress makes sense in Hume’s philosophy. And even though Hume suggests that this question is not central, in showing why it is not the case, I will conclude that, in concentrating on the question of the progress of civilisation, Hume was expressing a view on moral progress. To support this claim, I will begin by defending the claim that the notion of moral progress itself is consistent within Hume’s philosophical principles. (...) In brief, I will suggest that according to Hume, there are at least four ways in which an agent's morality can be modified: by a change of belief, by a will to change his own moral characteristics, by the government setting up rewards and punishment and by the progress of civilisation. The key to the problem will be to distinguish between the natural principles which direct human nature and the social nature of human beings, the first one being immutable, and the second being malleable. Drawing this distinction will allow us to reconcile the highly problematic notions of uniformity and diversity within human nature. Then, in correlation with the distinction between moral maxims and moral behaviour, I will suggest that both are subjects to improvement, even though the room left for the latter is greater. After having argued that the notion of moral progress makes sense, I will try to understand the role it plays in the Humean conception of the progress of civilisation. This will lead me to conclude that its conditions and its different states of development are for Hume intrinsically related to the progress of the civilisation in general. Furthermore, moral progress is secondary and relative to the general improvement of society. The morals of the people has no active role in its progress, contrary to politics, economics, sciences and arts which are the main causes of the gradual progress of improvement. Therefore, against Montesquieu, Hume considers the progress of “manners” and “customs” (i.e. moral behaviour or the moral worth of behaviour) as a consequence of the progress of civilisation, and not as its cause. Hume’s principal aim is to underline the process of civilisation, and to show the means by which it spreads though all the spheres of society. (shrink)

Hume insisted that property serve as the foundation of society because it best promotes the greatest amount of industry and therefore contributes to public utility. Industry thus plays a central role in Hume’s theory of justice. Given that Hume extensively discussed the social, political, cultural, and moral implications of industry in the Political Discourses, I suggest that Hume’s economic writings should be understood as an integral part of his overall philosophical project. In offering a parallel reading of the Enquiry Concerning (...) the Principles of Morals and the Political Discourses, I argue that Hume’s theory of justice does not resolve into a mere theory of property, as many philosophers complain, but rather, emerges as a rich account of how justice both generates the greatest material affluence and promotes the formation of the most virtuous society. (shrink)

This 1991 book is about the continuing influence of Hume's ideas on moral and political philosophy. In part, it is a critical exegesis of Hume's most impressive and challenging doctrines in Book III of the Treatise of Human Nature on such topics as morals, motivation, justice, and social institutions. However, the main thrust of the argument is to throw into relief the importance of that discussion for contemporary philosophy. While the author subjects most contemporary defences of Humean doctrines to intense (...) criticism, he also seeks to discover what versions of Hume's theories might still be defensible and viable. (shrink)

This book explores Hume's concern with the destructiveness of religious factions and his efforts to develop, in his moral philosophy, a solution to factional conflict. Sympathy and the related capacity to enter into foreign points of view are crucial to the neutralization of religious zeal and the naturalization of ethics. Jennifer Herdt suggests that Hume's preoccupation with religious faction is the key which reveals the unity of his varied philosophical, aesthetic, political and historical works.

In Book III of A Treatise on Human Nature,' Hume puts two questions which he says are distinct. The first concerns "the manner in which the rules of justice are established by the artifice of men." The second concerns "the reasons which determine us to attribute to the observance or neglect of these rules a moral beauty and deformity." Whatever his sympathies, the reader is bound to be struck by the sustained ingenuity of Hume's answer to the first question. He (...) is likely to be less impressed by the way in which Hume copes with the second. I shall be concerned with certain difficulties in Hume's treatment in the Treatise of this second question-difficulties which are of far more than exegetical interest. However, because the two questions are by no means as distinct as Hume declares-something which is rapidly made evident even by Hume's own discussion-I cannot exclude all reference to the first. What I shall avoid is any attempt to assess what is commonly received as Hume's answer to that question. Furthermore, I say next to nothing about what Hume takes just and unjust behaviour to consist in: about that remarkably confined area of human affairs which for Hume defines the limits within which people may be said to behave justly (and unjustly)-and, of course, to display other parasitic artificial virtues (and vices). My concern is rather with Hume's efforts to explain how there can be as well as natural, artificial virtues; how certain practices, whatever their detailed anatomies and inter-connexions, can be found morally estimable. And my conclusion is that his efforts are bound to fail. (shrink)

First Published in 1980. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Hume is one of the greatest of all British philosophers, and even in his own lifetime was celebrated as one of the pivotal figures of the Enlightenment. Hume's 'naturalist' approach to a wide variety of philosophical topics resulted in highly original theories about perception, self-identity, causation, morality, politics, and religion, all of which are discussed in this stimulating introduction by A J Ayer, himself one of the twentieth century's most important philosophers. Ayer also gives an account of Hume's fascinating life (...) and character, and includes generous quotations from Hume's lucid and often witty writings. (shrink)

The discussion on the relationship between Hume and utilitarianism has been lively for many decades. To contribute to this discussion, I identify four main features of a utilitarian view: a) a consequentialist theory of the right, b) a hedonist theory of the good, c) some kind of impartiality in evaluating consequences, and d) an essentially prescriptive, rather than merely explicative, attitude. I then show that, first, although he borrowed the word ‘utility’ from Hume, Bentham did not consider Hume as a (...) utilitarian and, second, that Hume's ethics does not really endorse any of the four main tenets of utilitarianism, either in the Treatise or in the Enquiry. I thus conclude that, notwithstanding recent interpretations to the contrary, Hume was no utilitarian in any substantial sense. (shrink)