Journal of the History of Philosophy

NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 469 for "conscience" is itself a notion which presupposes moral discourse and values. A man cannot intelligibly be said to have twinges of conscience about matters which do not have or are not supposed by him to have moral import or significance. One might, for instance, regret not having gone to a party; but one cannot properly be said to have twinges of conscience about it unless it involved something morally untoward like having broken a promise. Nor is it the case, as Butler is committed to hold, that conscience plays a pervasive role in all of one's own moral judgments. He speaks as if conscience "without being consulted, without being advised with, magisterially exerts itself, and approves or condemns him, the doer of them, accordingly.... -24 In fact we tend to invoke conscience only in the small segment of moral situations characterized by perplexity and dilemmas where one is at a loss how to explain, right then and there, one's moral stance. Moral agents tend to have a "nose" for moral discernment in difficult situations very much like the experienced detective has a feeling for a puzzling crime and its detection, although neither may be able to spell out, right then and there, how it all fits together. Once it is seen that the notion of conscience makes sense only in a moral perspective and that it cannot be regarded as a brute fact about human beings, then the temptation to join Butler in regarding it as the basis of morality seems to vanish. Conscience can tell us something to do only because it expresses and assumes a person's adherence and response to the principles of morality as we know them. And this is true even of an erroneous conscience.25 BE,LASZABADOS The University oJ Regina IN DEFENCE OF "HUME'S AGNOSTICISM" The general aim of J. C. A. Gaskin's article in the last issue of this Journalt is to correct a recent tendency of commentators on Hume "to modify the traditional picture of Hume as the Great Sceptic in matters of religion" (p. 201). He sets himself to prove the following theses: 1. Hume's writings leave us in no doubt about his personal convictions on the main religious issues of his time; 2. Hume doubts the truth or meaningfulness of all theological statements except one which asserts that probably the cause of universal order remotely resembles human intelligence; 3. Hume wished not only to replace religious teaching by a utilitarian theory as the basis of ethics, but also to show that the moral influence of religious feelings and institutions had been, throughout history, harmful; 4. Hume's scepticism about religious teachings, and his hostility toward them, were expressed by Philo, who speaks for Hume in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. 24 Sermons,p. 54. z~ I wish to thank Terence Penelhum, A. G. N. Flew and G. M. Greig for commenting on various ancestors of this paper. 1"Hume's Critique of Religion," XIV, 3 (July, 1976), 301-311. 470 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Gaskin canvasses Hume's books, letters, and even discarded material to prove the first and second theses. Without question, he succeeds. The traditional picture of Hume focussed by this erudite and intelligent reading should not be modified, I agree. The third thesis is an anti-thesis, put forth against Nicholas Capaldi, who argued a few years ago, among other things, that Hume "accepted the argument from design.''z In that paper Capaldi was principally concerned to show that what was important to Hume in the Dialogues was to urge that the minimal conclusion available to natural religion could provide no solid basis for ethics. It was quite to Capaldi's purpose to stress, in concert with Gaskin, that Hume accepted no more than "one simple, though somewhat ambiguous, at least undefined proposition," as Philo called it,3 paraphrased under 2 above. Thus Gaskin and Capaldi agree precisely on the proposition which, according to Hume's Dialogues, is proven by the argument from design. Whether or not accepting this proposition amounts to accepting the argument from design is a question, as Hume would have said, inviting a...