Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 1988

Teaching Philosophy, 2004

While David Hume (1711-1776) concentrates on the passions in the Book II of his A Treatise of Human Nature (although ethical questions are dealt here also), he concentrates of the subject of morality in the third and last book of the Treatise entitled Of Morals. For Hume, the rules of morality are not the conclusions of our reason but are rather founded upon moral sense or sentiment. The moral order pertains to the realm of moral sense or sentiment and we say that a particular human action is good or bad because we feel it is such. Hume the emotivist "rejected the notion that reason can command or move the human will and insisted that ethics should concentrate on certain impressions or feelings of approval or disapproval within the agent. In Hume's thinking, 'an action, or sentiment, or character, is virtuous or vicious, because its view causes a pleasure or uneasiness of a particular kind.' 1 He adopted, then, an ethical position which is subjectivist…" 2 Hume, the anti-intellectualist, writes in section 1 of Book III of his Treatise: 'Those who affirm that virtue is nothing but a conformity to reason; that there are eternal fitnesses and unfitnesses of things which are the same to every rational being that considers them; that the immutable measures of right and wrong impose an obligation, not only on human creatures, but also on the Deity himself: All these systems concur in the opinion, that morality, like truth, is discovered merely by ideas, and by their juxtaposition and comparison…Since morals, therefore, have an influence on the actions and affections, it follows, that they cannot be derived from reason; and that because reason alone, as we have already proved, can never have any such influence. Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason…' "According to Hume the basic assumptions on which we act, those fundamental beliefs, that is to say, which are necessary for practical life, are not conclusions drawn by the understanding from rational argument…he maintains that moral distinctions are derived ultimately, not from reasoning, but from feeling, from the moral sentiment. Reason alone is not capable of being the sole immediate cause of our actions. Indeed, Hume goes so far as to say that 'reason is, and ought to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.' 3 " 4 "In this same section of the Treatise," writes Vernon J. Bourke, "Hume introduces the approbative portion of his theory. To say that an act or character is vicious simply means that one has a feeling or sentiment of blame in viewing it. Vice and virtue are perceptions in the mind, just as sensible qualities (sounds, colors, heat) are perceptions and not present in objects. So, in the second section of Book III, he offers his version of a moral sense theory. This is the function of feeling pain at the perception of an action which is then called vicious, and of feeling pleasure in viewing another action which is virtuous. Some such moral feelings are original instincts and 5 V. J. BOURKE, op. cit., p 15.

Rivista Di Storia Della Filosofia, 2007

Hume is widely regarded as the grandfather of emotivism and indeed of non-cognitivism in general. For the chief argument for emotivism-the Argument from Motivation-is derived from him. In my opinion Hume was not an emotivist or proto-emotivist but a moral realist in the modern "response-dependent" style. His famous argument has thus been misconstrued. But my interest in this paper is not the historical Hume but the Hume of legend since the legendary Hume is one of the most influential philosophers of the present age. According to Michael Smith the "the Moral Problem"-the central issue in meta-ethics-is that the premises of Hume's argument appear to be true though the non-cognitivist conclusion appears to be false. Since the argument seems to be valid, something has got to give 1. Smith struggles to solve the problem by holding on to something like the premises of the argument whilst trying to fend off the conclusion. In my view this is a wasted effort. Hume was not arguing for non-cognitivsm in the first place, and the arguments for non-cognitivism that can be extracted from his writings are no good. Either the premises are false or the inferences are invalid. And this is despite the fact that Hume was substantially right about reason and the passions. Thus "the Moral Problem" is not a problem, and the legendary Hume does not deserve his influence. Nevertheless it is the legendary Hume and his fallacious arguments that I discuss in this paper. I reserve the real Hume for another occasion. 200 Charles Pigden 2. References to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature are by book, part and section, followed by page references to the Selby-Bigge/Nidditch and Norton and Norton editions.

Hume Studies, 2005

Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 2016

abstract 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.

Hume Studies, 2008

Philectics: Benin Journal of Philosophy, 2017

Rationalism is the school of philosophy that dominated the period before the modern era of human civilization. It is evident that rationalism was the fundamental foundation on which scientific, socio-political, religious, economic, cultural, ethical and similar theories before the age of enlightenment was squarely established. Platonic ethical theory is considered to be a typical example of rationalist moral philosophy because the foundation of the theory was sourced from the principles that are fixed, immutable, structured, universal and eternal like the reality of sizes and shapes of triangle in the mathematical world. The conviction of the rationalist moral philosophers like Plato on the foundation of a standard moral theory is based on the fact that any ethical theory that is built with the principles that are evident in the world of form ought to be constant and universal for all in the world. Nevertheless, the Post-Galilean period raised some scholars like Adam Smith, A.A. Shaftesbury, F. Hutcheson and David Hume that passionately hold the view that moral judgment is not based on any constant reality but rather on the sentiments and feelings of a moral agent. As a matter of fact, Hume describes the moral principles based on reason and divine authority as alien to human nature and capable of reducing humans to machines and beasts. Therefore, this write up surveys the justification of Hume for opposing any moral theory that has a tincture of Platonism and dogmatism.

Hume studies, 2011