Another Look at Hume's Account of Moral Evaluation PALL S. ARDAL I. I MAKE NO APOLOGIES for writing about this well-worn topic.' For, although there has been an enormous amount written about the account Hume gives of the nature of moral evaluation, commentators are as far from agreement as ever. My own contribution to the controversy has, if anything, not only added to the variety of opinions but also has increased the general confusion. For this I must accept some responsibility. I have certainly laid myself open to some misinterpretation , and the view I have so far expressed in print may also need some modification. I shall here attempt to clarify what precisely my view now is, and why I prefer it to some alternative views advanced by those who find my interpretation of this aspect of Hume's philosophy unacceptable. II. Since what I want to defend is in all important respects my earlier interpretation of the Treatise, 2 I shall for the most part, though not exclusively, be concerned with what Hume says in this, his early, but major, work. I am assuming that Hume did have a view about the nature of evaluation of character when he wrote the Treatise. It would take too long to discuss how much of this view is retained in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, although I am inclined to think that the main difference between the two works, on this topic, lies in the fact that the principle of sympathy, as a principle of communication, is given much less prominence in the later work. Hume undoubtedly expresses himself with what now would be considered undue looseness and sometimes fails to clarify important features of his doctrine. But it may seem redundant to stress that a doctrine about the nature of evaluation of character can be discovered in the Treatise, although it may have been confusedly and inadequately expressed. However, in view of the most recent work on Hume's moral epistemology, no such assumption can be made. Jonathan Harrison, in his Hume's Moral Epistemology, contends that Hume was so confused that he did not distinguish "in his own mind" between the following views? (1) Moral judgments are about the judger's feelings. (2) Moral judgments are about the feelings of mankind. ' This article is a slightly revised version of a paper presented at the McGill Bicentennial Hume Congress, Sept. 29-Oct. 3, 1976. The paper was written during my sabbatical leave from Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario. Thanks are due to Queen's for the leave, to the Canada Council for generous financial assistance, and to the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in Edinburgh for excellent working conditions. 2Passion and Value in Hume's Treatise (Edinburgh, 1966). Oxford, 1976; see particularly pp. 110-125. [405] 406 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY (3) A moral sense theory. (4) A non-propositional theory. (5) Moral judgments are a species of feeling. The second of these views is further divided into (a) the view that moral judgments are about the feelings of all men and this is known as a generalization from experience, and (b) the view that moral judgments are about the feelings of an ideal spectator. A nonpropositional theory about moral sentences is clearly consistent with the view that moral "judgments" are a species of feeling. Thus Hume, according to Harrison, not only confused in his mind different theories about moral judgments, but he also failed to distinguish theories about the function of moral sentences from theories about moral judgments? It is indeed a blessing that Harrison does not find in Hume the view that I have advocated and some other views that have been advanced , for this would simply make Hume even more confused than Harrison represents him to have been. I obviously cannot argue here against Harrison's interpretation in detail. I simply want to register my agreement with him when he describes his own "gaze" as "myopic . ''s He interprets passages far too literally as stating Hume's view at the time of writing, even when the passages he takes to support incompatible views appear on consecutive pages, or even in the same...
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 32 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.