Thursday, January 17, 2008

Hume on Moral Philosophy

As the editor (Eric Steinberg) notes on page 1, Hume uses the term 'moral' in the Enquiry in three senses. The first and broadest, pertaining to human nature, he shares with most philosophical usage of his own and the previous century. The second and more specific, the study of obligations, ethics, rights, right and wrong behavior and the like, is our most common sense of the term today. The third is interesting because it suggests something specific about Hume's own philosophical view: In this usage he contrasts "moral" in the sense of something based on experience or matters of fact with things that are "demonstrative" (by which I take it he means logically inferential) or "intuitive" (the way, for example, he thinks we intuit causal relationships rather than perceiving them).

It is worth wondering a little, I suspect, about this third usage.

2 comments:

David K. Braden-Johnson said...

So, moral and experiential are synonymous according to this third usage? It that how he proposes to bridge the "is-ought" gap? (BTW; you might want to turn off the pesky word verification prompt -- that will still disallow anonymous comments)

Anonymous said...

Roughly synonymous, apparently. However, I think even this fails to bridge the is-ought gap (the gap is Hume's discovery, after all), since experience as he conceives it is just one damn discrete sense impression after another -- in itself it contains no necessary connections such as causal relationships or social obligations, as such things (like oughts) are inferential or intuited, not perceived. Whence this third sense of moral then, you might well ask? Perhaps simply as a kind of reductio of the first, broad sense -- "pertaining to human nature."