Hume on the RPF

Bio

"David Hume was a Scottish philosopher and historian, and one of the
most important figures in the Scottish Enlightenment. His philosophy is
most famously understood as a thoroughgoing form of Scepticism, but
many commentators have argued that the element of Naturalism is no
less important.

"Hume was born in Edinburgh and attended the university there. At first he
considered a career in law, but came to have, in his words, ‘an
insurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of philosophy and
general learning.’ He did some self-study in France, where he also
completed A Treatise of Human Nature at the age of twenty-six. Although
many scholars today consider the Treatise to be Hume's most important
work and one of the most important books in the history of philosophy, the
public in England did not at first agree. Hume himself described the (lack
of) public reaction to the publication of the Treatise in 1739–40 by writing
that the book ‘fell dead-born from the press.’

"He later re-worked parts of the Treatise, and released them as An
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), and An Enquiry
Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), which were somewhat more
successful than the Treatise.

"One of his biggest contributions to ethical theory is what is known as the
is-ought problem. Hume noted that many writers talk about what ought to
be on the basis of statements about what is. But there seems to be a big
difference between descriptive statements (what is) and prescriptive
statements (what ought to be). Hume calls for writers to be on their guard
against changing the subject like that, not without giving an explanation of
how the ought-statements are supposed to follow from the is-statements.

"But how exactly can you derive an 'ought' from an 'is'? That question,
prompted by Hume's small paragraph, has become one of the central
questions of ethical theory, and Hume is usually assigned the position
that such a derivation is impossible. (Others interpret Hume as saying not
that one cannot go from a factual statement to an ethical statement, but
that one cannot do so without going through human nature, that is,
without paying attention to human sentiments.) G. E. Moore defended a
similar position with his ‘open question argument’, intended to refute any
identification of moral properties with natural properties – the so-called
‘naturalistic fallacy’. Now any ethical theorist who wishes to give morality
an objective grounding in more down-to-earth features of the world is
fighting an uphill battle.

"Hume was also one of the frontrunners of the philosophy of
utilitarianism. It was probably he who, along with his fellow members of
the Scottish Enlightenment, first advanced the idea that the explanation of
moral principles is to be sought in the utility they tend to promote. Hume's
role is not to be overstated, of course; it was his countryman Francis
Hutcheson who coined the utilitarian slogan ‘greatest happiness for the
greatest numbers’. But it was from reading Hume's Treatise that Jeremy
Bentham first felt the force of a utilitarian system: he ‘felt as if scales had
fallen from [his] eyes’.

"Hume was a moral sentimentalist and, as such, thought that moral
principles could not be intellectually justified. Some principles simply
appeal to us and others don't; and the reason why utilitarian moral
principles do appeal to us is that they promote our interests and those of
our fellows, with whom we sympathize. Humans are hard-wired to
approve of things that help society – public utility. Hume used this insight
to explain how we evaluate a wide array of phenomena, ranging from
social institutions and government policies to character traits and talents."

(Excerpts adapted, and portrait taken, from the Wikipedia article on Hume. Click here
for complete article.)

Works

An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals