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adamz24 's review for:
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
by David Hume
Hume's moral philosophy, though preferable to the childish and ridiculous approach of his contemporary Kant, is incredibly tedious reading when compared to his other work, and far less philosophically astute or argumentatively valid.
The whole project is a bit strange. He seems to accept much of what Hobbes argued, but then reduce what Hobbes thought was the foundation and basis of ethics to simply a prerequisite for morality to exist. Then he argues the famous case re: shared sentiment, etc., which I surely need not explicate.
The broader problems with this book (its perhaps unwarranted optimism concerning human nature, etc.) are only part of the issue. The big problem, for me, is that Hume thinks that this enquiry is essentially something like an empirical enquiry. So he's always relying on appeals to common sense, on appeals to pretty easily refutable and narrowly specific cases, on appeals to examples from earlier philosophy and poetry.
It is pretty unfair and hard to blame Hume for not being able to, in the 18th century, perform really anything like empirical scientific research into morality and human nature. But this book, unlike his other work, does not lay any real sort of groundwork or basis for future research in cognitive science, psychology, or neuroscience, in which Hume surely would have been working were he alive today. It, instead, consists mostly of pretty baseless speculation. The approach is interesting, and maybe influential, but ultimately futile.
He gives up a lot of the more philosophical argument in his other work for valid reasons, partly because he thinks morality is necessarily intuitive in some way, but the result, given what has transpired in the time that has passed since then, is that this book seems more like an oddity than brilliant philosophy.
The whole project is a bit strange. He seems to accept much of what Hobbes argued, but then reduce what Hobbes thought was the foundation and basis of ethics to simply a prerequisite for morality to exist. Then he argues the famous case re: shared sentiment, etc., which I surely need not explicate.
The broader problems with this book (its perhaps unwarranted optimism concerning human nature, etc.) are only part of the issue. The big problem, for me, is that Hume thinks that this enquiry is essentially something like an empirical enquiry. So he's always relying on appeals to common sense, on appeals to pretty easily refutable and narrowly specific cases, on appeals to examples from earlier philosophy and poetry.
It is pretty unfair and hard to blame Hume for not being able to, in the 18th century, perform really anything like empirical scientific research into morality and human nature. But this book, unlike his other work, does not lay any real sort of groundwork or basis for future research in cognitive science, psychology, or neuroscience, in which Hume surely would have been working were he alive today. It, instead, consists mostly of pretty baseless speculation. The approach is interesting, and maybe influential, but ultimately futile.
He gives up a lot of the more philosophical argument in his other work for valid reasons, partly because he thinks morality is necessarily intuitive in some way, but the result, given what has transpired in the time that has passed since then, is that this book seems more like an oddity than brilliant philosophy.