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The Moral Point of View

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Carole Stewart
Carole Stewart
Affiliation:
University of Guelph
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Extract

In his discussion of morals in the Third Book of the Treatise, Hume claims that the taking of what I shall call a general point of view is a necessary condition of the arousal of moral feelings. This aspect of Hume's theory has not received much attention from his commentators before now, although its implications for the theory as a whole might be regarded as significant.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 51 , Issue 196 , April 1976, pp. 177 - 187
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1976

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References

1 Fundamentally the same point has recently been made in a discussion by Taylor, Gabrielle, ‘Hume's Views of Moral Judgments’, in the Philosophical Quarterly, January, 1971.Google Scholar

2 All references are to the Selby-Bigge edition of 1888, reprinted 1964, of Hume's Treatise.

3 There are also references to the taking of a general point of view at T.583, 587, and 591, inter alia.

4 Sympathy, for Hume, is the process by which one man comes, by means of the enlivening of the idea of the feelings of another man to the strength of an impression, to ‘share’ the feelings of this other man. Cf. T.319.

5 A promise which is never, so far as I can see, kept.

6 It may be the case, although the evidence is not as strong, that Hume attaches the same or a similar condition to aesthetic approval or disapproval. In his essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, Essay XXIII, Part I, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary (Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 245Google Scholar, he says:

In like manner, when any work is addressed to the public, though I should have a friendship or enmity with the author, I must depart from this situation, and, considering myself as a man in general, forget, if possible, my individual being, and my peculiar circumstances … [or else my] taste evidently departs from the true standard, and of consequence loses all credit and authority.