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Hume defends his sympathy-based moral sentimentalism by claiming that, contrary to moral rationalism, we can never make moral judgments based on reason alone.Reason deals with facts and draws conclusions from them, but, all else being equal, it could not lead us to choose one option over the other; only our sentiments can do this, according to Hume.
Hume's law or Hume's guillotine [1] is the thesis that an ethical or judgmental conclusion cannot be inferred from purely descriptive factual statements. [ 2 ] A similar view is defended by G. E. Moore 's open-question argument , intended to refute any identification of moral properties with natural properties , which is asserted by ethical ...
Hume was born on 26 April 1711, as David Home, in a tenement on the north side of Edinburgh's Lawnmarket.He was the second of two sons born to Catherine Home (née Falconer), daughter of Sir David Falconer of Newton, Midlothian and his wife Mary Falconer (née Norvell), [14] and Joseph Home of Chirnside in the County of Berwick, an advocate of Ninewells.
Hume's introduction presents the idea of placing all science and philosophy on a novel foundation: namely, an empirical investigation into human psychology.He begins by acknowledging "that common prejudice against metaphysical reasonings [i.e., any complicated and difficult argumentation]", a prejudice formed in reaction to "the present imperfect condition of the sciences" (including the ...
[58] [59] For Hume, this epistemic finding implies a semantic conclusion: that the words "mind" or "self" cannot mean substance of mental states but must mean bundle of perceptions. This is the case because, according to Hume, words are associated with ideas and ideas are based on impressions.
For example, the idea of the taste of an orange is far inferior to the impression (or sensation) of actually eating one. Writing within the tradition of empiricism, he argues that impressions are the source of all ideas. Hume accepts that ideas may be either the product of mere sensation or of the imagination working in conjunction with ...
But the boy’s death haunts him, mired in the swamp of moral confusion and contradiction so familiar to returning veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is what experts are coming to identify as a moral injury: the pain that results from damage to a person’s moral foundation. In contrast to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which ...
This barrier between fact and value, as construed in epistemology, implies it is impossible to derive ethical claims from factual arguments, or to defend the former using the latter. [2] The fact–value distinction is closely related to, and derived from, the is–ought problem in moral philosophy, characterized by David Hume. [3]