The moral words would have to be indefinable or at least not definable in terms of natural properties or concepts. This was a thesis made famous by the Cambridge philosopher G. He was not denying that the moral can be defined in terms of the non-moral. He was merely denying the existence of logically valid arguments from the non-moral to the moral.
It is something he thinks he can take for granted. This is what we would expect if he were making the logical point since it would have been obvious to his readers.
So far from thinking that the moral concepts are indefinable, Hume actually defines the virtues in terms of the responses of an ideal spectator. To say that a trait is a virtue is to say that we would be inclined to approve of it at our unbiased best. It maintains, that morality is determined by sentiment. It defines virtue to be whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation ; and vice the contrary. We then proceed to examine a plain matter of fact, to wit, what actions have this influence.
Thus NOFI is not incompatible with naturalism. Hume himself was a naturalist, since he supposed that there are moral truths which are made true by natural facts, namely facts about what human beings are inclined to approve of. This is simply a mistake.
But why did Hume boast that his logical observation would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality? Hume thought that our moral beliefs are based on feelings rather than reason, namely the feelings of approval and disapproval that we experience at our informed and unbiased best.
But the orthodoxy of his day was that the truths of morality are demonstrable, that they can be derived by logic from self-evident axioms, that is, axioms evident to reason. For Hume no non-trivial moral claims are self -evident: they are evident only to human beings since only human beings have the right kind of feelings. By the end of 3. His principal argument the Motivation or Influence Argument goes like this:. The problem with this argument is that it is clearly invalid and not, as some commentators say, clearly valid.
It is obviously the case that moral beliefs have an influence on conduct, and it may be true that beliefs derived from reason can have no such influence without the aid of a pre-existing desire. But it would only follow that our moral beliefs are not derived from reason if our moral beliefs influenced us without the aid of pre-existing desires , and that claim is dubious in the extreme.
Nonetheless, Hume thinks he has proved that no non-trivial moral proposition is self-evident. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Skip to content Home. Share this: Twitter Facebook.
Like this: Like Loading Moore and the Naturalistic Fallacy — The Ought. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public. You can read four articles free per month.
To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please. One thing about running a philosophy magazine, with the resulting creative chaos, is that occasionally when tidying up you stumble across memos from your philosophical heros. At least, that was my experience recently. One of my greatest philosophical heros was the Oxford philosopher Philippa Foot It is a principle in logic that nothing can appear in the conclusions of a valid argument unless it also appears in the premises.
Some have argued that if this is in principle impossible, then there can be no way to derive any system of ethics from facts about the world, and that anyone who claims to do so must be mistaken. All ethical systems would be subjective, and none of them could ever be proven true. Foot seemed to elegantly sidestep the problem with her famous paper. Otherwise not. Hypothetical imperatives can be proven true or false.
I found her argument plausible and actually rather inspiring. She poured me tea in her Oxford home and we chatted about her then-new book, Natural Goodness.
0コメント