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Show Chapter XIII. Baier's Hume In this volume so far, I have examined the metaethical views of a wide range of twentieth century Humeans, to whom Hume's own views are of varying degrees of interest; as well as the Humean conception of the self these views all presuppose. Neither these views nor their presuppositions have purported to represent Hume's actual philosophical theses accurately, either in part or in whole. Rather, Hume's views have been positioned as the inspiration, the historical authority, and hence the legitimating imprimatur for the more contemporary philosophical views that purport to reconstruct them. Yet Hume's own views are often cited as refutation of some of the arguments I have so far advanced. It is often protested that these criticisms do not apply to Hume himself, whose philosophy is much more nuanced and complex; and hence that they merely target a straw man - or, at the very least, wrongly incriminate Hume through guilt by association. So it is now time to take the measure of these protests, by edging toward a direct, exegetical confrontation with Hume's philosophical position itself. In this chapter I target one of Hume's most well-known and highly regarded advocates; one who purports explicitly to model her own nuanced and complex philosophical views on Hume's - and who thus offers exegetical insight into Hume's views in the very act of formulating her own. In the next chapter I examine Hume's own arguments independently, in order to ascertain whether they provide the warrant that Annette Baier, as well as other, less historically-minded contemporary Humeans claim they do. 1 In Moral Prejudices, Baier argues that Hume's view constitutes a radical alternative to what she views as the predominant Kantian, Social Contracttheoretic paradigm in normative moral philosophy. On Hume's view, she claims, we must assign highest priority to such "thick" moral concepts as caring, trust, and familial and gender relations. Correspondingly, we must ignore or reject the traditionally more abstract concerns of moral philosophy, such as justice, obligation, and freedom. Baier's account of Hume's own conception of the self is notable for its complexity and refusal of reductionism as a value in theory-construction. Hence it reaches well beyond the bare bones utility-maximizing model of rationality and the belief-desire model of motivation appropriated into contemporary metaethics from it. Nevertheless, I argue here that, just as Kant incorporated Hume's insights into a yet broader and more subtle conception of the self, Baier's own defense of Hume similarly presupposes the very Kantian conception of the self she purports to reject. 1 Moral Prejudices, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). Page references to this work are parenthecized in the text preceded by "MP." |
