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Lecture 4: Discussion Questions

PHIL 1011

1. Did you get anything from Sam’s introductory comments about Hume’s life and the (supposed) virtue of humility? Do you think that humility is a virtue? If so, how would you conceptualise it? If not, why not?

2. If you listened to the lecture, it should be easy to summarise the classical account of moral motivation. It is more challenging, and interesting, to trace its influence on contemporary patterns of thought. Did any of Sam’s reflections (on psychoanalysis, on being hangry, on moral development, etc.) help you to see the ways in which you might implicitly accept the classical account?

3. What do you think Sam was up to in discussing the passage from Gaita’s memoir Romulus, My Father? (“I was not morally appalled by what my father was setting out to do. Mitru’s suicide and my father’s madness had convinced me that sexual love was a passion whose force and nature was mysterious, and that anyone who came under its sway should be prepared to be destroyed by it … The requirement to consent to such possibilities seemed to me to be intrinsic to love’s nature and, therefore, inseparable from its joys … For me it was never a question of justification. I simply refused to condemn my father for intending to shoot Lydia’s husband.”) What was his hypothesis about common attitudes concerning love, control, rationality, and related notions? Do you agree with him that we should resist these common attitudes?

4. What is the Humean Theory of Motivation? Can you give an argument for it? Can you think of an objection to it? If we accept this theory, do all of Hume’s contentious metaethical claims follow?

5. State Hume’s notorious claim about the rational status of desire in your own words. Why does Hume have this view? Does it seem right to you? What about the potential counterexamples mentioned at the end of the lecture (e.g., the person whose strongest desire is to count blades of grass)? You should be able to say why so many philosophers have taken Hume’s view to be radical, confronting, and perhaps even dangerous.

6. Sam distinguished between fundamental and non-fundamental desires, in order to clarify how Hume will respond to some objections. For example, he might say that the desire to refrain from going to the toilet at night in order to avoid the monster under your bed is, in a sense, irrational. But this, he will say, is not a persuasive objection to his thesis about the rational status of desire. Explain.

7. Hume uses his theory of motivation as the first premise in an argument for noncognitivism. The second premise is a claim about the motivational power of moral judgment. Reconstruct Hume’s argument, and evaluate this second premise. Why would anyone think it is true? How might we resist it?

8. Noncognitivism is the view that moral judgments are desires—or, better, that the states of mind expressed by moral judgments are desire-like states. Do you see why many philosophers think of noncognitivism as a highly revisionary theory? Do you see why many philosophers think of it as a highly sceptical theory? One bit of food for thought: how does the noncognitivist conceive of moral disagreement? Another: how does she conceive of what we are doing when we study moral philosophy?