دانلود کتاب Hume’s Moral Theory

Hume’s moral theory has been relatively neglected, as compared with
some other parts of his philosophy. Indeed, all that many reasonably
well-informed students of philosophy know about it is that he said (or,
alternatively, that he did not say) that you cannot derive an ‘ought' from
an ‘is'. But Hume's Law, as this has been called, is not the whole, or
even the most important part, of his moral theory. It is compatible with
an objectivist or intuitionist view which Hume would certainly have
rejected, and it contains no hint of his fascinating account of what he
called the artificial virtues, or of his anticipations of utilitarianism, to
which Bentham ascribed his own conversion to that doctrine. Also,
Hume's theory is best seen in the context of, and as a contribution to, an
extended debate on moral philosophy which we can take as beginning
with Hobbes, being continued by members of both the ‘rationalist’ and
the ‘moral sense' or ‘sentimentalist' schools, and concluding with the
writings of two of Hume’s critics, Richard Price and Thomas Reid. Some
of the main issues in this debate are whether there are, or are not,
objective moral values, whether men are by nature completely selfish or
are ‘made for society', whether morality depends in any way upon God
and religion, and how and by what faculty we discern the difference
between vice and virtue. The works in which this debate was carried on
were addressed to an educated general public rather than to specialists in
philosophy, and they are written in a straightforward, forthright way,
without technicalities or obfuscation or evasion. They are not free from
errors and fallacies, but where they go wrong they do so openly, and
their mistakes are often pointed out by other participants in the debate