Geoffrey Sayre-McCord

A genuine understanding of Hume's extraordinarily rich, important, and influential moral philosophy requires familiarity with all of his writings on vice and virtue, the passions, the will, and even judgments of beauty--and that means familiarity not only with large portions of _A Treatise of Human Nature, but also with An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals_ and many of his essays as well. This volume is the one truly comprehensive collection of Hume's work on all of these topics. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, a leading moral philosopher and Hume scholar, has done a meticulous job of editing the texts and has provided an extensive Introduction that is at once accessible, accurate, and philosophically engaging, revealing the deep structure of Hume's moral philosophy. --Don Garrett, New York University

How many serious mistakes can a brilliant philosopher make in a single paragraph? Many think that Mill answers this question by example—in the third paragraph of Chapter IV of Utilitarianism. Here is the notorious paragraph: The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible, is that people hear it: and so of the other sources of our experience. In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it. If the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself were not, in theory and in practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever convince any person that it was so. No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness. This, however, being a fact, we have not only all the proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to require, that happiness is a good: that each person's happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons. Happiness has made out its title as one of the ends of conduct, and consequently one of the criteria of morality

On one influential view, a person acts autonomously, doing what she genuinely values, if she acts on a desire that is her own, which is (on this account) a matter of it being appropriately ratified at a higher level. This view faces two problems. It doesn’t generalize, as it should, to an account of when a belief is an agent’s own, and does not let one distinguish between desires (and beliefs) happening to be one's own and their being the ones a person would need to have in order to be autonomous. The paper develops an alternative unified account of what it is for desires and beliefs to be one’s one, and argues that an account of acting autonomously should pay attention not to which desires and beliefs are one’s own, but to whether they are ones the agent has reason to have and to act on.

How should a moral realist respond to the (seemingly) abundant evidence diversity provides for relativism? Many think there is only one reasonable response: abandon moral realism. Against them, I argue that moral realists can stand their ground in the face of moral diversity without relying on excessively optimistic arguments or unrealistic assumptions. In the process, I defend two theses: (i) that, far from being incompatible with moral realism, many plausible versions of relativism are _versions of moral realism; and (ii) the best interpretation of the argument from diversity to relativism tells not at all against realist versions of relativism

In Morality, Bernard Gert argues that the fundamental demands of morality are well articulated by ten distinct, and relatively simple, rules. These rules, he holds, are such that any person, no matter what her circumstances or interests, would be rational in accepting, and guiding her choices by, them. The rules themselves are comfortably familiar (e.g. “Do not kill,” “Do not deceive,” “Keep your promises”) and sit well as intuitively plausible. Yet the rules are not, Gert argues, to be accepted merely because they are intuitively attractive, nor because they are already widely recognized, but because they stand as the only set of rules that can qualify as appropriately acceptable to all rational beings.