8 Reid on the Principle of Morals - Reid's Critique of Hume (Dan Robinson)

Professor Dan Robinson gives the final lecture in a series of 8 lectures on Thomas Reid's critique of David Hume at Oxford in 2014. “Like all other sciences, morals must have first principles, and all moral reasoning is based on them... In all rational belief, the thing believed is either a first principle or something inferred by valid reasoning from first principles”. As for utility, “Suppose that mice rescue the distressed person by chewing through the cords that bound him. Is there moral goodness in this act of the mice?” Beyond the armchair and other precincts of untrammeled speculation, one finds that, there is little purchase on a morality of pleasure and utility. Indded, “If what we call ‘moral judgment’ isn’t really a judgment but merely a feeling, it follows that the moral principles that we have been taught to consider as an immutable law to all intelligent beings have no basis except an arbitrary structure and fabric in the constitution of the human mind…Thus, by a change in our structure immoral things could become moral…There are beings who can’t perceive mathematical truths; but no defect, no error of understanding, can make what is true to be false”.
Under “David Hume”, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy begins with, “The most important philosopher ever to write in English”. His most formidable contemporary critic was the fellow Scot, Thomas Reid, the major architect of so-called Scottish Common Sense Philosophy. The most significant features of Hume’s work, as understood by Reid, are the representive theory of perception, the nature of causation and causal concepts, the nature of personal identity and the foundations of morality. Each of these topics is presented in a pair of lectures, the first summarizing Hume’s position and the second Reid’s critique of that position.
All Lectures: • Reid's Critique of Hum...
#Philosophy #Hume #Ethics

[@yannisguerra]

Interesting, I think a lot of our current sociopolitical situation would refute Reid's argument that the practical side of morality is more in agreement than the conceptual side

[@victorvelie3980]

Yup

[@collin501]

But don't a lot of those sociopolitical issues come from conceptual arguments that take hold of the minds of entire groups of people? Isn't that why philosophical arguments have often preceded shifts in moral sentiments? But we still have the common sense categories of praiseworthy and blameworthy. We just use different concepts to weigh who falls into those categories. Personally, I think it's a "both and" situation. Common sense rooted in the nature of our mind, language, or both. Next, sentiments from our personally developed character. And finally, the practical outworkings of philosophical ideas that we've adopted. All of these contribute to our more sensibilities and reasonings.

[@americafy9195]

@@collin501 Agreid.

[@collin501]

@@americafy9195 nice pun. lol

[@williamjason1583]

Hume was remarkably inept it appears.