Bioethicists have virtually assumed that Tarasoff generated a duty to warn the sexual partners of an HIV-positive man that they risked infection. Yet given the views of sex and of AIDS that have evolved in the gay community, in many cases the parallels to Tarasoff do not hold. Bioethicists should at the least attend to the community's views, and indeed should go beyond doing mere "professional ethics" to participate in the moral self-exploration in which these views are located.

The state that we inhabit plays a significant role in shaping our lives. For not only do its institutions constrain the kinds of lives we can lead, but it also claims the right to punish us if our choices take us beyond what it deems to be appropriate limits. Political philosophers have traditionally tried to justify the state's power by appealing to their preferred theories of justice, as articulated in complex and wide-ranging moral theories—utilitarianism, Kantianism, and the like. One of John Rawls's greatest contributions to political philosophy has been his recognition that this is the wrong way for this field to approach its task. He points to what he calls “the fact of reasonable pluralism,” which is the incontestable fact that in a free society people striving to lead their lives ethically will subscribe to conflicting moral and religious doctrines, many of which will be “reasonable” in the special sense of leaving their adherents willing to cooperate with those with whom they have moral disagreements. And this means that political philosophers can no longer rely on any particular “comprehensive” doctrine in their attempts to justify the state. For doing so would be unfair to those who subscribe to a conflicting reasonable doctrine; it would mean that the coercive power of the state would not be justified to them in terms they can accept, even while they were forced to abide by its terms.

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The article presents a new interpretation of Hume's treatment of personal identity, and his later rejection of it in the “Appendix” to the Treatise. Hume's project, on this interpretation, is to explain beliefs about persons that arise primarily within philosophical projects, not in everyday life. the belief in the identity and simplicity of the mind as a bundle of perceptions is an abstruse belief, not one held by the “vulgar” who rarely turn their minds on themselves so as to think of their perceptions. the author suggests that it is this philosophical observation of the mind that creates the problems that Hume finally acknowledges in the “Appendix.” He is unable to explain why we believe that the perceptions by means of which we observe our minds while philosophizing are themselves part of our minds. This suggestion is then tested against seven criteria that any interpretation of the “Appendix” must meet.

In the Treatise of Human Nature, Hume argues that, because we have adequate ideas of the smallest parts of space, we can infer that space itself must conform to our representations of it. The paper examines two challenges to this argument based on Descartes's and Locke's treatments of adequate ideas, ideas that fully capture the objects they represent. The first challenge, posed by Arnauld in his Objections to the Meditations, asks how we can know that an idea is adequate. The second challenge, implicit in Locke's Essay, asks how an empiricist can characterize an idea as inadequate, as both picking out an object and yet failing to capture it fully. In showing how Hume responds to these challenges, his theory of perceptual representation is explained and his treatment of space is related to his scepticism. His conclusion is shown not to be a characterization of space as it exists wholly apart from our powers of conception. Instead, in an adumbration of Kant, his claim is restricted to space as it appears to us.Part 2 of Book 1 of Hume's Treatise, "Of the ideas of space and time", is the least discussed portion of his investigation of the understanding. Those interpreters who do address it usually focus on how Hume fits into the early modern debate over the ontological status of space and time and such subsidiary topics as the extent of their divisibility, the possibility of a vacuum, and the relation of parts to wholes. 1 In what follows, I focus instead on one way that Hume's discussion in this Part sets the stage for his later investigation of scepticism, especially in Part 4 of Book 1 of the Treatise, "Of the sceptical and other systems of philosophy". 2 Hume himself signals the con-1 See, for example, Broad 1961; Fogelin1988; Holden 2004; Jacquette 1996; and Raynor 1980. An exception to this trend is Baxter 2009. Baxter there relates Hume's treatment of space and time to different possible interpretations of Pyrrhonian scepticism, and thus he shares my goal of recognizing the links between Parts 2 and 4 of Book 1 of the Treatise. Baxter's paper was published only as I undertook final revisions of my essay. Though our conclusions are complementary, and I rely on one of his claims to clarify my point in § 6 of what follows, my argument was developed independently of his. 2 Hume's footnotes establish seven direct links between Parts 2 and 4 of Book 1. First, the discussion of the two different ways we can conceive of external objects at T 1.2.6 points us forward to T 1.4.2 (T 1.2.6.9n14; SBN 68n). Second, at T 1.4.2.2n34; SBN 188n, in specifying the explanandum for his account of the belief in the independent existence of objects, Hume refers us back to T 1.2.6. Third, Hume appeals to his treatment of the "fiction" of a perfect geometric standard of equality (T 1.2.4.24; SBN 47 f.) in his first explanation of our belief in the continued existence of sensory objects Brought to you by |