Hume's motivational distinction between natural and artificial virtues

Fieser, James

doi:10.1080/09608789708570972

Search citation statements

Order By: Relevance

Paper Sections

Select...

Citation Types

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Year Published

2000

2024

Publication Types

Select...

Article3

Other1

Relationship

Self Cite0

Independent4

Authors

Journals

Cited by 4 publications

References 10 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics

Gill

2006

170

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Uncovering the historical roots of naturalistic, secular contemporary ethics, in this 2006 volume Michael Gill shows how the British moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries completed a Copernican revolution in moral philosophy. They effected a shift from thinking of morality as independent of human nature to thinking of it as part of human nature itself. He also shows how the British Moralists - sometimes inadvertently, sometimes by design - disengaged ethical thinking, first from distinctly Christian ideas and then from theistic commitments altogether. Examining in detail the arguments of Whichcote, Cudworth, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson against Calvinist conceptions of original sin and egoistic conceptions of human motivation, Gill also demonstrates how Hume combined the ideas of earlier British moralists with his own insights to produce an account of morality and human nature that undermined some of his predecessors' most deeply held philosophical goals.

show abstract