What moral ‘facts’ could lie behind the variety of moral notions — and what is often their bedrock, religious notions — which have manifested themselves in myriad institutions and norms of behaviour and which appear to be relative to time, place and circumstances?
Hume’s moral theory involves both a denial of any mind-independent, objective status or any rationally or logically necessary content to moral values and an explanation in psychological and sociological terms (meaning that the explanation is a causal one remaining within the experienced, observed natural world) of the existence and sustenance of moral systems.
I have argued that Hume’s moral theory is, in its fundamentals, a persuasive one.However a Humean moral scepticism, while pronouncing on a variety of disputes and issues, vivifies some collateral concerns. Hume is a sceptic about the powers of reason; he is not an extreme sceptic or nihilist or Pyrrhonist. His morality is a public morality which attempts to negotiate a middle way between the illusory certainty of some sort of moral realism and the degenerative free-for-all of a criteria-less society. I call it public because the focus is almost entirely on morality’s role in constraining conduct and fostering cooperation in a social context where partial conflict, limited benevolence and relatively scarce resources are facts of life. But in the realm of what might be called personal morality (i.e. the realm concerned with how each individual should behave or choose or respond), Hume, and equally the moral scepticism I have defended, has virtually nothing to say.1 Personal morality for us is too much a function of the sentiments individuals happen to have.
Certain of the ramifications of the brand of moral scepticism I have presented in the first five chapters, and of its bearings on broader subjects and concerns, I shall now discuss in this chapter; others will be left until subsequent chapters when I turn to legal theory. In particular in this chapter I shall treat the tension between the good and the moral life, the ‘free-rider’ problem, the need for standards, and, most generally, the uniquely Humean response to scepticism.
a)
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