Hume's Hedonism

Abstract:

This paper seeks critically to elucidate Hume’s views on pleasure and the good, in particular his evaluative hedonism, and to show that evaluative hedonism is in certain respects at least as significant a component of his philosophical ethics as sentimentalism. The first section explains his notion of pleasure, and how it is, in an important sense, prior to desire. The following two sections show how this conception of pleasure and its relation to desire leads Hume to accept evaluative hedonism, as well as a form of psychological hedonism, and to give pleasure a key role in his metaethics. The paper ends, as do both the Treatise and the second Enquiry, with the distinction—a false one, according to Hume—between virtues and natural abilities, and an attempt to bring out the implicit challenge Hume is making to non-hedonist accounts of value, especially those that postulate “moral” value.