Sublime

Hume’s pluralist, sentimentalist, and naturalist approach to ethics is more promising than utilitarianism or deontology for modern moral psychology. As a first step in resuming Hume’s project, we should try to identify the taste receptors of the righteous mind.

Plato is convinced that there is “the Good,” and that its nature can be ascertained; when people disagree about it, one, at least, is making an intellectual error, just as much as if the disagreement were a scientific one on some matter of fact.

No system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience.

My conclusions have direct implications for the viability of a Platonic and theistic account of reality over and against a Nietzschean and atheistic one.

Locke, as we saw, believed pleasure to be the good, and this was the prevalent view among empiricists throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their opponents, on the contrary, despised pleasure as ignoble, and had various systems of ethics which seemed more exalted. Hobbes valued power, and Spinoza, up to a point, agreed with Hobbes.

It is folly to talk of this or that demonstrating the rationalist philosophy. Everything demonstrates it.

In regard to the state of nature, Locke was less original than Hobbes, who regarded it as one in which there was war of all against all, and life was nasty, brutish, and short. But Hobbes was reputed an atheist. The view of the state of nature and of natural law which Locke accepted from his predecessors cannot be freed from its theological basis;

The philosophy asserts that virtue (meaning, chiefly, the four cardinal virtues of self-control, courage, justice, and wisdom) is happiness, and it is our perceptions of things—rather than the things themselves—that cause most of our trouble.