Abstract

Can a moral judgment ever be justified on strictly factual grounds, or is there always a gap between facts and judgment which only moral feelings can bridge? Where Hume turned to human nature for an answer, contemporary philosophers have sought to decide this question by analyzing moral language itself. R. M. Hare is one philosopher who seeks support for the distinction between the factual and the moral in the "logic" of evaluative words, and I begin the dissertation by examining his treatment of "good." Hare's aim is to show that the nature of evaluative judgments is revealed in the way "good" functions, but because he never establishes that linguistic propriety is the only criterion our judgments of goodness must satisfy, Hare's efforts in this direction prove question-begging. ;This leaves me with a question. If the idea of a fundamental distinction between the factual and the moral cannot come from language alone, how does the distinction suggest itself to us? Since Hume has been credited with pressing the distinction to our attention, I turn to him for guidance. Hume's insight is that facts are inert. Because they can affect us only through the intercession of some galvanizing feeling, facts alone cannot produce any action, so of course they cannot produce moral action. This idea, together with the attendant picture of a human being as a creature whose reason is servant to his passions, sets the problem I investigate in the remainder of the dissertation. ;My first discovery is that Hume never succeeds in showing that facts are inert. This naturally casts doubt on his views concerning the nature of morality. It turns out that the moral feeling on which Hume proposes to rest the whole of morality is nothing more than a chimera forced on him when he reasons transcendentally from his conception of human nature. But I cannot establish this without establishing that the ostensible distinction between the factual and the moral is itself bogus, so in the last two chapters I examine the thinking which makes the distinction seem plausible