Chapter 11 - Affective conflict and virtue

Summary

In Hume's philosophical corpus, there are only ten passages that explicitly mention Aristotle, and only two of these refer to Aristotle's ethics. It is nevertheless clear that Hume had the ancients in general, and Aristotle in particular, in his sights at various junctures in his moral philosophy. Hume's Treatise discussion of “greatness of mind,” for instance, deliberately appropriates elements of both Aristotelian megalopsychia and Ciceronian magnitudo animi.

My concern in this essay is with Hume's appropriation of one of the most central elements of Aristotle's ethics – the distinction between “true virtue” and “mere continence.” Hume well understood this distinction but he also held that while there can be morally significant differences between someone who acts in the face of temptation and someone who is not conflicted in acting as he ought, the latter state is not always morally preferable to the former. Hume's reception of the old Aristotelian saw, we might say half smiling, was mixed.

To see why Hume so received this doctrine, I begin with this problem confronting Aristotelians: the contrast between true virtue and mere continence seems to leave one unable to make sense of a significant arena of our everyday moral responses. Contemporary Aristotelians are aware of this difficulty. Unfortunately, some of the best-known attempts to make room for the common moral responses at issue are worse than unhelpful. To begin with, they fail to accommodate the very phenomena they were designed to accommodate. Furthermore, the proposed solutions reveal their authors to be committed not only to a problematic conception of good character, but also to a troublesome conception of the difference between character traits and other practical dispositions that are sometimes distinguished from character traits – pathologies, disorders, proficiencies, talents, abilities, and personality quirks.