Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 April 2001
There is a dichotomy in the Humean thought that morality is more properly felt than judged of. The idea of a moral sensibility with an epistemic and rational content is grounded in the experience of the state of nature, and a distinction made between a defensive and a constructive morality, constituted by a set of motivations, against the law of the strongest, and protective of the relationships of education and creative work, exclusion from which undermines the conditions for a constructive morality. Aesthetic education is a means of overcoming the sectarianism of defensive morality.