Blackwell Reference Online

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To the question whether Hume is a noncognitivist about moral judgments, an unqualified “yes” or “no” answer would invite a charge of anachronism and would surely oversimplify. Noncognitivism is a theory that has been clearly defined only in debates since the 1930s, and Hume's discussions of moral judgments are in any case complex: even those interpreters who have emphasized what they see as strong noncognitivist strands in his writing allow that these need to be disentangled from conflicting lines of thought that are also present. However, in the neighborhood of this too-simple question with its too-simple answers are subtler questions precisely about how to untangle these various threads, and it is these questions that I shall explore. At an abstract level, my conclusion will be similar to that of many others who have written on Hume on these topics: that Hume is not entirely consistent, that some of his remarks tend to noncognitivism, and there may be no definitive answer to the question of just how to weigh those remarks against ones that point in a different direction. But I find that I disagree with many of these other writers about important details. I think that Hume is frequently more consistent than his interpreters have supposed, that not every remark that has been thought to support noncognitivism actually does so, and that many complications in his views on these topics ... log in or subscribe to read full text