Miren Boehm
UW System Fellow (2023-2024)
Associate Professor, Philosophy, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
Hume and the Search for Morality
Hume maintains that morality is based on feeling and not on reason. He argues that we neither discover moral truths by reasoning (alone) nor do we discover moral facts in nature. Instead, we have a faculty of “taste” that is productive and “by gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises, in a manner, a new creation.” While it seems we are rather passive when we have feelings, sentiments, or tastes, Hume suggests that our feelings create a moral reality. “Those who have denied the reality of moral distinctions, may be ranked among the most disingenuous disputants.” For Hume, the reality of morality is somehow grounded on the alleged fact that “all characters and actions [are not] alike entitled to the affection and regard of every one.” About this “fact,” Hume claims that it is not even conceivable that any of us could ever seriously believe otherwise. My main question in this paper concerns the sense of “production,” “reality” and “entitlement” Hume has in mind in passages such as these.
Miren Boehm was born in Germany but grew up in the Basque Country, in Spain. She went to university in California, and she is now an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She studies the period of the scientific revolution and the relationship between science and philosophy, with a focus on the philosophy of David Hume. The questions that have driven her research have been centered on the relationship between the inquiring mind, its ideas and capacities, and our conception of the world or nature. She has explored the relationship between Hume’s philosophy of the mind and Newton’s philosophy of nature. More recently, she has worked on Mary Shepherd’s criticisms of Hume’s philosophy. Her work on Hume’s and Newton’s conceptions of space and time, the nature of causation, scientific methodology, and skepticism and naturalism has been published in leading journals such as Philosophers’ Imprint, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Synthese, and in book collections with Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Routledge.
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