Here Donald Livingston traces this distinction through all of Hume's writings and reveals its relevance for contemporary discussion.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XXI, Number 2, November 1995, pp. 151-164 On Hume's Conservatism DONALD W. LIVINGSTON In Opinion and Reform in Hume's Political Philosophy,1 John Stewart seeks to establish two theses. The first is that Hume's philosophical skepticism does not entail political conservatism as many commentators have argued, and the second is that central to all of Hume's writings, but especially to the History and the Essays, (...) is a program of major reforms. These include an ethic of individualism and cosmopolitanism, protection of private property, representative government under the rule of law, free trade, anti-imperialism, and moderate secularization. Stewart is right, I think, that these reforms are central to Hume's philosophic project, and he explores them with historical depth and subtlety. What is not so convincing, however, at least in the form presented, is the thesis that Hume is a liberal and not a conservative. And it is this thesis that I wish to explore. The first thing to appreciate is the sense in which Hume is neither a liberal nor a conservative. These are early nineteenth century terms framed to characterize a political and intellectual response to the French Revolution and to the Industrial Revolution. Liberalism and conservatism were not and could not have been a part of Hume's own self-understanding. That understanding is revealed clearly enough in Hume's remark that he was a whig in respect to "things" and a tory in respect to "persons" (HL II237). That is, he admired the moral character of Charles I and leading royalists more than the characters of Cromwell and the Puritan fanatics. But he was happy about the unintended consequences of the Puritan rebellion which led to the constitution of liberty Donald W. Livingston is at the Philosophy Department, Emory University, 214 Bowden Hall, Atlanta GA 30322 USA. 152 Donald W. Livingston of 1689 (the whig order of "things," namely liberty and the rule of law). But though Hume could not have thought of himself as a liberal or a conservative, it is possible to find intimated in his philosophy a pattern of thought significantly similar to a later structure of thought which may properly be called liberal or conservative as the case may be. Such retrospective judgments are legitimate as long as there is sufficient evidence to support the appropriate historical claim about what Hume did and thought he had done and an adequate philosophical theory of what liberalism and conservatism are. But if Hume is to be recruited as part of a liberal or conservative political tradition, we must be clear about what is meant by the terms 'liberal' or 'conservative '. And this is no easy matter; for these terms have not only changed their meanings over time, they are highly contested terms, being in their very nature partisan expressions the explication of which cannot entirely escape a political commitment. What I find unsatisfactory about Stewart's thesis that Hume should not be thought of as part of the conservative political tradition is not so much what he says about the critical and reforming character of Hume's thought (in that he is essentially correct) as that he does not offer a philosophical theory of conservatism or liberalism. The result is that much of the liberalism he finds in Hume would be embraced by self-professed conservatives, and some of what he characterizes as conservatism would be denied. One must gather Stewart's meaning for these terms from various contexts. In some places a conservative is thought of as a philosophical skeptic who has nothing to cling to but the raft of custom and is, consequently, incapable of making judgments of truth. Or, a conservative may be one who can indeed make judgments but is uncritical and perhaps even bigoted in doing so. Or finally, a conservative may be one whose character is informed by an ungenerous disposition to defend the status quo regardless of the oppression of others.2 Stewart argues that Hume is not a conservative in these senses but is a critical political theorist whose philosophical skepticism not only did not prohibit, but positively legitimated the formulation of truths about political things. In his... (shrink)

In his Hayek and Modern Liberalism, Chandran Kukathas claims that Hayek's political philosophy is fundamentally incoherent because it is heavily influenced from two incompatible directions: that of Hume and that of Kant. But in fact, the idiom in which Hayek's philosophy is cast is overwhelmingly Humean. Whatever difficulties Hayek's thought may contain, the incoherence Kukathas identifies is not one of them.

The idea of Hume as a philosopher of culture has only recently gained general acceptance; yet as far back as 1941 the Journal of the History of Ideas was publishing essays on Hume which reflected this aspect of his work. The essays selected for this volume range back as far as 1941, but they may be viewed as more timely than ever, given the recent interest in Hume as a philosopher of society, politics and history.

Hume is famous for having introduced a radical theory of the nature of causation. To say that A causes B is just to say that A is constantly conjoined with B and that experience of the conjunction determines the mind to expect the one on the appearance of the other. It was this theory that awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers and established Hume as a founding figure of the various forms of positivism that emerged from the nineteenth century. A. (...) J. Ayer, for instance, records how the Vienna Circle in its manifesto of 1929 officially included Hume as a precursor of the movement: “Those who stand closest to the Vienna Circle in their general outlook are Hume and Mach. It is remarkable how much of the doctrine that is now thought to be especially characteristic of logical positivism was already stated, or at least foreshadowed by Hume.” But this interpretation is mistaken. Hume’s conception of causation is not positivistic but skeptical. Hume did present the above constant conjunction account of causation, but what is generally ignored is that he was dissatisfied and skeptical about it. In what follows I wish to explore the rationale of Hume’s skepticism about causation. I shall show that Hume understood the constant conjunction account to operate against the conceptual background of a theistic vision of the world. Hume does not think that any constant conjunction causal explanation is adequate because we do not and cannot understand the mind of God. (shrink)

LIBERTY IN HUME'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND In his own lifetime, Hume was feted by his admirers as a great historian, and even his enemies conceded that he was a controversial historian with whom one had to reckon. On the other hand, Hume failed to achieve positive recognition for his philosophical views. It was Hume's History of England that played an influential role in public policy debate during the eighteenth century in both Great Britain and in the United States. Hume's Hist01Y (...) of England passed through seven editions and was beginning to be perceived as a classic before Hume's death. Voltaire, as an historian, considered it "perhaps the best ever written in any lan guage. " Gibbon greatly admired Hume's work and said, of a letter written by Hume in 1776 praising the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, that a compliment from Hume "overpaid the labor of ten years. " After Hume's death on August 20, 1776, the History became a factor in the revolutionary events that began to unfold. Louis XVI was a close student of Hume's History, and his valet records that, upon having learned that the Convention had voted the death penalty, the King asked for the volume in Hume's History covering the trial and execution of Charles I to read in the days that remained. But if Louis XVI found the consolations of philosophical history in the Stuart volumes, Thomas Jefferson saw in them a cause for alarm. (shrink)

There is a large literature in empirical psychology studying what psychologists call 'subjective well-being'. Only limited attention has been given to these results by philosophers who study what we call 'well-being'. In this paper, I assess the relevance of the empirical results to one philosophical theory of well-being, the desire satisfaction theory. According to the desire satisfaction theory, an individual's well-being is enhanced when her desires are satisfied. The empirical results, however, show that many of our desires are disappointed in (...) the sense that the satisfaction of those desires does not make us any happier. So I develop an argument against the desire theory of well-being on the basis of these empirical results. I then provide a defense of the desire theory based on a careful examination of the measures of subjective well-being used by psychologists. I conclude that the empirical results do not threaten the desire theory of well-being. (shrink)

Stewart's purpose is to show that Hume is not a political conservative, but is better understood as a liberal. The author is reacting against several recent works on Hume: David Miller's Philosophy and Ideology in Hume's Political Thought, Donald W. Livingston's Hume's Philosophy of Common Life, and Frederick G. Whelan's Order and Artifice in Hume's Political Philosophy. These "all share, with variations, the nineteenth-century view that Hume's epistemology led him to conservatism". Stewart acknowledges that the term "conservative" is (...) used in different ways by these authors, but not so differently that they cannot be collectively refuted by showing Hume to be a liberal, that is, one "who thought that major reforms were highly desirable in the United Kingdom in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries". Stewart is referring here to substantial "economic and political reforms," but not to "socialist, Marxist, or neoliberal reforms.". (shrink)

A succinct, neurobiological explanation of the pathways that 'wake up the brain' from deep anesthesia, sleep and brain injury.

Our century has witnessed violence on an unprecedented scale, in wars that have torn deep into the fabric of national and international life. And as we can see in the recent strife in Bosnia, genocide in Rwanda, and the ongoing struggle to control nuclear weaponry, ancient enmities continue to threaten the lives of masses of human beings. As never before, the question is urgent and practical: How can nations--or ethnic groups, or races--after long, bitter struggles, learn to live side by (...) side in peace? In An Ethic for Enemies, Donald W. Shriver, Jr., President Emeritus of Union Theological Seminary, argues that the solution lies in our capacity to forgive. Taking forgiveness out of its traditional exclusive association with personal religion and morality, Shriver urges us to recognize its importance in the secular political arena. The heart of the book examines three powerful and moving cases from recent American history--our postwar dealings with Germany, with Japan, and our continuing domestic problem with race relations--cases in which acts of forgiveness have had important political consequences. Shriver traces how postwar Germany, in its struggle to break with its political past, progressed from denial of a Nazi past, to a formal acknowledgement of the crimes of Nazi Germany, to providing material compensation for survivors of the Holocaust. He also examines the efforts of Japan and the United States, over time and across boundaries of race and culture, to forgive the wrongs committed by both peoples during the Pacific War. And finally he offers a fascinating discussion of the role of forgiveness in the American civil rights movement. He shows, for instance, that even Malcolm X recognized the need to move from contempt for the integrationist ideal to a more conciliatory, repentant stance toward Civil Rights leaders. Malcolm came to see that only through forgiveness could the separate voices of the African-American movement work together to achieve their goals. If mutual forgiveness was a radical thought in 1964, Shriver reminds us that it has yet to be realized in 1994. "We are a long way from ceasing to hold the sins of the ancestors against their living children," he writes. Yet in this poignant volume, we discover how, by forgiving, enemies can progress and have progressed toward peace. A timely antidote to today's political conflicts, An Ethic for Enemies challenges to us to confront the hatreds that cripple society and threaten to destroy the global village. (shrink)

Applying the rules and systems of mathematics and logic to instance ontology, this work argues for the validity and problem-solving capacities of instance ontology, and associates it with a version of the realist position which is named by the author as moderate realism.

The most popular and convincing arguments for the claim that vegetarianism is morally obligatory focus on the extensive, unnecessary harm done to animals and to the environment by raising animals industrially in confinement conditions (factory farming). I outline the strongest versions of these arguments. I grant that it follows from their central premises that purchasing and consuming factoryfarmed meat is immoral. The arguments fail, however, to establish that strict vegetarianism is obligatory because they falsely assume that eating vegetables is the (...) only alternative to eating factory-farmed meat that avoids the harms of factory farming. I show that these arguments not only fail to establish that strict vegetarianism is morally obligatory, but that the very premises of the arguments imply that eating some (non-factory-farmed) meat rather than only vegetables is morally obligatory. Therefore, if the central premises of these usual arguments are true, then strict vegetarianism is immoral. (shrink)

Cognitive neuroscientists have anticipated the union of neural and behavioral science with ethics (Gazzaniga 2005). The identification of an ethical rule—the dictum that we should treat others in the manner in which we would like to be treated—apparently widespread among human societies suggests a dependence on fundamental human brain mechanisms. Now, studies of neural and molecular mechanisms that underlie the feeling of fear suggest how this form of ethical behavior is produced. Counterintuitively, a new theory presented here states that it (...) is actually a loss of social information that leads to sharing others' fears with our own, thus allowing us to treat others as we would like to be treated. Adding to that hypothetical mechanism is the well-studied predilection toward affiliative behaviors. Thus, even as Chomsky hypothesizes that humans are predisposed to utter grammatical sentences, we propose that humans are 'wired for reciprocity'. However, these two neural forces supporting ethical behavior do not explain individual or collective violence. At any given moment, the ability to produce behavior that obeys this ethical rule is proposed to depend on a balance between mechanisms for prosocial and antisocial behaviors. That balance results not only from genetic influences on temperament but also from environmental effects particularly during critical neonatal and pubertal periods. (shrink)

Whitehead's magnum opus is as important as it is difficult. It is the only work in which his metaphysical ideas are stated systematically and completely, and his metaphysics are the heart of his philosophical system as a whole.

An adaptive preference is a preference that is regimented in response to an agent’s set of feasible options. The fabled fox in the sour grapes story undergoes an adaptive preference change. I consider adaptive preferences more broadly, to include adaptive preference formation as well. I argue that many adaptive preferences that other philosophers have cast out as irrational sour-grapes-like preferences are actually fully rational preferences worthy of pursuit. I offer a means of distinguishing rational and worthy adaptive preferences from irrational (...) and unworthy ones. The distinction is based on the agent’s own appraisal of the adaptive preference. (shrink)

Institutional corruption is a normative concept of growing importance that embodies the systemic dependencies and informal practices that distort an institution’s societal mission. An extensive range of studies and lawsuits already documents strategies by which pharmaceutical companies hide, ignore, or misrepresent evidence about new drugs; distort the medical literature; and misrepresent products to prescribing physicians. We focus on the consequences for patients: millions of adverse reactions. After defining institutional corruption, we focus on evidence that it lies behind the epidemic of (...) harms and the paucity of benefits. (shrink)

There is almost no theoretical discussion of non‐human animal well‐being in the philosophical literature on well‐being. To begin to rectify this, I develop a desire satisfaction theory of well‐being for animals. I contrast this theory with my desire theory of well‐being for humans, according to which a human benefits from satisfying desires for which she can offer reasons. I consider objections. The most important are (1) Eden Lin's claim that the correct theory of well‐being cannot vary across different welfare subjects (...) and (2) his objection against theories of human well‐being that require exercising a sophisticated capacity such as reason giving. (shrink)

Over the past 35 years, patients have suffered from a largely hidden epidemic of side effects from drugs that usually have few offsetting benefits. The pharmaceutical industry has corrupted the practice of medicine through its influence over what drugs are developed, how they are tested, and how medical knowledge is created. Since 1906, heavy commercial influence has compromised congressional legislation to protect the public from unsafe drugs. The authorization of user fees in 1992 has turned drug companies into the FDA's (...) prime clients, deepening the regulatory and cultural capture of the agency. Industry has demanded shorter average review times and, with less time to thoroughly review evidence, increased hospitalizations and deaths have resulted. Meeting the needs of the drug companies has taken priority over meeting the needs of patients. Unless this corruption of regulatory intent is reversed, the situation will continue to deteriorate. We offer practical suggestions including: separating the funding of clinical trials from their conduct, analysis, and publication; independent FDA leadership; full public funding for all FDA activities; measures to discourage R&D on drugs with few, if any, new clinical benefits; and the creation of a National Drug Safety Board. (shrink)

One version of the desire satisfaction theory of well-being (i.e., welfare, or what is good for one) holds that only the satisfaction of one's present desires for present states of affairs can affect one's well-being. So if I desire fame today and become famous tomorrow, my well-being is positively affected onlyif tomorrow, when I am famous, I still desire to be famous. Call this the present desire satisfaction theory of well-being. I argue, contrary to this theory, that the satisfaction of (...) past desires that are no longer held does indeed affect one's well-being. The satisfaction of past desires is good for one in that the present satisfaction of past desires positively affects one's past well-being. I argue for this view in stages, starting with the recognition that many of our desires are satisfied not at an instant but over an interval of time, and that it is during this interval of time that our well-being is positively affected. Once we get our foot in the door with some temporal thickness to desire satisfaction and the associated well-being, I argue, the door must open more widely to allow for greater temporal distance between present desire satisfaction and past well-being. I defend my thesis that present satisfaction of past desires increases one's past welfare against objections, including the claim that it involves backward causation and Velleman's claim that the view is highly counterintuitive whether or not it involves backward causation. I argue that some of the objections rely on hedonistic intuitions, intuitions that most desire satisfaction theories of welfare aim to correct. Once properly understood and applied, my counterintuitive and controversial thesis is really quite innocuous. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher. He is a central figure of modern philosophy, and set the terms by which all subsequent thinkers have had to grapple. He argued that human perception structures natural laws, and that reason is the source of morality. His thought continues to hold a major influence in contemporary thought, especially in fields such as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics.

In a well-known paper, Bernard Williams argues that an immortal life would not be worth living, for it would necessarily become boring. I examine the implications for the boredom thesis of three human traits that have received insufficient attention in the literature on Williams’ paper. First, human memory decays, so humans would be entertained and driven by things that they experienced long before but had forgotten. Second, even if memory does not decay to the extent necessary to ward off boredom, (...) once-satisfied desires often return after a sufficient period of time. Eternity would always contain sufficient time for our desires to rejuvenate. Third, even if too many of our desires were satisfied but not yet rejuvenated, we can expect that human ingenuity would continue to invent new pursuits, pastimes, careers, and ways of life that would prevent us from becoming bored as we moved from one to another. Finally, I consider and respond to several objections, including the claims that as much variety as I propose to be put into an eternal life is inconsistent with having one character throughout one’s life and that the sort of character change and memory decay I postulate is inconsistent with personal identity. (shrink)

Although human well-being is a topic of much contemporary philosophical discussion, there has been comparatively little theoretical discussion in philosophy of (nonhuman) animal well-being. Animal welfare science is a well-established scientific discipline that studies animal well-being from an empirical standpoint. This article examines parts of this literature that may be relevant to philosophical treatments of animal well-being and to other philosophical issues. First, I explain the dominant conceptions of well-being in animal welfare science and survey some debates in that literature (...) surrounding these competing conceptions. Second, I explain the empirical methods used to measure animal well-being. Third, I argue for the philosophical relevance of the research in animal welfare science and outline some philosophical issues concerning animal welfare and its science that I claim are worthy of attention by philosophers. (shrink)