Abstract

Hume skeptically debunks the natural law tradition's rationalist view of the grounds of received norms, but goes on to naturalistically reconstruct the very same norms by basing them on human sentiment and circumstance. He thereby culminates a Copernican revolution in normative theory initiated by such modern Natural Lawyers as Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke. Hume goes beyond those innovators in rejecting, as unwarranted speculative metaphysics, the modality of eternal, immutable, and universal laws that necessarily obligate every rational being. In famously arguing that morals are not derived from reason, and that the normative ought cannot be inferred from the descriptive is, he attacks internalist rationalism, as exemplified then by intuitionism, and later by Kant. Rationalism sought to validate the robust modality of natural law, without the ancient teleology or Christian voluntarism that historically grounded it. By contrast, Hume's internalist sentimentalism identifies empirically real norms based in contingent human desires and circumstance----not universal reason or metaphysics. ;This thesis reconstructs Hume's skepticism as a challenge to rationalism in the natural law tradition, and interprets his positive science of morality and law as the zenith of that tradition's naturalistic currents. His skepticism only challenges grounding practical norms in rational norms. However, Hume is often thought to bar any type of moral or legal cognitivism, and to therefore inconsistently undermine his empirical science of morals and law. Clarifying his skepticism's point and force, and its enduring strength against Kantian and rationalist views, dispels his theory's alleged incoherence. In bringing practical norms down to Earth, and distinguishing them from rational norms, Hume helps to open and define a conceptual space in which externalist cognitivism is an eligible naturalistic view. This project reveals a compelling and coherent Humean synthesis of reductive naturalist and expressivist ethics, and of natural law and positivist jurisprudence