Hume, Mandeville, Butler, and “that Vulgar Dispute”
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Erin Frykholm
Abstract
The debate over whether human motivations are fundamentally selfinterested or benevolent consumed Shaftesbury, Mandeville, and Hutcheson, but Hume – though explicitly indebted to all three – almost entirely ignores this issue. I argue that his relative silence reveals an overlooked intellectual debt to Bishop Butler that informs two distinguishing features of Hume’s view: first, it allows him to appropriate compelling empirical observations that Mandeville makes about virtue and moral approval; second, it provides a way of articulating a fundamental criticism of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson on the issue of virtuous motivation. From this position, Hume is able to reframe the question of virtue according to the approbation of the spectator, rather than the internal aims of the agent.
- EPA
Hutcheson’s Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections
- EPM
Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
- FB
Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Public Benefits
- H
Hume’s History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688
- IIBV
Hutcheson’s Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue
- IVM
Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit
- SBN
Selby-Brigge/Nidditch edition of Hume’s Enquiry
- T
Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature
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Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Articles
- Refining Motivational Intellectualism: Plato’s Protagoras and Phaedo
- Aristotle and Crossing the Boundaries between the Sciences
- Hume’s Answer to Bayle on the Vacuum
- Locke’s Principle of Proportionality
- Three Myths About Kant’s Second Antinomy
- Discussion
- Hume, Mandeville, Butler, and “that Vulgar Dispute”
- Book Reviews
- Dominic J. O’Meara, Cosmology and Politics in Plato’s Later Works, Cambridge University Press, 2017, xi + 157 pp., https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316869581
- Ryan Patrick Hanley, Love’s Enlightenment. Rethinking Charity in Modernity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017, xv + 182 pp.
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Articles
- Refining Motivational Intellectualism: Plato’s Protagoras and Phaedo
- Aristotle and Crossing the Boundaries between the Sciences
- Hume’s Answer to Bayle on the Vacuum
- Locke’s Principle of Proportionality
- Three Myths About Kant’s Second Antinomy
- Discussion
- Hume, Mandeville, Butler, and “that Vulgar Dispute”
- Book Reviews
- Dominic J. O’Meara, Cosmology and Politics in Plato’s Later Works, Cambridge University Press, 2017, xi + 157 pp., https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316869581
- Ryan Patrick Hanley, Love’s Enlightenment. Rethinking Charity in Modernity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017, xv + 182 pp.
