A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

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A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

So, first up on the chopping block. I actually wrote my final paper for phil on this one. Hume breaks down the source of all morals and human feelings with merciless precision, explaining how and why they come about in an almost phenomenological way, describing how they arise in the mind and make reason "the slave of the passions.”

I compared Hume's analysis of morality with Singer's hypothetical scenario, in which you are walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it. The problem is, you just bought these pants today, and they were really expensive. Do you risk getting the jeans muddy just to save a child who is going to die any second?



Psychologically healthy people would feel obligated to help, to prevent the suffering and death of the child. Singer's comparative example from real life is the equally certain imminent suffering of those threatened with starvation. I would add all the people living in hell in the Congo.

He compares the uncomfortable but morally irrelevant sacrifice of the cleanly state of one’s clothes to the equally morally irrelevant sacrifices of enjoyment of wealth the affluent would have to make to help the starving. The only difference between the two situations, Singer argues, is distance. Thus, if distance carries no intrinsic moral weight, as Singer holds, the affluent are under equal obligation to help alleviate famine as they are to save the drowning child.

Bummer city, right?

The other little story I liked from that class was supposed to illustrate a woman’s right to choose.

Imagine you live in a city where there’s a serious vagrancy problem, and the bums all catch a weird sleeping sickness that causes them to fall down and roll around on the ground. It’s summertime, and no one can afford air conditioning.

It’s a really hot night, and it would feel so much better to open one of the french windows everybody in town has and let the breeze blow through. You can just taste the cool breeze on your skin. But the law states that if through your negligence, one of these bums rolls into your house, you have to feed and care for him for the next 18 years to life.

Proof that NYC is bummer city USA courtesy of Girlnarly aka she of gnarly ideas