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126-499: Philosophers refer to people who have moral responsibility for an action as " moral agents ". Agents have the capability to reflect upon their situation, to form intentions about how they will act, and then to carry out that action. The notion of free will has become an important issue in the debate on whether individuals are ever morally responsible for their actions and, if so, in what sense. Incompatibilists regard determinism as at odds with free will, whereas compatibilists think

252-599: A chargé d'affaires in Paris, writing "despatches to the British Secretary of State ". He wrote of his Paris life, "I really wish often for the plain roughness of The Poker Club of Edinburgh... to correct and qualify so much lusciousness." Upon returning to Britain in 1766, Hume wrote a letter to Lord Hertford after being asked to by George Colebrooke ; the letter informed Lord Hertford that he had an opportunity to invest in one of Colebrooke's slave plantations in

378-468: A normative conclusion of what ought to be done. Hume denied that humans have an actual conception of the self, positing that we experience only a bundle of sensations , and that the self is nothing more than this bundle of perceptions connected by an association of ideas. Hume's compatibilist theory of free will takes causal determinism as fully compatible with human freedom. His philosophy of religion , including his rejection of miracles, and of

504-513: A "simple Roman tomb", requesting in his will that it be inscribed only with his name and the year of his birth and death, "leaving it to Posterity to add the Rest". David Hume died at the southwest corner of St. Andrew's Square in Edinburgh's New Town , at what is now 21 Saint David Street. A popular story, consistent with some historical evidence and with the help of coincidence, suggests that

630-596: A belief in determinism if this freedom weighs upon us or if we need an excuse". A similar view is that individual moral culpability lies in individual character. That is, a person with the character of a murderer has no choice other than to murder, but can still be punished because it is right to punish those of bad character. How one's character was determined is irrelevant from this perspective. Robert Cummins, for example, argues that people should not be judged for their individual actions, but rather for how those actions "reflect on their character". If character (however defined)

756-441: A closely related variant, 'When (if ever) does moral responsibility transfer from its human creator(s) to the system?'. The questions arguably adjoin with but are distinct from machine ethics , which is concerned with the moral behavior of artificial systems. Whether an artificial system's behavior qualifies it to be morally responsible has been a key focus of debate. Batya Friedman and Peter Kahn Jr. posited that intentionality

882-518: A coldness—which he attributed to a "Laziness of Temper"—that lasted about nine months. Scurvy spots later broke out on his fingers, persuading Hume's physician to diagnose him with the "Disease of the Learned". Hume wrote that he "went under a Course of Bitters and Anti-Hysteric Pills", taken along with a pint of claret every day. He also decided to have a more active life to better continue his learning. His health improved somewhat, but in 1731, he

1008-469: A distinct condition, separate from the control condition: For instance, Alfred Mele thinks that the epistemic condition is a component of the control condition. Nonetheless, there seems to be a philosophical consensus of sorts that it is both distinct and explanatorily relevant. One major concept associated with the condition is "awareness". According to those philosophers who affirm this condition, one needs to be "aware" of four things to be morally responsible:

1134-538: A few main ideas. The first discussion is on whether it is possible for an artificial system to be a moral agent - see artificial systems and moral responsibility . The second discussion concerns efforts to construct machines with ethically-significant behaviors - see machine ethics . Finally, there is debate about whether robots should be constructed as moral agents. Research has shown that humans do perceive robots as having varying degrees of moral agency. These perceptions can manifest in two distinct ways: 1. ideas about

1260-417: A hot pan's handle is more forceful than simply thinking about touching a hot pan. According to Hume, impressions are meant to be the original form of all our ideas. From this, Don Garrett (2002) has coined the term copy principle, referring to Hume's doctrine that all ideas are ultimately copied from some original impression, whether it be a passion or sensation, from which they derive. After establishing

1386-449: A libertarian position. In daily life, we feel as though choosing otherwise is a viable option. Although this feeling does not firmly establish the existence of free will, some incompatibilists claim the phenomenological feeling of alternate possibilities is a prerequisite for free will. Jean-Paul Sartre suggested that people sometimes avoid incrimination and responsibility by hiding behind determinism: "we are always ready to take refuge in

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1512-414: A moment ... but the sheer agreeableness of animal faith will protect us from excessive caution and sterile suspension of belief. Others, such as Charles Sanders Peirce , have demurred from Hume's solution, while some, such as Kant and Karl Popper , have thought that Hume's analysis has "posed a most fundamental challenge to all human knowledge claims". The notion of causation is closely linked to

1638-544: A moral person, coining the idea of a 'Moral Turing Test'. They subsequently disavowed the Moral Turing Test in recognition of controversies surrounding the Turing Test . Andreas Matthias described a 'responsibility gap' where to hold humans responsible for a machine would be an injustice, but to hold the machine responsible would challenge 'traditional' ways of ascription. He proposed in 2004 three cases where

1764-606: A person experiences a variety of taste-sensations, tactile-sensations, and smell-sensations when biting into an apple, with the overall sensation—again, a complex impression. Thinking about an apple allows a person to form complex ideas, which are made of similar parts as the complex impressions they were developed from, but which are also less forceful. Hume believes that complex perceptions can be broken down into smaller and smaller parts until perceptions are reached that have no parts of their own, and these perceptions are thus referred to as simple. Regardless of how boundless it may seem;

1890-429: A person is legally responsible for what he does as long as he should know what he is doing, and his choices are deliberate. Some theorists discard any attempts to evaluate mental states and, instead, adopt the doctrine of strict liability , whereby one is liable under the law without regard to capacity, and that the only thing is to determine the degree of punishment , if any. Moral determinists would most likely adopt

2016-422: A person's imagination is confined to the mind's ability to recombine the information it has already acquired from the body's sensory experience (the ideas that have been derived from impressions). In addition, "as our imagination takes our most basic ideas and leads us to form new ones, it is directed by three principles of association, namely, resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect": Hume elaborates more on

2142-720: A personal level, the Marquess found Hume's dietary tendencies to be bizarre. Hume then started his great historical work, The History of England , which took fifteen years and ran to over a million words. During this time, he was also involved with the Canongate Theatre through his friend John Home , a preacher. In this context, he associated with Lord Monboddo and other thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment in Edinburgh. From 1746, Hume served for three years as secretary to General James St Clair , who

2268-400: A robot or "social machine" with the capability of understanding morality and agency has not been accomplished yet. However, a machine with those capabilities could be potentially created in the future. Discussion of moral agency in non-human animals involves both debate about the nature of morality and about the capacities and behavior of human and non-human animals. Thinkers who agree about

2394-418: A robot’s moral capacity (the ability to be/do good or bad) and 2. ideas about its dependence or independence on programming (where high dependency equates to low agency). Research suggests that the moral judgment of an action may not depend on whether the agent is a human or a robot. However, robots are rarely given credit for acting well, and must behave more consistently well to be trusted. The creation of

2520-561: A scholar of 18th-century literature, judged it a "remarkable autobiography, even though it may lack the usual attractions of that genre. Anyone hankering for startling revelations or amusing anecdotes had better look elsewhere." Despite condemning vanity as a dangerous passion, in his autobiography Hume confesses his belief that the "love of literary fame" had served as his "ruling passion" in life, and claims that this desire "never soured my temper, notwithstanding my frequent disappointments". One such disappointment Hume discusses in this account

2646-425: A similar point of view. Psychologist Albert Bandura has observed that moral agents engage in selective moral disengagement in regards to their own inhumane conduct. Moral agents are entities whose actions are eligible for moral consideration. An example of this would be a young child old enough to understand right from wrong, yet they hit their siblings on an occasion when they get angry. The action of hitting

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2772-414: A so-called 'cause' results in an indeterminate number of possible, so-called 'effects', that does not mean the person had the free-thinking independent will to choose that 'effect'. More likely, it was the indeterminate consequence of his chance genetics, chance experiences and chance circumstances relevant at the time of the 'cause'. In Kant's philosophy, this calls for an act of faith, the faith free agent

2898-630: A specific immoral act that a specific person committed, people tend to say that that person is morally responsible for their actions, even if they were determined (that is, people also give compatibilist answers). The neuroscience of free will investigates various experiments that might shed light on free will. One of the attributes defined for psychopathy is "failure to accept responsibility for own actions". When people attribute moral responsibility, they usually attribute it to individual moral agents. However, Joel Feinberg, among others, has argued that corporations and other groups of people can have what

3024-453: A substantial departure from technologies and theory as extant in 2014. An artificial system based on those technologies will carry zero responsibility for its behaviour. Moral responsibility is apportioned to the humans that created and programmed the system. Colin Allen et al. proposed that an artificial system may be morally responsible if its behaviours are functionally indistinguishable from

3150-422: A variety of speculations. One prominent interpretation among contemporary Humean scholarship is that this new "scene of thought" was Hume's realisation that Francis Hutcheson 's theory of moral sense could be applied to the understanding of morality as well. From this inspiration, Hume set out to spend a minimum of 10 years reading and writing. He soon came to the verge of a mental breakdown, first starting with

3276-465: A very usual indiscretion, in going to the press too early." Hume also provides an unambiguous self-assessment of the relative value of his works: that "my Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals; which, in my own opinion (who ought not to judge on that subject) is of all my writings, historical, philosophical, or literary, incomparably the best." He also wrote of his social relations: "My company

3402-515: A viable criminal jurisprudence is compatible with the denial of deserved blame and punishment. His view rules out retributivist justifications for punishment, but it allows for incapacitation of dangerous criminals on the analogy with quarantine of carriers of dangerous diseases. Isolation of carriers of the Ebola virus can be justified on the ground of the right to defend against threat, a justification that does not reference desert. Pereboom contends that

3528-416: Is a criticism against the libertarian conception of moral responsibility. It suggests that any given action, and even a person's character, is the result of various forces outside a person's control. It may not be appropriate, then, to hold that person solely morally responsible. Thomas Nagel suggests that four different types of luck (including genetic influences and other external factors) end up influencing

3654-555: Is a necessary condition for moral responsibility, and that computer systems as conceivable in 1992 in material and structure could not have intentionality. Arthur Kuflik asserted in 1999 that humans must bear the ultimate moral responsibility for a computer's decisions, as it is humans who design the computers and write their programs. He further proposed that humans can never relinquish oversight of computers. Frances Grodzinsky et al. considered artificial systems that could be modelled as finite state machines . They posited in 2008 that if

3780-467: Is also evidence that some non-human species, especially other primates, can demonstrate empathy and emotions such as guilt or grief, though some thinkers dispute this. However, humans display distinctive capacities related to intelligence and rationality such as the ability to engage in abstract and symbolic thought and to employ complex language. Philosophers and biologists who claim that non-human animals are moral agents typically argue that moral agency

3906-456: Is based on something a priori , yet to be known, or immaterial. Otherwise, without free agent's a priori fundamental source, socially essential concepts created from human mind, such as justice, would be undermined (responsibility implies freedom of choice) and, in short, civilization and human values would crumble. It is useful to compare the idea of moral agency with the legal doctrine of mens rea , which means guilty mind, and states that

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4032-439: Is called ‘collective moral responsibility’ for a state of affairs. For example, when South Africa had an apartheid regime, the country's government might have been said to have had collective moral responsibility for the violation of the rights of non-European South Africans. The emergence of automation, robotics and related technologies prompted the question, 'Can an artificial system be morally responsible?' The question has

4158-545: Is damaging to entertain the illusion that a person can make a single decision that is somehow, suddenly, independent of their physiology and history. He describes what scientists have learned from brain damaged patients, and offers the case of a school teacher who exhibited escalating pedophilic tendencies on two occasions – each time as results of growing tumors. Eagleman also warns that less attractive people and minorities tend to get longer sentencing – all of which he sees as symptoms that more science

4284-582: Is dependent on empathy or social relations, and stress the evidence for these in non-human animals. They may also point out behaviors which in humans are described as moral activities, such as the punishment of individuals who break social norms. Some thinkers suggest that there are a variety of types or levels of moral agency which vary by species, or that animals may act morally without being full moral agents. Thinkers who hold that only humans can be moral agents typically argue that moral agency depends on rationality. They highlight distinctive human abilities and

4410-525: Is in the initial literary reception of the Treatise , which he claims to have overcome by means of the success of the Essays : "the work was favourably received, and soon made me entirely forget my former disappointment". Hume, in his own retrospective judgment, argues that his philosophical debut's apparent failure "had proceeded more from the manner than the matter". He thus suggests that "I had been guilty of

4536-419: Is intended to get Arjuna to perform his duty (i.e., fight in the battle), but he is also claiming that being a successful moral agent requires being mindful of the wider circumstances in which one finds oneself. Paramahansa Yogananda also said, "Freedom means the power to act by soul guidance, not by the compulsions of desires and habits. Obeying the ego leads to bondage; obeying the soul brings liberation." In

4662-416: Is needed in the legal system. Derk Pereboom defends a skeptical position about free will he calls hard incompatibilism . In his view, we cannot have free will if our actions are causally determined by factors beyond our control, or if our actions are indeterministic events – if they happen by chance. Pereboom conceives of free will as the control in action required for moral responsibility in

4788-500: Is only vanity that causes us to regard ourselves as the agent in charge of these actions. However, Krishna adds this caveat: "... [But] the Man who knows the relation between the forces of Nature and actions, witnesses how some forces of Nature work upon other forces of Nature, and becomes [not] their slave..." When we are ignorant of the relationship between forces of Nature, we become passive victims of nomological facts. Krishna's admonition

4914-402: Is our knowledge, and not our ability to conceive, that is restricted to what can be experienced. Hume thought that we can form beliefs about that which extends beyond any possible experience, through the operation of faculties such as custom and the imagination, but he was sceptical about claims to knowledge on this basis. A central doctrine of Hume's philosophy, stated in the very first lines of

5040-451: Is something in the cause that necessarily produces its effect is because our past experiences have habituated us to think in this way. Continuing this idea, Hume argues that "only in the pure realm of ideas, logic, and mathematics, not contingent on the direct sense awareness of reality, [can] causation safely…be applied—all other sciences are reduced to probability". He uses this scepticism to reject metaphysics and many theological views on

5166-439: Is the dominant causal factor in determining one's choices, and one's choices are morally wrong, then one should be held accountable for those choices, regardless of genes and other such factors. In law, there is a known exception to the assumption that moral culpability lies in either individual character or freely willed acts. The insanity defense  – or its corollary, diminished responsibility (a sort of appeal to

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5292-609: Is the origin of this position of Spinoza. "If a man is Not on the road to destruction, then he has not taken the path that ONLY SEEMS right to him." P.F. Strawson is a major example of a contemporary compatibilist. His paper "Freedom and Resentment," which adduces reactive attitudes, has been widely cited as an important response to incompatibilist accounts of free will. Other compatibilists, who have been inspired by Strawson's paper, are as follows: Gary Watson, Susan Wolf, R. Jay Wallace, Paul Russell, and David Shoemaker . Daniel Dennett asks why anyone would care about whether someone had

5418-411: Is therefore argued that it is doubtful that one can praise or blame someone for performing an action generated randomly by his nervous system (without there being any non-physical agency responsible for the observed probabilistic outcome). Hard determinists (not to be confused with fatalists ) often use liberty in practical moral considerations, rather than a notion of a free will. Indeed, faced with

5544-438: Is to argue that, rather than reason, natural instinct explains the human practice of making inductive inferences. He asserts that "Nature, by an absolute and uncontroulable [ sic ] necessity has determin'd us to judge as well as to breathe and feel." In 1985, and in agreement with Hume, John D. Kenyon writes: Reason might manage to raise a doubt about the truth of a conclusion of natural inductive inference just for

5670-472: Is up for moral consideration because the child is old enough to consider whether or not it is the correct action to take and the morality of their behavior. Moral patients are entities that themselves are eligible for moral consideration. An example of this would be a child who does not know how to determine right from wrong. A child in this situation is up for moral consideration by others because those around them understand they are incapable of understanding

5796-500: The Treatise of Human Nature , is that the mind consists of perceptions, or the mental objects which are present to it, and which divide into two categories: "All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call impressions and ideas ." Hume believed that it would "not be very necessary to employ many words in explaining this distinction", which commentators have generally taken to mean

5922-657: The Philosophical Essays , which were decidedly anti-religious. This represented a turning point in his career and the various opportunities made available to him. Even Adam Smith , his personal friend who had vacated the Glasgow philosophy chair, was against his appointment out of concern that public opinion would be against it. In 1761, all his works were banned on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum . Hume returned to Edinburgh in 1751. In

6048-546: The Treatise to be Hume's most important work and one of the most important books in Western philosophy, critics in Great Britain at the time described it as "abstract and unintelligible". As Hume had spent most of his savings during those four years, he resolved "to make a very rigid frugality supply [his] deficiency of fortune, to maintain unimpaired [his] independency, and to regard every object as contemptible except

6174-487: The Treatise . Though he was only 23 years old when starting this work, it is now regarded as one of the most important in the history of Western philosophy . Hume worked for four years on his first major work, A Treatise of Human Nature , subtitled "Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects", completing it in 1738 at age 28. Although many scholars today consider

6300-496: The University of Edinburgh at an unusually early age—either 12 or possibly as young as 10—at a time when 14 was the typical age. Initially, Hume considered a career in law , because of his family. However, in his words, he came to have: ...an insurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of Philosophy and general Learning; and while [my family] fanceyed I was poring over Voet and Vinnius , Cicero and Virgil were

6426-575: The West Indies , though Hertford ultimately decided not to do so. In June of that year, Hume facilitated the purchase of a slave plantation in Martinique on behalf of his friend, the wine merchant John Stewart, by writing to the colony's governor Victor-Thérèse Charpentier . According to Felix Waldmann, a former Hume Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, Hume's "puckish scepticism about

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6552-401: The argument from design for God's existence, were especially controversial for their time. Hume left a legacy that affected utilitarianism , logical positivism , the philosophy of science , early analytic philosophy , cognitive science , theology , and many other fields and thinkers. Immanuel Kant credited Hume as the inspiration that had awakened him from his "dogmatic slumbers." Hume

6678-411: The fallacy of the single cause ) – can be used to argue that the guilty deed was not the product of a guilty mind. In such cases, the legal systems of most Western societies assume that the person is in some way not at fault, because his actions were a consequence of abnormal brain function (implying brain function is a deterministic causal agent of mind and motive). The argument from luck

6804-437: The frontal lobe reduces the ability to weigh uncertain risks and make prudent decisions, and therefore leads to an increased likelihood that someone will commit a violent crime. This is true not only of patients with damage to the frontal lobe due to accident or stroke, but also of adolescents, who show reduced frontal lobe activity compared to adults, and even of children who are chronically neglected or mistreated. In each case,

6930-459: The moral community is not rationality — for if it were, we might have to exclude some disabled people and infants, and might also have to distinguish between the degrees of rationality of healthy adults — but the real object of moral action is the avoidance of suffering. An example of this is the abortion debate . Further examples can be taken from the argument from marginal cases . Discussions of artificial moral agency center around

7056-455: The " constant conjunction " of events. This problem of induction means that to draw any causal inferences from past experience, it is necessary to presuppose that the future will resemble the past; this metaphysical presupposition cannot itself be grounded in prior experience. An opponent of philosophical rationalists , Hume held that passions rather than reason govern human behaviour, famously proclaiming that " Reason is, and ought only to be

7182-472: The 1750s, it was necessary for his friends to avert a trial against him on the charge of heresy , specifically in an ecclesiastical court. However, he "would not have come and could not be forced to attend if he said he was not a member of the Established Church". Hume failed to gain the chair of philosophy at the University of Glasgow due to his religious views. By this time, he had published

7308-614: The Authors which I was secretly devouring. He had little respect for the professors of his time, telling a friend in 1735 that "there is nothing to be learnt from a Professor, which is not to be met with in Books". He did not graduate. At around age 18, Hume made a philosophical discovery that opened up to him "a new Scene of Thought", inspiring him "to throw up every other Pleasure or Business to apply entirely to it". As he did not recount what this scene exactly was, commentators have offered

7434-646: The Chair of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. However, the position was given to William Cleghorn after Edinburgh ministers petitioned the town council not to appoint Hume because he was seen as an atheist. In 1745, during the Jacobite risings , Hume tutored the Marquess of Annandale , an engagement that ended in disarray after about a year. The Marquess could not follow with Hume's lectures, his father saw little need for philosophy, and on

7560-526: The Western tradition, Baruch Spinoza echoes the Bhagavad Gita ' s point about agents and natural forces, writing "men think themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and their appetite, and do not think, even in their dreams, of the causes by which they are disposed to wanting and willing, because they are ignorant [of those causes]." Krishna is hostile to the influence of passions on our rational faculties, speaking up instead for

7686-593: The action (which one is doing), its moral significance, consequences, and alternatives. Mauro suggests that a sense of personal responsibility does not operate or evolve universally among humankind. He argues that it was absent in the successful civilization of the Iroquois . In recent years, research in experimental philosophy has explored whether people's untutored intuitions about determinism and moral responsibility are compatibilist or incompatibilist. Some experimental work has included cross-cultural studies. However,

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7812-549: The analogy holds for incapacitation of dangerous criminals. He also argues that the less serious the threat, the more moderate the justifiable method of incapacitation; for certain crimes only monitoring may be needed. In addition, just as we should do what we can, within reasonable bounds, to cure the carriers of the Ebola virus we quarantine, so we should aim to rehabilitate and reintegrate the criminals we incapacitate. Pereboom also proposes that given hard incompatibilism, punishment justified as general deterrence may be legitimate when

7938-541: The basis that they are not grounded in fact and observations, and are therefore beyond the reach of human understanding. The cornerstone of Hume's epistemology is the problem of induction . This may be the area of Hume's thought where his scepticism about human powers of reason is most pronounced. The problem revolves around the plausibility of inductive reasoning , that is, reasoning from the observed behaviour of objects to their behaviour when unobserved. As Hume wrote, induction concerns how things behave when they go "beyond

8064-463: The boat this instant." A Treatise of Human Nature begins with the introduction: "'Tis evident, that all the sciences have a relation, more or less, to human nature.… Even Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, and Natural Religion, are in some measure dependent on the science of Man." The science of man , as Hume explains, is the "only solid foundation for the other sciences" and that the method for this science requires both experience and observation as

8190-504: The concept of personal responsibility (or some popularization thereof) may include (for example) parents, managers, politicians, technocrats , large-group awareness trainings (LGATs), and religious groups. Some see individual responsibility as an important component of neoliberalism . Depending on how a philosopher conceives of free will , they will have different views on moral responsibility. Metaphysical libertarians think actions are not always causally determined, allowing for

8316-430: The consequences of their actions and are therefore unable to understand the morality of a situation due to developmental barriers. Many philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant , view morality as a transaction among rational parties, i.e., among moral agents. In Richard Dean’s article on Kant’s moral theory he discusses how agents who are able to control their tendencies or drives, are able to remain unbiased as they determine

8442-437: The control (or freedom) condition (which answers the question 'did the individual doing the action in question have free will?') and the epistemic condition, the former of which is explored in the above discussion. The epistemic condition, in contrast to the control condition, focuses on the question 'was the individual aware of, for instance, the moral implications of what she did?' Not all philosophers think this condition to be

8568-405: The cornerstones of human thought. Matters of Fact are dependent on the observer and experience. They are often not universally held to be true among multiple persons. Hume was an Empiricist, meaning he believed "causes and effects are discoverable not by reason, but by experience". He goes on to say that, even with the perspective of the past, humanity cannot dictate future events because thoughts of

8694-654: The damage to his reputation from the quarrel with Rousseau that he would author an account of the dispute, titling it "A concise and genuine account of the dispute between Mr. Hume and Mr. Rousseau ". In 1767, Hume was appointed Under Secretary of State for the Northern Department . Here, he wrote that he was given "all the secrets of the Kingdom". In 1769 he returned to James' Court in Edinburgh, where he would live from 1771 until his death in 1776. Hume's nephew and namesake, David Hume of Ninewells (1757–1838),

8820-438: The debate about whether people naturally have compatibilist or incompatibilist intuitions has not come out overwhelmingly in favor of one view or the other, finding evidence for both views. For instance, when people are presented with abstract cases that ask if a person could be morally responsible for an immoral act when they could not have done otherwise, people tend to say no, or give incompatibilist answers. When presented with

8946-415: The distinction between feeling and thinking . Controversially, Hume, in some sense, may regard the distinction as a matter of degree, as he takes impressions to be distinguished from ideas on the basis of their force, liveliness, and vivacity—what Henry E. Allison (2008) calls the "FLV criterion." Ideas are therefore "faint" impressions. For example, experiencing the painful sensation of touching

9072-449: The emerging field of neuroethics , argue, on the basis of such cases, that our current notion of moral responsibility is founded on libertarian (and dualist ) intuitions. They argue that cognitive neuroscience research (e.g. neuroscience of free will ) is undermining these intuitions by showing that the brain is responsible for our actions, not only in cases of florid psychosis , but also in less obvious situations. For example, damage to

9198-461: The end of this period Hume had attained his well-known corpulent stature; "the good table of the General and the prolonged inactive life had done their work", leaving him "a man of tremendous bulk". In 1749 he went to live with his brother in the countryside, although he continued to associate with the aforementioned Scottish Enlightenment figures. Hume's religious views were often suspect and, in

9324-483: The essay with a frank admission: I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not a misplaced one; and this is a matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained. Diarist and biographer James Boswell saw Hume a few weeks before his death from a form of abdominal cancer . Hume told him that he sincerely believed it a "most unreasonable fancy" that there might be life after death. Hume asked that his body be interred in

9450-428: The existence of religious miracles played a significant part in defining the critical outlook which underpins the practice of modern science." Waldmann also argued that Hume's views "served to reinforce the institution of racialised slavery in the later 18th century." In 1766, Hume left Paris to accompany Jean-Jacques Rousseau to England. Once there, he and Rousseau fell out , leaving Hume sufficiently worried about

9576-587: The fame that he coveted. The volumes traced events from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688 and was a bestseller in its day. Hume was also a longtime friend of bookseller Andrew Millar , who sold Hume's History (after acquiring the rights from Scottish bookseller Gavin Hamilton ), although the relationship was sometimes complicated. Letters between them illuminate both men's interest in

9702-453: The following year, the Faculty of Advocates hired him to be their Librarian, a job in which he would receive little to no pay, but which nonetheless gave him "the command of a large library". This resource enabled him to continue historical research for The History of England . Hume's volume of Political Discourses , written in 1749 and published by Kincaid & Donaldson in 1752, was

9828-431: The forcefulness of impressions and ideas, these two categories are further broken down into simple and complex : "simple perceptions or impressions and ideas are such as admit of no distinction nor separation", whereas "the complex are the contrary to these, and may be distinguished into parts". When looking at an apple, a person experiences a variety of colour-sensations—what Hume notes as a complex impression. Similarly,

9954-425: The foundations of a logical argument. In regards to this, philosophical historian Frederick Copleston (1999) suggests that it was Hume's aim to apply to the science of man the method of experimental philosophy (the term that was current at the time to imply natural philosophy ), and that "Hume's plan is to extend to philosophy in general the methodological limitations of Newtonian physics ." Until recently, Hume

10080-523: The free will required for moral responsibility in the desert-involving sense is not in the offing. However, he also contends that by contrast with the backward-looking, desert-involving sense of moral responsibility, forward-looking senses are compatible with causal determination. For instance, causally determined agents who act badly might justifiably be blamed with the aim of forming faulty character, reconciling impaired relationships, and protecting others from harm they are apt to cause. Pereboom proposes that

10206-426: The future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past". However, even though custom can serve as a guide in life, it still only represents an expectation. In other words: Experience cannot establish a necessary connection between cause and effect, because we can imagine without contradiction a case where the cause does not produce its usual effect…the reason why we mistakenly infer that there

10332-535: The ghosts and gods and that it cannot survive in a naturalistic environment devoid of miracles". We cannot punish another for wrong acts committed, contends Waller, because the causal forces which precede and have brought about the acts may ultimately be reduced to luck, namely, factors over which the individual has no control. One may not be blamed even for one's character traits, he maintains, since they too are heavily influenced by evolutionary, environmental, and genetic factors (inter alia). Although his view would fall in

10458-570: The goal of the legal system is to punish people for misdeeds, require the libertarian intuition. Many forms of ethically realistic and consequentialist approaches to justice, which are aimed at promoting future welfare rather than retribution, can survive even a hard determinist interpretation of free will. Accordingly, the legal system and notions of justice can thus be maintained even in the face of emerging neuroscientific evidence undermining libertarian intuitions of free will. Neuroscientist David Eagleman maintains similar ideas. Eagleman says that

10584-477: The guilty party can, they argue, be said to have less responsibility for his actions. Greene and Cohen predict that, as such examples become more common and well known, jurors' interpretations of free will and moral responsibility will move away from the intuitive libertarian notion that currently underpins them. They also argue that the legal system does not require this libertarian interpretation. Rather, they suggest that only retributive notions of justice , in which

10710-462: The improvements of [his] talents in literature". Despite the disappointment, Hume later wrote: "Being naturally of a cheerful and sanguine temper, I soon recovered from the blow and prosecuted with great ardour my studies in the country." There, in an attempt to make his larger work better known and more intelligible, he published the An Abstract of a Book lately Published as a summary of

10836-428: The last principle, explaining that, when somebody observes that one object or event consistently produces the same object or event, that results in "an expectation that a particular event (a 'cause') will be followed by another event (an 'effect') previously and constantly associated with it". Hume calls this principle custom , or habit , saying that "custom...renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for

10962-401: The legal justice system ought to become more forward looking. He says it is wrong to ask questions of narrow culpability, rather than focusing on what is important: what needs to change in a criminal's behavior and brain. Eagleman is not saying that no one is responsible for their crimes, but rather that the "sentencing phase" should correspond with modern neuroscientific evidence. To Eagleman, it

11088-435: The machine had a fixed state transition table, then it could not be morally responsible. If the machine could modify its table, then the machine's designer still retained some moral responsibility. Patrick Hew argued that for an artificial system to be morally responsible, its rules for behaviour and the mechanisms for supplying those rules must not be supplied entirely by external humans. He further argued that such systems are

11214-497: The machine's behaviour ought to be attributed to the machine and not its designers or operators. First, he argued that modern machines are inherently unpredictable (to some degree), but perform tasks that need to be performed yet cannot be handled by simpler means. Second, that there are increasing 'layers of obscurity' between manufacturers and system, as hand coded programs are replaced with more sophisticated means. Third, in systems that have rules of operation that can be changed during

11340-440: The main doctrines of the Treatise , without revealing its authorship. This work contained the same ideas, but with a shorter and clearer explanation. Although there has been some academic speculation as to the pamphlet's true author, it is generally regarded as Hume's creation. After the publication of Essays Moral and Political in 1741—included in the later edition as Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary —Hume applied for

11466-454: The merits of the later texts alone, rather than on the more radical formulations of his early, youthful work, dismissing his philosophical debut as juvenilia : "A work which the Author had projected before he left College." Despite Hume's protestations, a consensus exists today that his most important arguments and philosophically distinctive doctrines are found in the original form they take in

11592-547: The nature, behavior and abilities of different species may still disagree about which capacities are important for moral agency or about the significance of particular behaviors in determining moral agency. Since moral agents are often thought to warrant particular moral consideration, this discussion is sometimes linked to debates in animal rights about practices involving non-human animals. Studies of animal biology and behavior have provided strong evidence of complex social structures and behavioral norms in non-human species. There

11718-599: The only work he considered successful on first publication. In 1753, Hume moved from his house on Riddles Court on the Lawnmarket to a house on the Canongate at the other end of the Royal Mile . Here he lived in a tenement known as Jack's Land, immediately west of the still surviving Shoemakers Land. Eventually, with the publication of his six-volume The History of England between 1754 and 1762, Hume achieved

11844-816: The operation of the machine. A more extensive review of the arguments may be found in Patrick Hew's 2014 article on artificial moral agents. Moral agents Moral agency is an individual's ability to make moral choices based on some notion of right and wrong and to be held accountable for these actions. A moral agent is "a being who is capable of acting with reference to right and wrong." Most philosophers suggest only rational beings, who can reason and form self-interested judgments, are capable of being moral agents. Some suggest those with limited rationality (for example, people who are mildly mentally disabled or infants ) also have some basic moral capabilities. Determinists argue all of our actions are

11970-407: The path of moral action. The ability to be able to control this is called moral commitment. Agents need to become experts in this control in order to be able to declare something as moral or immoral and retain reputability. For this reason, they would exclude other animals from moral consideration. Utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and Peter Singer have argued that the key to inclusion in

12096-580: The penalties do not involve undermining an agent's capacity to live a meaningful, flourishing life, since justifying such moderate penalties need not invoke desert. Compatibilists contend that even if determinism were true, it would still be possible for us to have free will. The Hindu text The Bhagavad Gita offers one very early compatibilist account. Facing the prospect of going to battle against kinsmen to whom he has bonds, Arjuna despairs. Krishna attempts to assuage Arjuna's anxieties. He argues that forces of nature come together to produce actions, and it

12222-467: The possibility of free will and thus moral responsibility. All libertarians are also incompatibilists; for they think that if causal determinism were true of human action, people would not have free will. Accordingly, some libertarians subscribe to the principle of alternate possibilities, which posits that moral responsibility requires that people could have acted differently. Phenomenological considerations are sometimes invoked by incompatibilists to defend

12348-414: The possibility that determinism requires a completely different moral system, some proponents say "So much the worse for free will!". Clarence Darrow , the famous defense attorney, pleaded the innocence of his clients, Leopold and Loeb , by invoking such a notion of hard determinism. During his summation, he declared: What has this boy to do with it? He was not his own father; he was not his own mother; he

12474-555: The present testimony of the senses, or the records of our memory". Hume argues that we tend to believe that things behave in a regular manner, meaning that patterns in the behaviour of objects seem to persist into the future, and throughout the unobserved present. Hume's argument is that we cannot rationally justify the claim that nature will continue to be uniform, as justification comes in only two varieties—demonstrative reasoning and probable reasoning —and both of these are inadequate. With regard to demonstrative reasoning, Hume argues that

12600-497: The press." However, he found literary success in his lifetime as an essayist, and a career as a librarian at the University of Edinburgh . These successes provided him much needed income at the time. His tenure there, and the access to research materials it provided, resulted in Hume's writing the massive six-volume The History of England , which became a bestseller and the standard history of England in its day. For over 60 years, Hume

12726-470: The problem of induction. According to Hume, we reason inductively by associating constantly conjoined events. It is the mental act of association that is the basis of our concept of causation. At least three interpretations of Hume's theory of causation are represented in the literature: Hume acknowledged that there are events constantly unfolding, and humanity cannot guarantee that these events are caused by prior events or are independent instances. He opposed

12852-489: The product of antecedent causes, and some believe this is incompatible with free will and thus claim that we have no real control over our actions. Immanuel Kant argued that whether or not our real self , the noumenal self, can choose, we have no choice but to believe that we choose freely when we make a choice. This does not mean that we can control the effects of our actions. Some Indeterminists would argue we have no free will either. If, with respect to human behavior,

12978-519: The property of responsibility and speculates that the idea of moral responsibility may be "a purely metaphysical hankering". In this view, the denial of moral responsibility is the moral hankering to be able to assert that one has some fictitious right such as asserting PARENTAL rights instead of parent responsibility. Bruce Waller has argued, in Against Moral Responsibility (MIT Press), that moral responsibility "belongs with

13104-474: The same category as the views of philosophers like Dennett who argue against moral responsibility, Waller's view differs in an important manner: He tries to, as he puts it, "rescue" free will from moral responsibility (See Chapter 3). This move goes against the commonly held assumption that how one feels about free will is ipso facto a claim about moral responsibility. In philosophical discussions of moral responsibility, two necessary conditions are usually cited:

13230-412: The sense involving deserved blame and praise, punishment and reward. While he acknowledges that libertarian agent causation, the capacity of agents as substances to cause actions without being causally determined by factors beyond their control, is still a possibility, he regards it as unlikely against the backdrop of the most defensible physical theories. Without libertarian agent causation, Pereboom thinks

13356-421: The slave of the passions ." Hume was also a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on emotion or sentiment rather than abstract moral principle. He maintained an early commitment to naturalistic explanations of moral phenomena and is usually accepted by historians of European philosophy to have first clearly expounded the is–ought problem , or the idea that a statement of fact alone can never give rise to

13482-537: The street was named after Hume. His tomb stands, as he wished it, on the southwestern slope of Calton Hill , in the Old Calton Cemetery . Adam Smith later recounted Hume's amusing speculation that he might ask Charon , Hades ' ferryman, to allow him a few more years of life in order to see "the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition". The ferryman replied, "You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years.… Get into

13608-636: The success of the History . In 1762 Hume moved from Jack's Land on the Canongate to James Court on the Lawnmarket . He sold the house to James Boswell in 1766. From 1763 to 1765, Hume was invited to attend Lord Hertford in Paris , where he became secretary to the British embassy in France . Hume was well received among Parisian society, and while there he met with Isaac de Pinto . In 1765, Hume served as

13734-577: The two brothers and their sister on her own. Hume changed his family name's spelling in 1734, as the surname 'Home' (pronounced as 'Hume') was not well-known in England. Hume never married and lived partly at his Chirnside family home in Berwickshire, which had belonged to the family since the 16th century. His finances as a young man were very "slender", as his family was not rich; as a younger son he had little patrimony to live on. Hume attended

13860-410: The two can coexist. Moral responsibility does not necessarily equate to legal responsibility . A person is legally responsible for an event when a legal system is liable to penalise that person for that event. Although it may often be the case that when a person is morally responsible for an act, they are also legally responsible for it, the two states do not always coincide. Preferential promoters of

13986-491: The uniformity principle cannot be demonstrated, as it is "consistent and conceivable" that nature might stop being regular. Turning to probable reasoning, Hume argues that we cannot hold that nature will continue to be uniform because it has been in the past. As this is using the very sort of reasoning (induction) that is under question, it would be circular reasoning . Thus, no form of justification will rationally warrant our inductive inferences. Hume's solution to this problem

14112-445: The unique complexity of human behavior. They argue that shared behaviors such as the punishment of wrongdoers are nevertheless underpinned by very different internal processes, meaning that these behaviors qualify as moral activity for humans but not for non-humans. David Hume David Hume ( / h juː m / ; born David Home ; 7 May 1711 – 25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist who

14238-452: The value of heeding the dictates of one's own nature: "Even a wise man acts under the impulse of his nature. Of what use is restraint?" Spinoza similarly identifies the taming of one's passions as a way to extricate oneself from merely being passive in the face of external forces and a way toward following our own natures. Jesus asserted that "There is a path that SEEMS right to a man which leads to Destruction". The contrapositive (equivalent)

14364-463: The way that a person's actions are evaluated morally. For instance, a person driving drunk may make it home without incident, and yet this action of drunk driving might seem more morally objectionable if someone happens to jaywalk along his path (getting hit by the car). This argument can be traced back to David Hume . If physical indeterminism is true, then those events that are not determined are scientifically described as probabilistic or random. It

14490-410: The ways in which ordinary propositions about objects, causal relations, the self, and so on, are semantically equivalent to propositions about one's experiences. Many commentators have since rejected this understanding of Humean empiricism, stressing an epistemological (rather than a semantic ) reading of his project. According to this opposing view, Hume's empiricism consisted in the idea that it

14616-455: The widely accepted theory of causation that 'all events have a specific course or reason'. Therefore, Hume crafted his own theory of causation, formed through his empiricist and sceptic beliefs. He split causation into two realms: "All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact." Relations of Ideas are a priori and represent universal bonds between ideas that mark

14742-824: Was a co-founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783. He was a Professor of Scots Law at Edinburgh University and rose to be Principal Clerk of Session in the Scottish High Court and Baron of the Exchequer. He is buried with his uncle in Old Calton Cemetery. In the last year of his life, Hume wrote an extremely brief autobiographical essay titled "My Own Life", summing up his entire life in "fewer than 5 pages"; it contains many interesting judgments that have been of enduring interest to subsequent readers of Hume. Donald Seibert (1984),

14868-454: Was afflicted with a ravenous appetite and palpitations . After eating well for a time, he went from being "tall, lean and raw-bon'd" to being "sturdy, robust [and] healthful-like." Indeed, Hume would become well known for being obese and having a fondness for good port and cheese, often using them as philosophical metaphors for his conjectures. Despite having noble ancestry, Hume had no source of income and no learned profession by age 25. As

14994-766: Was best known for his highly influential system of empiricism , philosophical scepticism and metaphysical naturalism . Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume followed John Locke in rejecting the existence of innate ideas , concluding that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon , Thomas Hobbes , John Locke, and George Berkeley as an empiricist. Hume argued that inductive reasoning and belief in causality cannot be justified rationally; instead, they result from custom and mental habit. We never actually perceive that one event causes another but only experience

15120-505: Was born on 26 April 1711, as David Home, in a tenement on the north side of Edinburgh 's Lawnmarket . He was the second of two sons born to Catherine Home ( née Falconer ), daughter of Sir David Falconer of Newton, Midlothian and his wife Mary Falconer (née Norvell), and Joseph Home of Chirnside in the County of Berwick , an advocate of Ninewells . Joseph died just after David's second birthday. Catherine, who never remarried, raised

15246-610: Was common at his time, he became a merchant 's assistant, despite having to leave his native Scotland. He travelled via Bristol to La Flèche in Anjou , France. There he had frequent discourse with the Jesuits of the College of La Flèche . Hume was derailed in his attempts to start a university career by protests over his alleged " atheism ", also lamenting that his literary debut, A Treatise of Human Nature , "fell dead-born from

15372-476: Was envoy to the courts of Turin and Vienna . At that time Hume wrote Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding , later published as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding . Often called the First Enquiry , it proved little more successful than the Treatise , perhaps because of the publication of his short autobiography My Own Life , which "made friends difficult for the first Enquiry". By

15498-705: Was not his own grandparents. All of this was handed to him. He did not surround himself with governesses and wealth. He did not make himself. And yet he is to be compelled to pay. Paul the Apostle , in his Epistle to the Romans addresses the question of moral responsibility as follows: "Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?" In this view, individuals can still be dishonoured for their acts even though those acts were ultimately completely determined by God. Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen, researchers in

15624-460: Was not unacceptable to the young and careless, as well as to the studious and literary", noting of his complex relation to religion, as well as to the state, that "though I wantonly exposed myself to the rage of both civil and religious factions, they seemed to be disarmed in my behalf of their wonted fury". He goes on to profess of his character: "My friends never had occasion to vindicate any one circumstance of my character and conduct." Hume concludes

15750-447: Was seen as a forerunner of logical positivism , a form of anti- metaphysical empiricism. According to the logical positivists (in summary of their verification principle ), unless a statement could be verified by experience, or else was true or false by definition (i.e., either tautological or contradictory ), then it was meaningless. Hume, on this view, was a protopositivist, who, in his philosophical writings, attempted to demonstrate

15876-405: Was the dominant interpreter of English history. He described his "love for literary fame" as his "ruling passion" and judged his two late works, the so-called "first" and "second" enquiries, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals , as his greatest literary and philosophical achievements. He would ask of his contemporaries to judge him on

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