Abstract
Hume was wrong about getting an ‘ought’ out of an ‘is’: We do it all the time. The precaution which ‘authors do not commonly use’ is a relevant principle which we insert between mere is and axiological ought. Pamela in Richardson’s Pamela had one notable principle: qv (Hume’s essay is 1739–1740: Pamela, 1740). Kant’s later insistence that we ‘Act only on that maxim (principle [?]) that you can at the same time will be an universal law’ sinks Hume.
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Notes
- 1.
Epigraph: David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1888, and many subsequent editions. There is a revised edition by P.H. Nidditch, Oxford, 1978, in which the original pagination is, virtually, preserved. Or, see Ernest C. Mossner’s edition, Pelican 1968, Penguin 1985. Epigraph (Hume, 1958, Bk III, Part I, p.469); (Hume, 1985, p.521).
- 2.
One used in a literature and philosophy course Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling 1771. (It happened that Mackenzie also wrote a Life of John Home, the Scottish dramatist, − whose Douglas is still eminently readable – a relative of Hume’s. The Scots pronounce the family name ‘Home’ as ‘Hume’.) Reprints of The Man of Feeling are still available, notable is the Oxford ‘World’s Classics’ ed. The book is as fine an example as one may get of eighteenth century sentimentalism: although it may feel on occasion a parody of it.
- 3.
See my ‘What does “good” tell me?’ (Hutchings, 1965).
- 4.
Richardson, Pamela: the most readily available reprint is the ‘Everyman’ edition in two volumes. Dent, London & Dutton, New York ed. M. Kinkead-Weekes [1914] and 1974 (etc). The quotations in text are from p.19 of Vol. I of this printing; q.v. for a Select Bibliography. Kinkead-Weekes’ introduction is dated 1962 so will not be found in earlier editions.
- 5.
Fielding should have known better. Perhaps he did; whether he wrote Shamala has been a matter of controversy. I do not know the present state of the case. However how could one of the foundation writers of the English novel have been a parodist of another man’s work before becoming himself a – better – novelist?
- 6.
David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King transcends the ‘interesting’ of the novel by being unfinished, plotless, and being about the boring life of a tax office persons: and by directly raising the question of boredom, never to settle it. Except by forcing us, so to speak, to read with pleasure passages on the face of them boring, boring. See Wallace 2012, pp.383, 176, 488, 461, 504 & 546: etc. The David Foster Wallace sentence-form is considered by Wallace and others to be the only one suited to the USA as it presently is. It seems, 2013, to be as mannered and laborious as are the ‘letters’ in Pamela. One now reads both as a duty as much as a pleasure. The point is obvious: both content and style change between Pamela, What Masie Knew and The Pale King. How content and style interact is a matter of interest for serious literary criticism.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
See ‘The Horror, the Horror’, Gary Saul Morson on Isaac Babel in The New York Review of Books (Morson, 2018). On p.30, col.a, Morson quotes Babel: “Must penetrate the soul of the fighting man. I’m penetrating, it’s all horrible wild beasts with principles”. [Italic added.]
- 12.
P. Æ. Hutchings Kant on Absolute Value (Hutchings, 1972). See particularly pp.234ff and: ‘The categorical imperative says nothing about utility, but it – draws our attention to it most effectively by requiring us to test maxims against their own possible harmfulness. Showing something to be harmful makes, perhaps, a stronger case for its being wrong, than showing it to be useful does for its being right. This kind of negative Utilitarianism is effective, while making smaller claims, and needing infinitely less elaboration and defence, than does Mill’s rather more ambitious scheme of positive utilitarian morality: p.241.
- 13.
See Mackenzie, 1987 [1771], p.16. For an informative account of Mackenzie see Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh changed the World, by James Buchan, Chapter 11, ‘The Man of Feeling’ (Buchan, 2003). The book contains a portrait of Mackenzie by Raeburn with a sharp remark by Buchan. Buchan also observes ‘In [The Man of Feeling] ‘… incessant floods of tears … there are forty-three separate instances of weeping’ (Buchan, 2003, p.306). Adam Smith’s book on Moral Sentiments is much more sober. His The Theory of Moral Sentiments was published in 1759 (Our Hume here, 1739–1740) Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776: the year of a notable event in the whole future history of Capitalism!
- 14.
See Immanuel Kant, The Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals and The Critique of Practical Reason, any edition.
- 15.
- 16.
Becoming Jane Austen: a Life, by Jon Spence, 2007, p.91.
- 17.
As might be expected Diderot and J-J. Rousseau provide interesting uses of ‘sensibilité’.
- 18.
That in the lived world young gentlewomen might have been sexually harassed one don’t doubt. But it is not Austen’s style to have dwelt on this possibility. In Pamela it is the engine of the whole plot.
- 19.
See Jon Spence, 2007, pp.104–105; 110–111.
- 20.
See ‘Other People’s Money’ 2018.
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Hutchings, P. (2019). ‘Is and Ought’: Yet Again. In: Wong, P., Bloor, S., Hutchings, P., Bilimoria, P. (eds) Considering Religions, Rights and Bioethics: For Max Charlesworth. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18148-2_12
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