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Hume Studies Volume XXVI, Number 1, April 2000, pp. 187-194 Book Reviews JOHN BRICKE, Mind and Morality: An Examination of Hume's Moral Psychology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Pp. χ + 263. ISBN 0-19-823589-5. In this close analysis of Hume's moral psychology, John Bricke treats Hume as a thoroughly systematic thinker who aims for a comprehensive theory of mind. Bricke seeks to reveal the systematic structure of Hume's thought by a process he calls "regimenting" the text. Bricke also has the aim of placing Hume's theory in the context of contemporary action theory, the terms of which are inspired in large part by Davidsonian analyses. To provide a theoretical framework, Bricke starts off with an analysis of practical reason and takes the basic analytical options to be conativism or cognitivism . He then argues that Hume's is a conativist theory of action and moral action. (Bricke subsequently goes on to argue that Hume's view should be understood as an "expanded moral conativism." More on this shortly.) The central concept for conativism is desire: as a reason for action, desire plays an ineliminable motivational role. Bricke provides detailed arguments designed to establish both that for Hume it is desire that plays the essential motivational role for action and that Hume explicitly rejects a cognitivist theory of action, moral action, and moral evaluation. On the face of it, neither of these are controversial claims. In chapter 2, Bricke offers an analysis of the centrality of desire taking Treatise II iii 3 as pivotal to the analysis of action in which desire is central.1 In chapter 3, Bricke extends the analysis to specifically moral action and judgment, taking T III i 1 as a pivotal section. In addition to these two sections of the Treatise—T II iii 3, "Of the influencing motives of the will"; T III i 1, "Moral distinctions not deriv'd from reason "—Bricke includes a third as "pivotal" (2), T III ii 1, "Justice, whether a natural or artificial virtue." The first sections argue, among other things, that Volume XXVI, Number 1, April 2000 188 Book Reviews a passion is an "original fact" or "original existence." This distinctively Humean claim is central to the conativist thesis. Hume characterizes a passion as distinct from a belief in virtue of its not representing something external (or for that matter, internal, i.e., another passion) to the experiencer. Bricke reworks this claim, admitting that the resulting conception may be "only insecurely Hume's" (25), to be a point about how passions, and specifically desires, relate to the world, rather than a denial that they are representational in any sense. This way of relating is defined in terms of the notion "direction of fit." Bricke argues that passions, and specifically desires, as well as beliefs, can have representational content, and even the same representational content. But, whereas a belief can be evaluated in terms of its correctness, that is, in terms of its conformity in some sense to the way the world is, a passion is neither correct nor incorrect; it just is the way some person feels about the world or desires the world to be. Thus, if desire is a species of passion broadly understood , then it is a mental or psychological state whose relation to the world is one that aims for satisfaction; it has a "world-to-mind direction of fit." A belief, on the other hand, is truth-evaluable; it has a "mind-to-world direction of fit." Bricke wants to articulate a conception of passion, and of desire, that adequately distinguishes it from belief and that will "point the way to Hume's conativism" (25). In keeping with his method of regimenting Hume in order to reveal the underlying systematicity of Hume's thought, Bricke combs the Treatise and Enquiries for textual evidence. Given the pivotal role Bricke assigns to T II iii 3 and T III i 1, textual support ought to lie therein as well as elsewhere in the text. In T II iii 3, Hume claims that he is endeavoring "to prove first, that reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the...

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