The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche by Christine Swanton (review)

Having established her pluralistic account as an influential position within contemporary virtue ethics, in this work Christine Swanton offers a virtue-ethical reading of David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche with the aim of showing how they can further the development of virtue ethics beyond the Aristotelian and ancient eudaemonist traditions (xi). Readers of Swanton’s other major work, Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), may recall that many of its philosophical resources were drawn from Nietzsche and, to a lesser extent, from Hume. This new study can be seen as offering a fuller and more historically grounded reading of the work of both thinkers. Swanton has also published on Hume and Nietzsche separately, and four of her previously published articles have been extensively revised for this volume. For this reason, The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche can be seen as Swanton’s most considered contribution to the interpretation of both these thinkers. We believe it adequately reflects her sustained effort to make Nietzsche’s voice heard in mainstream debates in virtue ethics over the past fifteen years. Since the psychological assumptions common to Hume and Nietzsche that underlie her response-dependent readings of these thinkers are discussed only in the first part of the book and their normative ethics and metaethics are not compared in detail, the second and third parts of the book can be informatively read as two separate monographs, one on Hume and the other on Nietzsche. Following the main interest of the readership of this journal, we focus on Swanton’s reading of Nietzsche, referring to Hume only when doing so elucidates Swanton’s project as a whole.

Swanton sees Hume’s and Nietzsche’s examinations of a wide variety of virtuous character traits described by so-called “thick” concepts—qualities such as being “honest” or being “benevolent”—as the key contribution these thinkers make to the overarching virtue-ethical concern with what constitutes “a good life proper to human beings” (xii). She argues that the relevance of these thinkers for contemporary ethics is most salient if we view them as developing a kind of response-dependent virtue ethics, according to which virtues and values are made intelligible by their capacity to arouse appropriate sensibilities and responses (23). Such sensibilities, Swanton tells us, “make available a basic distinction between the polarities of virtue and vice” (27), although she emphasizes that this does not entail that ethics is based on subjective emotional responses. Once the “world of ethics” is made intelligible by one’s sensibility, the fittingness of one’s virtues to specific situations is determined by criteria that take reason and the findings of the human and natural sciences into account (33–37).

Swanton starts her discussion of Hume’s ethics with his view of sentiment as the source of distinctions between virtue and vice, which also allows her to clarify the sentimentalist basis of the response dependent virtue ethics presented in chapter 2. The main task of chapter 3, in turn, is to argue for the response-dependent reading of Hume as a strong alternative to subjectivist, skeptic, and noncognitivist accounts. For Swanton, Hume remains convinced that ethics can be “a form of reliable, objective interaction with the world, permitting critical purchase on both people’s behaviour and emotions through objectively and socially accessible notions of virtue and vice” (45). In chapter 4 Swanton shows that Hume can retain a standard conception of justice in her response-dependent reading, so that the characteristic motive of the just person is seen as a sense of duty that is independent of consequences or self-interest (71). In her view, the required sense of duty can be produced by the combination of a “mere regard” for justice and a properly Humean natural motive such as compassion (78). Chapter 5 discusses in more detail Hume’s “pluralistic account of the sources of the moral sentiment, the taxonomy...