Not Moderately Moral: Why Hume Is Not a “Moderate Moralist”

In the debates over the moral content of artworks, the group whose views are known variously as “ethicism,” “moralism,” or “moderate moralism” has claimed Hume as one of its own, and this supposed kinship has gone largely uncontested. We argue, contra Gaut and others, that the “merited response argument” is not to be found in Hume, and that he was not a (moderate) moralist in the current sense. Hume did indeed hold that our moral responses contribute to aesthetic assessment, but this does not amount to the claim that moral flaws in works of art are also aesthetic flaws.