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Can Hume Be Read as a Virtue Ethicist?
- Hume Studies
- Hume Society
- Volume 33, Number 1, April 2007
- pp. 91-113
- 10.1353/hms.2011.0234
- Article
- Additional Information
It is not unusual now for Hume to be read as part of a virtue ethical tradition. However there are a number of obstacles in the way of such a reading: subjectivist, irrationalist, hedonistic, and consequentialist interpretations of Hume. In this paper I support a virtue ethical reading by arguing against all these interpretations. In the course of these arguments I show how Hume should be understood as part of a virtue ethical tradition which is sentimentalist in a response-dependent sense, as opposed to Aristotelian.