A Golden Manifesto, Part II

Mary Midgley continues her recollection of a golden age of female philosophy.

- Mary Midgley

In the first part of this essay (in Issue 116), I suggested that philosophers have been wrong in thinking that they were engaged in a hunt for a single and infallible answer to moral questions. They can hope to get nearer to right answers, to get further from some demonstrably wrong ones, and to get a better grasp of the kind of wrongness that is causing most trouble here. But none of this will be final.

In his book of 1739, A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume famously claimed that it was impossible to logically derive judgments about values, about what ought to be the case, solely from facts about the world. Here Hume showed no interest in the detailed meaning of the value-judgments themselves, simply treating them as solid, ultimate units. His point was only that they were matters of feeling, not of reason.