All exam boards: ethics options
As the American political philosopher Larry Arnhart shows in Darwinian Natural Right (1998, p. 72), David Hume argues that although politicians can persuade people to display moral sentiments of kindness and sympathy, this only succeeds because our ‘nature must furnish the materials, and give us some notion of moral distinctions’. Hume’s appeal to sympathy as a foundation for ethics founders, however, on his nominalism because it looks like special pleading. In other words, sympathy has no foundations apart from those an artificially constructed social contract might provide. Hume appeals to nature but has not worked out a basis upon which such nature might be known due to knowledge being little more than ‘habits of mind’.
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