ABSTRACT
Hume’s discussion of human action is not meant to stand alone. It is put forward primarily to illuminate the nature of morality-one of Hume’s earliest and most central interests. Understanding morality involves understanding why and how there comes to be such a thing at all, why we approve or disapprove of any of the people or actions around us, and why we take the particular moral attitudes to them that we do. The aim here, as elsewhere in the science of man, is to explain a pervasive and fundamental part of human life, or at least to lay the foundations for an accurate and detailed naturalistic explanation. And, as elsewhere, this ‘scientific’ goal is to be achieved partly by a negative and partly by a positive phase, with the negative task once again that of repudiating the traditional pretensions of reason.
