ABSTRACT
This chapter provides David Hume in a fundamental debate in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries concerning morality's normatively-its power to obligate. Moreover, since Kant's revolutionary theory of moral obligation is perhaps best appreciated as an attempt to work out problems inherited from these two traditions, understanding Hume's relation to them should improve our understanding of Hume's relation to Kant. Most obviously, Hume would have to abandon the fundamental principle of his virtue ethics, that all merit derives from "mental qualities". Hume's approach is distinguished most sharply from Hutcheson's by the idea that justice is realized by social practices that require a different concept of obligation from either Hutchesonian natural or moral obligation, viz., rule-obligation. Hutcheson's own view is that every virtuous motive is an instance of benevolence and that universal benevolence is both the morally best, and no less a rational, motive than self-love.
