ABSTRACT
In order to ‘remedy this confusion of names’ (EAP 78) and to offer a more ‘distinct and just view of the various principles of action,’ (EAP 75) Reid often finds himself correcting and commenting on what he considers to be misunderstandings among earlier philosophers. Among the views which Reid seeks to rectify we find explicit mention of the accounts of David Hume, Adam Smith, and those philosophers who tend to understand the ultimate end of human action to be pleasure (the Epicureans, as Reid calls them), and those who understand it as self-love (he calls their account the Selfish system). When it comes to the passions, Reid reproaches Hume of different shortcomings, such as attributing too much importance to the role of pleasure and displeasure as grounds of the passions, in thinking that all motives are passions, and in failing to recognize the existence of a different kind of motives: the rational motives. Reid thinks that a more careful observation of the motives that move many brute animals, infants, madmen, but also adult human beings, is in order. For Reid, the Epicureans, the Egoists, and other sentimentalist philosophers are wrong to stress the primary role of pleasure and displeasure in grounding moral evaluations. They are correct, however, to recognize that moral evaluation is not always a matter of deductive reasoning, and, as I will show in this paper, to acknowledge the importance of passions in human moral life.
