ABSTRACT
Having offered an account of what the conception of a wanting thing consists in and of its roots in the tradition of empirico-liberalism, I am now in a position to focus on its pervasiveness in Anglo-American thinking about morality in the second half of the twentieth century. The conception of people, and thus of moral agents, as ‘wanting things’ has pervaded Anglo-American moral philosophy from the logical positivism of the 1930s-a linguistically processed version of Hume’s radical and unbridgeable gap between facts and values-to the more sophisticated versions of its successors who strove to deal with that gap by reinterpreting moral language out of all recognition. More significantly, it pervades the quasi-Kantian attempts of those contemporary liberals, pre-eminently John Rawls, who wish to give rationality at least some role; and it infects even the work of communitarian-inspired critics of the empiricist tradition and its attendant liberal enterprise. All these responses to Hume’s challenge fail, and for the same reason. None can in the end bring themselves to challenge Hume’s view of the relation of reason to wants, namely that ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions’,1 and thus they are all committed to retaining what we want as the justification of morality.
