ABSTRACT
In Chapter 3 we considered reasons to interpret Hume's moral philosophy as a form of skeptical naturalism, in large part because that enables us to highlight features of his view that he took to be most significant. He was a moral skeptic, if by “moral skepticism” we mean the denial that there are objective moral values. But he was not a skeptic if we mean by that that there are no grounds for distinguishing correct from incorrect moral claims, or for regarding some moral judgments as sound and appropriate and others as unsupported and implausible. He held that there are naturalistic considerations relevant to such distinctions. Hume did not take the denial that there are objective values to have some of the implications often ascribed to it. In this chapter we discuss issues concerning relativism chiefly because it is often associated with the denial of moral objectivity.
