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(2009) Hume on motivation and virtue, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
In "What Kind of Virtue Theorist is Hume?" I was concerned to show that Hume's moral theory should be understood as a pluralistic virtue theory. The emphasis was on the pluralistic character of his criteria of virtue rather than on arguments for reading him as a virtue ethicist per se. (I argue for a virtue ethical reading of Hume in "Can Hume be Read as a Virtue Ethicist?" in Hume Studies, April 2007, Vol. 33, No.1, 91–113.) Nonetheless, implicit in the paper is a virtue ethical reading, so it is useful to say something about such a reading. It is important first to distinguish virtue ethics as a genus of moral theory from virtue ethics as a species. Virtue ethics has often been defined in terms of one of its species, Aristotelian virtue ethics. Such a definition makes a virtue ethical reading of Hume problematic, unless of course one interprets Hume as some kind of Aristotelian. It is my view that Hume should not be so interpreted, so a virtue ethical reading of him has to be non-Aristotelian. So the question arises, what is virtue ethics as a genus? Here are the central tenets.
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Swanton, C. (2009)., Reply to Baier, in C. R. Pigden (ed.), Hume on motivation and virtue, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 259-263.
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