#hume

Hi my name is Jean-Jacques Rousseau and I have a pretty foot, a fine leg, an easy manner, lively features, a pretty little mouth, black hair and eyebrows and sunken eyes which, however, dart vigorously when my blood is kindled. A lot of people tell me I look like Lucius Junius Brutus (AN: if u don't know who he is get da hell out of here!).

I have only to venture into the streets of my own neighborhood, the West Village, to see such Humean casualties by the thousand: younger people, for the most part, who have grown up in our social-media era, have no personal memory of how things were before, and no immunity to the seductions of digital life. What we are seeing—and bringing on ourselves—resembles a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale.

[For Hume,] morality provides a set of pleasures of its own... Because of sympathy, the sense that you are lovable and worthy in the eyes of others makes you lovable and worthy in your own. For the same reason, the sense that you are detestable in the eyes of others makes you detestable in your own. And morality provides these feelings regardless of whether you think that morality is justified or not. This fact enables Hume to add the familiar claim that virtue is its own reward to his list of the ways in which virtue promotes self-interest without any circularity at all. Together, all of these arguments establish what Hume calls our “interested obligation” to be moral.