Shadow-Boxing: Humean Selves and Moral Judgement

This is the Humean "self": It is a reality known to us only by virtue of resemblance amongst our perceptions and impressions; a unity and a permanent existence which we cannot refrain from conceiving because of the causal relations through the life of mind. The implications are such that we can only ever know Hume's "self" as an historical entity and, at best, our knowledge can only ever be approximate. Our judgements must therefore refer to varying instantiations of "self" rather than an enduring self. Assuming the authenticity and adequacy of judgements only hold so long as the judgement actually refers to the nature of the judged, judgement must prove superfluous and obsolete the moment one's "identity" changes.Hardly free of criticism, Hume's theory has met with some longstanding and intuitively-appealing objections. I take the most persuasively argued to be those put forth by Terence Penelhum, Barry Stroud and Jane L. McIntyre. Not surprisingly, then, this dissertation is largely preoccupied with examining the subtleties of these arguments, why they are intuitively appealing and well-received, and why they should not be.