Objectivity and Perfection in Hume’s Hedonism

David Hume’s value theory—in particular, his theory of prudential value or self-interest—is rarely investigated in any depth. Though he makes a number of claims about what is in someone’s interest (including his discussion of the prudential value of the virtues in the second Enquiry1), there is very little material in Hume’s philosophic writing that yields a clear statement of his theory of what makes people better-off, and why Hume’s various claims about the prudential value of virtue or any other qualities might or might not follow from them. In this essay, I intend to investigate Hume’s account of the nature of selfinterest (or, interchangeably, “happiness”, “welfare. In essence, my reading is this: Hume was a hedonist. He believed that pleasure and pain are the only things that influence the prudential value of a life. But Hume was a hedonist of extraordinary sophistication. His hedonism intriguingly blends traditional hedonism with a perfectionist value theory leaving a version of qualitative hedonism with—in something of a coup for qualitative hedonists—a clear and compelling rationale for the relative value of higher and lower pleasures. My reading of Hume’s view arises in the main as a result of trying to answer one simple question about Hume’s hedonism. In §2, I raise, for Hume, a “meta-evaluative” question that arises for any hedonist theory of prudential value: what is the source of pleasure’s goodness? Is it the case that pleasure is good because pleasure is desired, or wanted, or is otherwise the subject of an authoritative pro-attitude (call this “subjective hedonism”)? Or is it the case that pleasure is good independently of such pro-attitudes (call this “objective hedonism”)? I discuss the answer to this question in