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Religion and Faction in Hume's Moral Philosophy. Jennifer Herdt.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 292 pages. Hardcover, $59.95. (Reviewed by Michael D. Garral, Johns Hopkins University)
Traditionally, Hume scholars have privileged the study of Hume's epistemology, so much so that upon extending their analyses to his critique of morality and religion, the leading concern has remained epistemological. More often than not, this bias has served to thin out Hume's philosophical corpus by omitting his non-epistemological works from consideration. The result has not only been a fragmenting of Hume's oeuvre, but a narrowing of our understanding of how his conception of morality intersects with his worries about the social effects of religious zeal and faction.
In her new book, Religion and Faction in Hume's Moral Philosophy, Jennifer Herdt attempts to rectify this imbalance by giving an account of Hume which "resists allowing the tail of epistemology to wag the dog of critical reflection about ethics, religion, and society" (xi). Indeed, Herdt sees Hume's epistemological worries as "not only secondary to" but "actually driven by" his concerns about religious zeal and faction (9). Although she does not directly defend this claim, Herdt goes on to interpret "Hume's project" ( 10) as an attempt to determine the sources of, and solution to, social and religious strife. Herdt therefore reads everything from the Treatise to the History with an eye to fleshing out Hume's secular "search for shared public vocabularies" (xii).
At the center of Hume's project, Herdt tells us, is his development of a conception of sympathy that captures our ability to appreciate another's beliefs, motives, goals, and values. Herdt characterizes sympathy as an outgrowth of the modern natural-law tradition which challenged the medieval emphasis on the common good by highlighting the reality of different and disconnected individual concerns. Such a reality, however, threatened to undermine not only human cooperation,but also the idea of moral authority. After all, if individuals are primarily self-interested, then what sanctions the claims of morality? And further, why should the distinctive, separate claims of others motivate one to act for their sake?
The "solution" to these queries, Herdt contends, lay in the principle of sympathy, which offered "a way of bridging the gap [between persons] by connecting us with the 'interiors'...