UC San Diego

This dissertation reconstructs David Hume's largely overlooked account of character, examines its role in his theory of virtue and moral philosophy, and explores its relevance for contemporary moral theory. The thesis addresses three issues surrounding Hume's view of character, including what character traits are, how we identify them, and what Hume's account offers to current debates about character and virtue. Previous interpretations of character in Hume require a more robust account of personhood than Hume articulates. In contrast, I argue that a trait is a disposition rooted in the strength of associations between the impressions and ideas that make up the self. This account makes traits real qualities, attributable to persons, without requiring metaphysical claims beyond what Hume makes in his reductionist account of the self. Moreover, I show that a focus on Hume's account of character reveals features of his moral epistemology that have escaped notice. I argue that Hume's moral epistemology requires not only the oft- discussed "general point of view" but also a narrative account of character. That is, inferring character traits from actions requires viewing actions as part of a narrative, making reference to social circumstances, personal beliefs and intentions of the agent, past actions and/or other pieces of relevant contextual information to make a particular action intelligible. I also argue that our assessments of virtue and vice derived from these narrative accounts reveal that traits assessed as virtues or vices vary substantially, according to a person's social and cultural circumstances. This dissertation provides a significant contribution to an area of Hume scholarship by illuminating Hume's often neglected, and poorly understood, conception of the nature of character traits. It also argues that the standard account of Hume's moral epistemology is lacking a necessary feature, namely the emphasis on narrative accounts of character. This reading of Hume poses new challenges, and rewarding answers, to standard questions about virtue and vice. Finally, it proposes a new solution to troubling skepticism about character and virtue