Friday, March 05, 2004

Hume's Law -- Let me know if you want to read my paper.

I posted last week on Hume's Law -- since then, I've completed a draft of a short (10-page) paper on the topic. If anyone is interested in reading it, please email me or leave a note with your email address. I'd very much appreciate comments. If they come in the next few days, I may incorporate them into my paper before turning it in. If they come afterward, they will enrich my intellectual experience and may be incorporated into any future work I do on the topic. Either way's good. In my paper, I consider three puzzles that arise from Hume's Law. Hume's Law seems intuitively right, but it's difficult to say why and how. The first puzzle is, "Why does Hume introduce the principle? What work does it do for him?" The second is, "Can we formalize Hume's Law in a way that avoids trivial counterexamples?" The third is, "Does the principle of 'ought implies can' pose an insuperable threat to Hume's Law?" I attempt to solve all three puzzles by limiting the scope of Hume's Law to motivational morality.

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