Hume
Article
Hume is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 23, 2021 and October 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Wright approvingly quotes Hume”; “Hume seems to be trying to make this same distinction in his eight days of darkness example”. It most often appears alongside 767 AD, @Scientific_Bird, ACX.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: April 23, 2021
- Last seen: October 30, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- 767 AD (1 shared issues)
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- @Scientific_Bird (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- ACX community (1 shared issues)
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- AI 2027 (1 shared issues)
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- Alzheimer’s (1 shared issues)
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- Andrew Hammel (1 shared issues)
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- Andrew Snyder-Beattie (1 shared issues)
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- Angry Birds (1 shared issues)
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- Anthropic (1 shared issues)
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- Anton Leicht (1 shared issues)
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- Asterisk (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
How might you try to become such a perfect moral agent? Well, if you can only act via your feelings, the only route seems to be to selectively strengthen some feelings over others. That's how David Hume thinks of morality. On Hume’s view, feelings come in two kinds: the violent and calm passions. The former include things such as rage and hatred; the latter - compassion, love, and the sense of beauty. Wright approvingly quotes Hume and claims that
27: Also Fatima-related: in the comments highlights post, I linked FLWAB’s criticism of David Hume’s argument against ever believing miracles. Joe James argues that FLWAB, myself, and other critics are misunderstanding Hume’s argument. FLWAB says no he isn’t. They continue the discussion in the comments, but neither comes off looking great, and they don’t get anywhere. I’m unfortunately still confused - there are many cases where something that never happened before happens for the first time. For example, nobody had ever seen a grizzly-polar bear hybrid until recently, so “the universal testimony of mankind” was that this didn’t happen. But when a reliable person did see it, we had little trouble imagining that we were wrong and it was simply very rare, or a new thing happening now because of climate change. If nobody has ever seen a sea part before, but then many people say they saw Moses part the Red Sea, what is different about this such that “the universal testimony of mankind” suddenly becomes a disqualifier? Hume seems to be trying to make this same distinction in his eight days of darkness example, but there it seems like he is only saying he will accept non-religious anomalies, but rule out religious ones, because religious people often lie. But then what happened to the “universal testimony of mankind” argument? I kind of get the impression that he’s groping towards Bayes’ Theorem, but hard-coding in a belief that the prior probability of lots of religious people lying is higher than the probability of a miracle. If that’s his belief, then fair enough, but I guess I expected the much-vaunted Hume’s Argument Against Miracles to be something more than this.