“We assessment the obtainable documentary proof used to help present assaults on Hume’s ethical character and, particularly, the dual costs that he supported slavery and was a racist…. Hume shouldn’t be responsible on both cost. He didn’t help slavery and he can’t be thought to be a ‘racist’ in any trendy sense of that phrase.”
So write David Ashton and Peter Hutton final month in The Herald, in a bit based mostly on their longer consideration of the matter in Scottish Affairs.
In 2020 a successful campaign was launched to rename what was then called Hume Tower at the University of Edinburgh in response to allegations that Hume expressed racist views and supported slavery.
Ashton and Hutton write:
On the query of slavery, we present that Hume was an implacable and vocal opponent. In his collected works, Hume makes use of the phrase ‘slavery’ in 89 separate locations and, every time he makes a judgement about it, it’s invariably crucial. For him slavery was unjustifiable on any account, and he would have strongly opposed any try to make use of racial variations with a purpose to justify it. To argue in any other case, is solely perverse.
Claims that Hume wrote a letter encouraging Lord Hertford to buy a plantation, beforehand used to help the cost that Hume endorsed slavery, is a misinterpretation, they write:
Hume had been requested to put in writing on behalf of Sir George Colebrook to inform Hertford of a possibility to put money into a plantation. Hume’s solely involvement was as an middleman, speaking the curiosity of 1 social gathering to a different. At no level does he categorical an opinion as as to if Hertford ought to make investments.
They notice that the allegation of Hume’s racism stems from a footnote during which Hume writes “I’m apt to suspect the negroes… to be naturally inferior to the whites.” They are saying that “This isn’t solely surprising however deeply puzzling, as a result of it’s utterly at odds with what he has to say elsewhere in his revealed works,” and attempt to “account for this obvious anomaly.”
Right here’s what they are saying:
Hume’s essay, to which the footnote is connected, was addressing culturally various and geographically separated human societies and their progress from early man to completely developed civilisations. His use of the phrase ‘inferior’ on this context, was not supposed to distinguish between people when it comes to their human worth and rights (which he had already confirmed have been equal in his view), however the growth of their civilisation when it comes to European values— particularly with regard to written historic data. Some might even see this as prejudice on Hume’s half however, in that case, it is just on this restricted sense and it doesn’t quantity to racism. Why not?
Fashionable definitions of racism have at their core, a justification for a disparity in energy—the domination of 1 particular person or group over one other. However it’s exactly this disparity in energy to which Hume was implacably opposed. Because of this, Hume’s feedback within the footnote, while seemingly prejudiced by means of twenty first century eyes, can not, by definition, be racist.
Whether or not others will settle for their distinction between “restricted prejudice” and “trendy racism”, or, in the event that they do, accord the excellence sufficient significance to deem the renaming of the tower “unjust,” because the authors do, stays to be seen.
(through Leiter)
Associated: “Statues, Monuments, & Philosophy“, “The Ethics of Honoring“, “Edinburgh’s Philosophers on the Renaming of Hume Tower“
