Lorenzo Greco: The Proud Self: A Humean Ethics of Virtue

monograph is a compelling, original, and creative study of Hume's moral philosophy.The book is centred around a guiding question: "can we interpret his account as a genuine form of virtue ethics?" (p.6) to which Greco replies with an affirmative answer.While recognizing that "the category of virtue ethics is not in itself Humean, but rather stems from a modern shift in normative ethics" (p.1), Greco believes that we are justified in "applying virtue ethics, so interesting to us today, as a theoretical lens to see if it can capture the distinctiveness of the Humean moral approach" (p.1).The book's method includes serious textual analysis of Hume's work, yet it is also explicitly engaged in reading it through present-day categories.As such, The Proud Self aims not only to reconstruct Hume's thought but also to contribute to today's discourse around normative ethical theory.In Chaps. 1 and 2, Greco tackles a first, obvious problem that one encounters when thinking of Hume as a virtue ethicist: given his notorious account of personal identity as a bundle of perceptions, it may seem impossible to take Hume as the proposer of an ethic in which character and character traits are central.This is because, if we want to read Hume as a virtue ethicist, we must attribute to him a substantive account of the self.Yet, how can that be squared with Hume's discussion of the self as a bundle of perceptions?Greco tackles this point head-on and highlights a "shift in questions" (p.20) -from metaphysical to practical -between Book 1 and Books 2-3 of the Treatise.In the former, Hume takes a third-personal point of view and is concerned with the reidentification of self across time; in the latter, he takes a first-personal perspective where characterization is central.After a careful analysis of several interpretations of the self in Hume, in Chap.2, Greco proposes his own reading, a narrative conception of the self, which he takes to be "the most successful candidate for articulating Hume's intentions regarding the self as an agent and, as a consequence, the Humean virtuous person" (p.39).