Jim Chamberlain (he/him)

Jim works at the intersection of Hume studies, moral psychology, and metaethics.

In a series of papers, Jim defends a comprehensive reinterpretation of David Hume’s theory of moral judgement. Hume is typically thought to distinguish our immediate, unreflective moral sentiments from our more considered moral judgements, by arguing that we correct for biases in moral sentiment by adopting an imagined ‘common point of view’, from which we then form our considered moral judgements. Jim argues instead that Hume understands all moral judgements as sentiments, which occur automatically whenever we contemplate token characters of types which we generally associate with causing happiness or unhappiness. For example, we all associate benevolence with happiness, and so we all experience moral approbation towards any benevolent character that we encounter. On this interpretation, to adopt a ‘common point of view’ is simply to express our moral sentiments. Hume is thus understood to endorse emotivism: the theory that assertoric moral utterances express emotions or sentiments, not moral beliefs.

Jim is now addressing contemporary evidence that moral judgements are typically produced via purely intuitive psychological processes. He is developing a Humean theory of moral intuition, which broadly reconciles our pre-theoretic understanding of moral reasoning – as typically employed with the aim of forming appropriate moral judgements – with this psychological evidence. Jim also argues in favour of quasi-realist expressivism: roughly, the theory that assertoric moral utterances express moral attitudes, but that we nevertheless rightly talk of moral facts and moral truths.