But before doing so it is important to notice three features of Hume’s treatment of the virtues which recur in other eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century moral philosophies. The first of these concerns the characterization of particular virtues. In a society where there is no longer a shared conception of the community’s good as specified by the good for man, there can no longer either be any very substantial concept of what it is to contribute more or less to the achievement of that good.
