The importance of recalling in the form of objections to Hume’s thesis those self-doubts which Diderot put into Rameau’s mouth is not only however a matter of Hume’s inability to transcend the eighteenth century’s egoistic presuppositions. What they point to is a more fundamental weakness which becomes explicit when we consider Hume’s attitude to rival tables of the virtues. One the one hand, Hume sometimes writes as if the knowledge of what is virtuous and what is vicious is a matter of simple reflection open to everyone: ‘The final sentence, it is probable, which pronounces character and
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