Hume’s Mitigated Scepticism and the Problems of Evil

In his various presentations of the problems of evil, Hume stops short of endorsing the conclusion that God is either amoral or immoral. This paper examines two explanations for why Hume did not explicitly endorse the conclusion. According to the dominant explanation, Hume chose not to explicitly endorse the conclusion in order to conceal his true anti-religious views for prudential reasons. In this paper, I defend a less popular explanation, which posits that Hume’s reluctance to endorse such conclusions was due to his sceptical epistemology.

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Daryl Ooi is a lecturer in the Philosophy Department at the National University of Singapore. His primary areas of interests are in Early Modern Philosophy, Chinese Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion and Dialogical Pedagogy.