What's Wrong with Benevolence

Happiness, Private Property, and the Limits of Enlightenment

David Stove, Andrew Irvine, Andrew Irvine

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781594035517
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Politische Philosophie

Is benevolence a virtue? In many cases it appears to be so. But when it comes to the "enlarged benevolence" of the Enlightenment, David Stove argues that the answer is clearly no. In this insightful, provocative essay, Stove builds a case for the claim that when benevolence is universal, disinterested and external, it regularly leads to the forced redistribution of wealth, which in turn leads to decreased economic incentives, lower rates of productivity, and increased poverty.As Stove points out, there is an air of paradox in saying that benevolence may be a cause of poverty. But there shouldn't be. Good intentions alone are never sufficient to guarantee the success of one's endeavors. Utopian schemes to reorganize the world have regularly ended in failure.Easily the most important example of this phenomenon is twentieth-century communism. As Stove reminds us, the attractiveness of communism—the "emotional fuel" of communist revolutionaries for over a hundred years—has always been "exactly the same as the emotional fuel of every other utopianism: the passionate desire to alleviate or abolish misery." Yet communism was such a monumental failure that millions of people today are still suffering its consequences.In this most prescient of essays, Stove warns contemporary readers just how seductive universal political benevolence can be. He also shows how the failure to understand the connection between benevolence and communism has led to many of the greatest social miseries of our age.

A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF D.C.(DAVID CHARLES) STOVE AND RELATED WRITINGS

COMPILED BY JAMES FRANKLIN, ANDREW IRVINE, SCOTT CAMPBELL, AND SELMAN HALABI

A.	Books	127
B.	Articles	166
C.	Reviews	198
D.	Letters	203
E.	Obituaries, Reminiscences, and Additional Discussion	205
F.	Unpublished	209

Inactive internet links often may be found
archived at The Internet Archive,
www.archive.org

dp n="145" folio="126" ?dp n="146" folio="127" ?

A. BOOKS

Probability and Hume’s Inductive Scepticism.

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Object and Plan of the Book

Part One: Some Remarks on Probability

1. Chiefly on Statements of Logical Probability

Part Two: Hume’s Argument for Inductive Scepticism: Identification

2. Its Structure and Content

3. Its Suppressed Premisses

4. Its Further Interpretation and Generalization

Part Three: Hume’s Argument for Inductive Scepticism: Evaluation

5. The Falsity of Its Sceptical Conclusion

6. The Falsity of Its Deductivist Premiss

7. The Truth and Importance of Its Fallibilist Consequence

8. Our Historical Debts to Hume’s Argument for Scepticism

9. Concluding Remarks

Appendix

Index

REVIEWS

S. Blackburn, “Past Certainties and Future Possibilities,” Times Literary Supplement, 3727 (August 10, 1973), 935; discussed in J. L. Mackie and S. Blackburn, “Hume and Induction,” Times Literary Supplement, 3734 (September 28, 1973), 1133; and J. L. Mackie and S. Blackburn, “Hume and Induction,” Times Literary Supplement, 3736 (October 12, 1973), 1234; with Stove’s reply in “Hume, Induction and the Irish” (1976).

dp n="147" folio="128" ?

J. Janssens, in Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 35 (1973), 646–647.

A. Flew, in Philosophical Quarterly, 24 (1974), 72–73.

I. M. Fowlie, in Philosophical Books, 15:2 (May 1974), 24–26.

I. Hinckfuss, in Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 52 (1974), 269–276; with Stove’s reply in “Hume, Induction and the Irish” (1976).

A. C. Michalos, in Philosophia, 4 (1974), 375–379.

J. F. Fox, in British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 26 (1975), 85–87.

C. A. Hooker, in Hume Studies, 1 (1975), 25–29.

D. W. Livingston, in Journal of the History of Philosophy, 13 (1975), 413–415.

M. Williams, in Philosophical Review, 84 (1975), 453–457.

E. Millstone, in Mind, 85 (1976), 297–298.

R. George, in Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 7 (1977), 203–211.

DISCUSSION AND CITATION

J. E. Adler, “Stove on Hume’s Inductive Scepticism,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 53 (1975), 167–170; with Stove’s reply in “Hume, Induction and the Irish” (1976).

S. Waterlow, “On a Proposed Refutation of Hume,” Analysis, 36 (1975), 43–46.

P. J. McGrath, “Hume’s Inductive Scepticism,” Philosophical Studies (Ireland), 24 (1976), 64–81.

J. Cassidy, “The Nature of Hume’s Inductive Scepticism: A Critical Notice,” Ratio, 19 (1977), 47–54.

B. Stroud, “Causality and the Inference from the Observed to the Unobserved: The Negative Phase,” chap. 3 in Hume (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 42–67.

dp n="148" folio="129" ?

G. Gawlick, “Zwischen Empirismus und Skeptizismus,” Philosophische Rundschau, 26 (1979), 161–186.

W. K. Goosens, “Stove and Inductive Scepticism,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 57 (1979), 79–84.

J. Immerwahr, “A Skeptic’s Progress: Hume’s Preference for the First Enquiry,” in McGill Hume Studies, ed. D. F. Norton, N. Cap - aldi, and W. L. Robison (San Diego: Austin Hill Press, 1979), 227–238.

D. M. Armstrong, What Is a Law of Nature? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 57.

P. Engel, “Hume et le commencement de la philosophie,” Critique, 39(1983), 960–981.

K. Gemes, “A Refutation of Inductive Scepticism,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 6 1 (1983), 434–438; repr. in David Hume: Critical Assessments, vol. 2, Induction, Scepticism, ed. S. Tweyman (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 44–48.

S. A. Grave, A History of Philosophy in Australia (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1984), 192–193.

G. J. D. Moyal and S. Tweyman, Early Modern Philosophy: Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Politics–Essays in Honour of Robert F. McRae (Delmar, N.Y.: Caravan Books, 1986), 133.

B. Janz, “Reason, Inductive Inference, and True Religion in Hume,” Dialogue (Canada), 27 (1988), 721–726.

W. E. Morris, “Hume’s Refutation of Inductive Probabilism,” in Probability and Causality, ed. J. H. Fetzer (Dordrecht and Boston: Reidel, 1988), 43–77.

C. Belshaw, “Scepticism and Madness,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 67 (1989), 447–451.

R. J. Bench, “Paradigms, Methods and the Epistemology of Speech Pathology: Some Comments on Eastwood (1988),” British Journal of Disorders of Communication, 26 (1991), 235–242.

dp n="149" folio="130" ?

K. R. Merrill, “Hume’s ‘Of Miracles,’ Peirce, and the Balancing of Likelihoods,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 29 (1991), 85–113.

A. W. Sparkes, Talking Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 288.

B. Maund, “History and Philosophy of Science in Australia,” in Essays on Philosophy in Australia, ed. J. T. J. Srzednicki and D. Wood (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer, 1992), 243–46.

L. Cataldi Madonna, “Humes skeptisches Argument gegen die Vernunft,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 75 (1993), 179–194.

M. Levin, “Reliabilism and Induction,” Synthese, 97 (1993), 297–334.

M. Markel, “Induction, Social Constructionism, and the Form of the Science Paper,” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 23 (1993), 7–22.

A. Rosenberg, “Hume and the Philosophy of Science,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hume, ed. D. F. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 77.

R. Niklaus, “Voltaire and English Empiricism,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 48 (1994), 9–24.

P. J. R. Millican, “Hume’s Argument Concerning Induction: Structure and Interpretation,” in David Hume: Critical Assessments, vol. 2, Induction, Scepticism, ed. S. Tweyman (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 91–144; repr. in Hume: General Philosophy, ed. D. W. D. Owen (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), 165–218.

A. G. Padgett, “The Mutuality of Theology and Science: An Example from Time and Thermodynamics,” Christian Scholar’s Review, 26 (1996), 12–35; and online at www2.luthersem.edu/apadgett/mutuality.html

R. Weintraub, “The Sceptical Life,” Dialectica, 50 (1996), 225–233.

dp n="150" folio="131" ?

L. Falkenstein, “Hume’s Answer to Kant,” Noûs, 32 (1998), 331–360.

R. Lantin, “Hume and the Problem of Induction,” Philosophia, 26:1–2 (1998), 105–117.

A. Mura, “Hume’s Inductive Logic,” Synthese, 115 (1998), 303–331.

J. Greco, “Agent Reliabilism,” Philosophical Perspectives, 13 (1999), 273–296.

...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Introduction
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V
• VI
• VII
• VIII
• IX
• X
• XI
• XII
• XIII
• XIV
• XV
• XVI
• A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF D.C.(DAVID CHARLES) STOVE AND RELATED WRITINGS
• Acknowledgements
• NOTES
• INDEX
• A NOTE ON THE TYPE
• Copyright Page