HUME

Seio Saks
for Miss Tomaselli
supervision Tuesday, 27 Nov, 15:00
(TRIPOS 2012)

Why did Hume argue that justice is an artificial virtue?

For Hume, the virtues are known not by reason but by sentiment. When I witness an action, I
form an idea of its motive by association, and if I have a feeling of moral approval for this motive, I
identify the action as virtuous. The motives which I morally approve can be either natural or
artificial, the product of human inventions. Hume argues that the motive to justice, unlike that to
(say) benevolence, would not exist pre-socially people would not be moved to respect property or
obligation if the relevant social conventions did not exist, and therefore this respect would not be a
virtue. The social conventions which produce rules of justice develop as men gradually realise that
they are in their self-interest. Once its utility is known, the motive of respect for justice also
becomes morally approved, through the operation of sympathy and the influence of education. The
virtue of justice is artificial because it refers to man-made conventions, and cannot be understood in
abstraction from the human creation of society.
Hume's key discussion of justice is found in part two of Book III of the Treatise of Human
Nature (henceforth Treatise), published in London 1739-40. He does not set out with a definition,
but we can infer one from his usage of the term. The stability of possessions, he says, is established
by the laws of society, that is, by the laws of justice (Treatise p.264). Governments are
responsible for the execution and decision of justice (p.303). Justice therefore seems to mean
respect for the law, especially for the three Laws of Nature: the stability of possession... its
transference by consent [and] the performance of promises (p. 293, p.310). It is often contended
that justice, for Hume, mostly concerns property (Forbes 1975, Moore 1976) not surprisingly
when two of the three basic laws explicitly govern property, and a key role of the third is to enable
commercial contracts.
However, if the fundamental laws of justice are Laws of Nature, what does it mean to say
that justice is an artificial virtue? Hume explains that natural and artificial are not opposites in
every sense, but only where natural means non-artificial (Treatise p.258). Justice is artificial
because the laws of justice only exist in human society, which they serve to enable. They are
conventions which develop gradually from the interaction of people who begin to realise the
benefits of society. This is why they are artificial: they cannot be understood apart from or prior to
the development of society. Yet they are natural in the extended sense that they are common to
and even inseparable from the human species it is natural for humans to invent justice and
society.
In claiming this, Hume is repudiating a number of thinkers who believed that justice was
natural in a more direct sense. Most of them could be divided into three groups (Moore 1976) based
on what they meant by natural justice: 1) based on a natural sentiment, like the sex instinct
(Shaftesbury) or the moral sense (Hutcheson); 2) based on laws discovered by reason in the nature
of things (the natural lawyers), 3) based on the natural right to property (Locke and followers).
Hume borrowed from both Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, but he argued that men's natural affections
were limited to family and close kin and thus could not found the impartial virtue of justice. Against
the natural right and natural law views, Hume argued that reason could not discern a natural virtue
of justice.
Forbes (1976) suggests that necessary but silent support for the latter argument is the
denial that reason could trace justice back to God's commands. This denial can be inferred from
Hume's arguments against natural religion, found in the suppressed parts of the Treatise, in the
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), and most extensively in Dialogues Concerning
Natural Religion (1779, published posthumously). In the latter Hume cast strong doubts on the

popular Newtonian idea that experimental reasoning could reveal substantial truths about God and
his attributes. If it could not, then appeal to God's commands would have no place in an
experimental science of man and society, and the theological route to natural law would be
blocked.
It is certainly the case that Hume has little to say about the divine in the Treatise. However,
if his denial that reason could discern virtue via discerning God is implicit, his denial that reason
could discern virtue directly is explicit. He offers several arguments against the view that morality
is based on reason. For example, actions result from passions (emotions), never from reason alone,
which by itself is inert. Therefore moral views cannot be articles of reason, because they influence
behaviour, but reason does not. Reason is the slave of the passions, related to action insofar as it
can discover the circumstances to which the passions respond.
Reason could be the basis of morality if there were objective moral values out there waiting
to be discovered, but Hume's epistemology has no room for anything of the kind. For Hume,
everything the mind perceives is either an impression (sensation, emotion etc.) or an idea (the
faint copy of an impression). Hence we cannot have an idea of anything we haven't previously had a
direct impression of. But we have no direct impression of an objective moral value (what kind of a
thing is it? What does it look or feel like?)
To see this we need to consider the way we make moral judgments. Let's say that when I
contemplate action A, I have the impression A is morally good. But this impression is not an
impression of any objective moral quality in the action itself. Contemplating the theft of a wallet,
for example, we have an impression of moral wrongness. But there is no moral entity hidden in
any of the circumstances: the external movements, the relation of ownership, the violation of the
law. The impression of moral wrongness arises internally from the mind it is a response to
viewing the circumstances, but it is not an impression of any particular circumstance as such.
This bears a resemblance to the views of Hutcheson, and is analogous to Hume's account of
causation. (The extent of Hutcheson's influence has become the subject of fresh debate: eg Moore
1995). Hume argues that our idea of causal connection arises from a habit of the mind, not from any
external reality that we perceive. When we repeatedly see that C is followed by E, we form the habit
of expecting E to follow C, and this habitual expectation induces us to say that C causes E.
However, we do not perceive a cause or causal connection in object C, object E, or anywhere in
the physical world. Rather, what gives rise to the idea of cause is the impression of the expectation
of E when we see C. The idea of cause results from a custom or habit internal to the mind. We
cannot show that there is any objectively real thing called causation beyond this habit itself.
The same goes for the ideas of moral virtue and vice they are not derived from rational
demonstrations, but from an internal, affective response to externally perceived actions. Hume has
therefore successfully answered the natural lawyers' claims about a natural justice based on reason.
However, there could still be a non-artificial virtue of justice on Hume's own account or a similar
one, such as Hutcheson's, who founded justice on a natural feeling of benevolence.
In arguing against such a view, Hume elaborates his account of our judgment of virtue what triggers the response of moral (dis)approbation is not the action itself but the motive that we
infer, and so our judgment of virtue refers to the motive of the action (Treatise III.2.i, p.252). On this
basis, Hume offers a somewhat thorny argument to demonstrate that justice cannot be a natural
virtue. A benevolent action (like giving money to the poor) is perceived as virtuous on the basis of
the natural motive of benevolence. By comparison, a just action (like paying back a loan) is
perceived as virtuous on the basis of the motive of honesty or regard to justice (p.254). This is
acceptable to civilised but not to natural man, who rejects it as circular: the virtue of a just act
cannot consist in the motive of justice, because this would mean that the virtue of the act consists in
the motive to act virtuously, and so this motive could not itself identify the virtuous act.
However, this would only be circular if acting virtuously is equivalent to acting justly, but it
doesn't seem that Hume wants to say this: benevolent acts are virtuous, but not required by strict
justice. What Hume seems to intend is that the motive which makes an act virtuous must precede
the idea of the relevant virtue, and that this is the case for benevolence but not for justice though

we don't yet know why and therefore benevolence is natural but not justice.
To make sense of the charge of circularity, we must note that it is made by natural man. It is
natural man who cannot fathom the motive of justice that underlies the civilised man's just acts,
and therefore accuses him of acting according to an arbitrary notion. The difference, however,
simply lies in the fact that in natural man the motive of justice does not exist, because that motive
makes no sense outside of society. This is what Hume needs to demonstrate to make good his claim
that the virtue of justice is artificial.
For Hume, society and justice appear only where men possess limited sympathies and exist
in conditions of scarcity. If they possessed universal benevolence (like Hutcheson's man) and lived
among plenty, justice would be superfluous. If they were irredeemably selfish (like Hobbes' man)
and lived in extreme scarcity, justice would be impossible. Given limited generosity and scarcity,
however, men gradually learn to see that it is in the interest of them and their families to pursue
certain forms of co-operation with other families. Thus, the artificial Laws of Nature property,
its transfer, and promise-keeping insensibly develop, not as explicitly stated rules but a sense of
the common interest. These remedy the greatest insecurities of the state of nature, and while
society is small, the threat of exclusion is enough to guarantee that these laws are kept. Once men
become aware of the benefits of e.g. promise-keeping, they have an incentive to keep their word lest
they forfeit their trust.
Accordingly, Hume rejects the idea of basing society on a promise or contract there
could be no such thing as a promise prior to the social convention of promise-keeping. No act of
will or utterance could create an obligation unless there was already a social agreement defining
what it means to be obliged to someone. This and the other basic laws of justice emerge as a result
of men's increasingly intelligent self-interest. Eventually, however, justice comes to be seen not
only as prudent but as morally virtuous. Hume offers a number of reasons for this: one is the
operation of sympathy, which generates moral approval for actions in view of the pleasure and
benefit they produce for the agent and those affected. (In the case of justice, however, it seems that
this can only be sympathy with the overall common good of general observance, since as Hume
points out, individual acts of justice may cause displeasure and harm.) The virtuous character of
justice is reinforced by the education offered by parents, and, once government is created, the
efforts of politicians. (Hume borrows this notion from Mandeville, while rejecting his claim that
politicians alone invent the virtue of justice.)
It is after the creation of society, then, that justice begins to be seen as a virtue. However,
when society becomes larger neither interest nor morality are enough to restrain men's natural desire
for immediate gain at the expense of others and of their own long-term good. This leads to the
invention of government and the appointment of magistrates to adjudicate and enforce the laws of
justice, so that following them is in everyone's short-term as well as long-term interest. (This, of
course, should include the magistrates themselves. Here it is good institutions that are to be relied
on rather than good men, since the intrinsic partiality of human nature must always be reckoned
with.)
Forbes (1975, ch.2) argues that there is a basic contradiction in Hume's notion of justice,
since it is founded on two conflicting motives: immediate self-interest and the benefit of strictly
following the laws of property and justice. If a certain section of society were to become
exceedingly poor, Forbes suggests, this notion of justice would lead to dangerous tensions. But
justice only becomes contradictory in this way when certain conditions no longer obtain, and
Hume was well aware of that. Justice is only created in an average situation between extreme lack
and extreme plenty, and ceases to apply when that situation stops Hume believed, for example,
that magistrates had the right to open private granaries and distribute grain to the poor at set prices,
not merely in a situation of actual starvation, but even in less urgent necessities. (Hont 2005). In
general, however, Hume shared the assumption with Smith and other thinkers of the Scottish
Enlightenment that commercial society and private property would serve the poor as well as the
rich. He saw an opportunity for poorer countries in their low wages (Hont 2005). As Moore (1976)
emphasises, however, this belief formed part of a system based on experimental, or experiential

reason, suggesting a potential willingness to adjust for conflicting evidence.

Hume saw dangers too in commercial society, notably the jealousy of trade and the growing
national debt. Private property, however, remains key to his account of society. Moore (1976) has
gone further and suggested that his notion of property (contra Locke) and his British social context
underlay his account of causation and indeed the whole of the Treatise. In this case, Hume's thought
would seem to move from account of law and justice morals epistemology. This is in
opposition to a more traditional account which might go morals epistemology account of law
and justice, emphasising Hutcheson's influence (largely denied by Moore 1994). However, though
there is evidence of careful reading of Roman law in the Treatise, it seems that more would be
required to make Moore's claim stick. There are, after all, numerous other influences mentioned by
Hume, including Berkeley, Locke, Descartes, Bayle etc.
It is not immediately obvious that Hume's account of society is wholly reducible to his
epistemology, or vice versa. However, both are tightly joined in his attack on the various theories of
natural justice of the moral sense school, the natural lawyers and natural rights theorists. Hume
argues that reason cannot discern the virtues moral approval is an emotion, triggered by
contemplating the motive of action. However, this not preclude the possibility that justice is a
motive which we naturally approve. Hume goes on to argue that for man prior to the social
convention of justice, there could not be such a motive. The rules of justice arise gradually, a
product of the artifice of society, and eventually obtain the standing of virtues. For Hume, justice is
an artificial virtue because a social invention, even if it is a necessary one.
Bibliography
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (London
1886)
R. Cohon, Hume's Moral Philosophy (2010), in Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy
D. Forbes, Humes Philosophical Politics, (Cambridge, 1975)
I. Hont, Jealousy of Trade (Cambridge, Mass, 2005)
J. Moore, Humes Theory of Justice and Property, Political Studies, 24 (1976), 10319.
J. Moore, Hume and Hutcheson, in M. A. Stewart and J. P. Wright (eds), Hume and
Humes Connexions, (Edinburgh, 1994), pp. 25-37