This is a very long, sometimes twisty reading. But Hume, to his credit, gives you the major structure in the first paragraph. He says he will answer two questions (I will translate a bit).
Supposing the rules of justice are artificial, how are they created?
Why do we regard them as moral rules?
Hume’s answer to the first question ranges from paragraphs 2-22. He gives a general theory of conventions that includes non-moral phenomena such as languages as well as what he regards as the central case for justice, namely, property.
His answer to the second question occupies only five paragraphs: 23-28. And, annoyingly, he says that the answer depends on his account of the natural virtues. To cut to the chase, the answer is that we naturally sympathize with others: we feel what others do. We feel good about people who are motivated to comply with the rules of justice because those rules serve the public good and we sympathize with the public that benefits from them (par. 24).
The trick is that conventions are established and maintained by self-interested motivations. Acting in self-interest is obviously not a virtue on its own. But conventions make otherwise non-moral behavior into morally virtuous (or vicious) behavior. That is the idea. It is why the justice is an artificial virtue (and vice); it has these moral characteristics only because of human conventions.
Human beings need to live in societies (pars. 2-3). But there are two deep sources of anti-social behavior that have to be overcome.
Our limited generosity; we do not care very much about people outside of our immediate circle. (pars. 5-6)
Scarcity; there is not enough stuff for everyone to get what they want (par. 7).
If there were no scarcity, as in the Garden of Eden or the Golden Age (see below), limited generosity would not matter very much. It would be like air is among us. There is no such thing as “my air.” We just all breathe whatever air is around our heads. And if we were benevolent, maybe scarcity would not matter; everyone would share. But, alas, there are definite limits both to our generosity and in the goods available to us.
According to Hobbes, this leads to fruitless war as we all try to get the things we need from one another. The war is fruitless because no one is ever secure. Whatever you have can be taken away by someone else. Hobbes explains his thinking in the famous thirteenth chapter of Leviathan, which has been included as optional reading on the sakai site; I also included some notes on Hobbes at the bottom of this page.
Hobbes believes that the only solution is the state, which will set down rules and punish people for violating them. Hume thinks the problems Hobbes notes have obvious solutions that do not require the state. His example of the rowboat in paragraph 10 illustrates his thinking. The idea is that rules establishing property rights are just as obvious as rowing is in the rowboat case. It is in our interests to establish and comply with the rules establishing property rights, just as it is in our interest to row, provided everyone else does the same.
Hume thinks that his analysis of the function of justice shows that it is not discovered by reason. Justice solves the problem posed by the combination of limited generosity and scarcity. If either of those conditions did not exist, there would be no point to it. Again, for us, there is no such thing as owning the air we breathe even though it is, obviously, vital. It is so abundant that we do not need property rights in air in order to live together and so it does not occur to us that there would be such a thing. For Hume, that means that justice is not the sort of thing that could be discovered by reason. It isn’t an eternal logical truth or fact to be discovered. It is something that is created in response to a specific problem. By the same token, it is not part of human nature either in the way that, say, parental affection for their children is nearly instinctual (pars. 16-17).
He also thinks the conventional analysis of justice explains its paradoxical nature. Acting justly can require doing things that seem pretty bad, like repaying a debt to a seditious bigot. Taken by itself, that would be a bad thing to do. But we think you have to do it anyway: a debt has to be paid and all. Why? What’s the point of doing something stupid like that? Hume’s answer is that while the particular repayment may be pointless, maintaining the system of conventional rules is very important. The individual act is important because it is part of an important system. See paragraph 22.
That paragraph, par. 22, is also very important for seeing how Hume thinks conventions work. It repays careful study.
Justice is established by conventions; the rules of justice are conventional rules. So are languages; the rules of English are conventional rules as are the rules of Spanish and Chinese, and so on.
But we treat the rules of justice as moral rules: we think that people who obey they are virtuous and those who disobey them are vicious. Why?
That is what Hume tackles in paragraphs 23-25. The answer, in brief, turns on the mechanism of sympathy. Our hands are a little tied here because he is not going to describe sympathy until he gives his theory of the natural virtues. But we can get the basic idea: we think justice is a virtue because the rules of justice are necessary for society and we sympathize with the public good.
Paragraph 24 is where the story is laid out; I would look at that one pretty carefully.
Note that Hume slides between two things in this paragraph.
Why do observers feel that someone who is disposed to follow the rules of justice is virtuous? (And the person who is disposed to disobey them is vicious.)
Why is anyone motivated to comply with the rules of justice? To put it in Hume’s lingo, why do we have a “sense of moral good and evil” that motivates us to follow the rules and makes us feel guilty when we break them?
Hume closes with a series of observations on the following topics.
Are the rules of justice a deliberate creation of “politicians” who seek to control and perhaps manipulate people? (par. 25)
More remarks on why anyone would be motivated to be just. (pars. 26-27)
A remark meant to qualify his claim that there is no such thing as justice or injustice in the state of nature. I can’t say I completely followed it, though. (par. 28)
Hobbes gives three reasons for thinking that people in the state of nature would be “in that condition which is called war” and, more specifically, a war “of every man, against every man” (Leviathan, 13.8).
“Competition” is another way of saying “scarcity.” Hobbes assumes that people are willing to fight and kill to get what they need. He also assumes that resources are scarce relative to people’s needs. He concludes that they will fight to get what they need.
Diffidence is the opposite of confidence. Here is the basic idea.
Suppose we have two people: You and Me. Neither one of us wants to fight. However, you think that I fear that you will attack me. We both know that attacking others by surprise greatly increases the odds of success; that is what Hobbes means when he says “there is no way for any man to secure himself, so reasonable, as anticipation” (Leviathan, 13.4).
Given that, you have to at least entertain the thought that you might have to attack me first, if only to defend yourself against a misguided attack on my part. And I can go through the same kind of thinking about you. It’s not hard to see how this process of thought can lead two people who have no desire to attack one another to wind up at one another’s throats.
What is called the prisoner’s dilemma is often used to illustrate diffidence as a cause of conflict. (In this table, the first number is the payoff for the row or horizontal player, the second number is the payoff for the column, or vertical, player).
| Anticipate | Wait | |
|---|---|---|
| Anticipate | 3rd / 3rd | 1st / 4th |
| Wait | 4th / 1st | 2nd / 2nd |
Suppose we started in the southeast box. One of us is going to move north or west because first is better than second. Let’s say it’s the row player who goes first, moving us to the northeast box. Then the other player is going to move west, because third is better than fourth. It would go the same way if we went to the southwest box first; the two players are symmetrical. The point is that we inevitably wind up in the undesirable northwest box, where everyone is trying to sneak up and attack everyone else.
Hume is, in effect, going to say that the situation is different than this.
Finally, glory is a matter of reputation. It will not be terribly important for our purposes.
Hume refers to the poets’ description of a golden age in ¶15. His point is that in a world of great abundance, such as the golden age, there would be no conventions to create property rights because there would be no need for them. Hume was referring to classical sources, such as the Roman poets Virgil (70-19 BC) and Ovid (43 BC - 17/18 AD).
This is what David and Mary Norton say in the annotations to the edition of Hume’s Treatise that they edited.
The metaphor of a Golden Age is typically traced to Hesiod, whose golden race of men lived at a time when life on earth was idyllic. Later Roman poets recast Hesiod’s notion of a golden race into that of a Golden Age; see e.g. Virgil, Georgics 2.536; Ovid Metamorphoses 1.76–150. (Hume 2000, 544)
Here is Ovid’s Metamorphoses 1.68–150
Bk I:68-88 Humankind
He [the world’s maker -mjg] had barely separated out everything within fixed limits when the constellations that had been hidden for a long time in dark fog began to blaze out throughout the whole sky. And so that no region might lack its own animate beings, the stars and the forms of gods occupied the floor of heaven, the sea gave a home to the shining fish, earth took the wild animals, and the light air flying things.
As yet there was no animal capable of higher thought that could be ruler of all the rest. Then Humankind was born. …
Bk I:89-112 The Golden Age
This was the Golden Age that, without coercion, without laws, spontaneously nurtured the good and the true. There was no fear or punishment: there were no threatening words to be read, fixed in bronze, no crowd of suppliants fearing the judge’s face: they lived safely without protection. No pine tree felled in the mountains had yet reached the flowing waves to travel to other lands: human beings only knew their own shores. There were no steep ditches surrounding towns, no straight war-trumpets, no coiled horns, no swords and helmets. Without the use of armies, people passed their lives in gentle peace and security. The earth herself also, freely, without the scars of ploughs, untouched by hoes, produced everything from herself. Contented with food that grew without cultivation, they collected mountain strawberries and the fruit of the strawberry tree, wild cherries, blackberries clinging to the tough brambles, and acorns fallen from Jupiter’s spreading oak-tree. Spring was eternal, and gentle breezes caressed with warm air the flowers that grew without being seeded. Then the untilled earth gave of its produce and, without needing renewal, the fields whitened with heavy ears of corn. Sometimes rivers of milk flowed, sometimes streams of nectar, and golden honey trickled from the green holm oak.
Bk I:113-124 The Silver Age
When Saturn was banished to gloomy Tartarus, and Jupiter ruled the world, then came the people of the age of silver that is inferior to gold, more valuable than yellow bronze. Jupiter shortened spring’s first duration and made the year consist of four seasons, winter, summer, changeable autumn, and brief spring. Then parched air first glowed white scorched with the heat, and ice hung down frozen by the wind. Then houses were first made for shelter: before that homes had been made in caves, and dense thickets, or under branches fastened with bark. Then seeds of corn were first buried in the long furrows, and bullocks groaned, burdened under the yoke.
Bk I:125-150 The Bronze Age
Third came the people of the bronze age, with fiercer natures, readier to indulge in savage warfare, but not yet vicious. The harsh iron age was last. Immediately every kind of wickedness erupted into this age of baser natures: truth, shame and honour vanished; in their place were fraud, deceit, and trickery, violence and pernicious desires. They set sails to the wind, though as yet the seamen had poor knowledge of their use, and the ships’ keels that once were trees standing amongst high mountains, now leaped through uncharted waves. The land that was once common to all, as the light of the sun is, and the air, was marked out, to its furthest boundaries, by wary surveyors. Not only did they demand the crops and the food the rich soil owed them, but they entered the bowels of the earth, and excavating brought up the wealth it had concealed in Stygian shade, wealth that incites men to crime. And now harmful iron appeared, and gold more harmful than iron. War came, whose struggles employ both, waving clashing arms with bloodstained hands. They lived on plunder: friend was not safe with friend, relative with relative, kindness was rare between brothers. Husbands longed for the death of their wives, wives for the death of their husbands. Murderous stepmothers mixed deadly aconite, and sons inquired into their father’s years before their time. Piety was dead, and virgin Astraea, last of all the immortals to depart, herself abandoned the blood-drenched earth.
In short, Ovid is giving a story of the origins of humanity very much like you would find in Genesis: God gives us the top place in the world he has created and sets us up in a paradise of abundance. Then there is a story about humanity’s fall from paradise to what we see now. If you read on, you will see that Jupiter gets angry with humanity and floods the world. As I said, it’s very much like Genesis.