Hume’s Position Considered for the Fifth Time

Hume is sceptical of moral realism, of objectivist moral theories, of there being any mind-independent, authoritative moral prescripts. With such a subjectivist starting point, morality is put forward as the answer to a partial conflict problem.

But why does it matter that rules of justice can coherently form by convention when it seems that Hume is explicitly disavowing any historical claim of there being a time before justice, a time “full of war, violence and injustice”?⁶⁴ Indeed the state of nature out of which these rules are imagined to convene is emphasised by Hume to be “a mere philosophical fiction, which never had, and never cou’d have any reality.”⁶ If Hume’s whole account of the escape is not meant as an historical account, it is far from obvious what it is meant as. The reader is being convinced (or for some, left in doubt) that a reciprocal conventionalist account will fuel an escape, but an escape from a prison that never existed. Similarly, the sceptic, for whom moral evaluation consists in felt sentiments, may have an interest in how sentiments in favour of artificial rules actually arose, but what is the interest when the historical claim is abjured?

One possibility is that the story is meant to justify a particular type of state or political structure.

A theory of the state of nature that begins with fundamental general descriptions of morally permissible and impermissible actions, and of deeply based reasons why some persons in any society would violate these moral constraints, and goes on to describe how a state would arise from that state of nature will serve our explanatory purposes, even if no actual state ever arose that wayJ^b

But Hume’s story does not read as if he is trying to justify say, the status quo or any other particular state. Unlike Nozick, Hume takes it as virtually self-evident that the state, any state, is better than anarchy.⁶⁷ Any set of property rules is clearly better than none. The elaborate Humean account of justice seems aimed at more than this. There is certainly no attempt by Hume to show what type of state is better, simply that some state will arise — the type being largely arbitrarily and areasonably determined. Nor is Nozick convincing when he supports the analytical value of the state of nature concept by baldly asserting, “We learn much by seeing how the state could have arisen, even if it did not arise that way.”⁶⁸ What do we learn? is the sceptic’s response.

A related possibility is that Hume wanted merely to attack social contract theories of the state which supported the Whigs of his day.⁶⁹ Where most social contract theories are incoherent due to an inability to explain the bindingness of a first-ever contract, at least the Humean conventionalist solution has the virtue of coherence and consistency. But this still does not really explain the need to offer a positive alternative. Mere coherence alone, however desirable, seems an unsatisfying basis on which to rest an explanation of the purpose of Hume’s narrative. Moreover, an attack on social contract models does not, per se, furnish a point to an ahistorical story.

A third possible explanation of Hume’s story might argue that it was meant to show us what the world would be like without justice, to exemplify the benefits of social living by using a shifting perspective between the present and an imagined state of nature. Again though, such a rationale, standing alone, makes Hume’s convention insight superfluous. No Humean conventionalist account need be devised to realise the horrors of an Albania or Lebanon or northern Sri Lanka or former Yugoslavia. Hume certainly had no doubts of the benefits of justice.

Perhaps then there simply is no plausible lesson to be learnt from Hume’s account of the escape from a non-existent place? Such pessimism, I believe, is unwarranted. It results from exaggerating the ahistorical aspects — indeed the historical aspects — of Hume’s account. It is the Hobbesian state of each for himself that Hume rules out as never existing. Limited benevolence or instinctive, yet partial, impulses towards sociability will always produce, at a minimum, some sort of primitive, community-centred motivation. Given human nature, the Hobbesian individually oriented natural man is a pure fiction. But the acknowledged communal impulses, as Hume notes, lead to tribalism at best, not to rules of justice. The state of nature can be conceded to be a fiction and yet the actual formulation of rules and practices promoting social co-ordination would still need explanation — inherited or instinctive impulses alone manifestly failing to suffice on the observed evidence.

To see the value of the Humean convention-based explanation in comprehending social co-ordination generally⁷⁰ I think it is necessary to distinguish two questions:

a) How did the rules arise?

b) How are the rules sustained?

Does the Humean narrative offer an answer to a), to comprehending the expansion of social co-ordination? (If this is to be thought of in terms of an escape, it is the escape from mere genetic sociability or primitive tribalism.

That said, it is still easy to be sceptical about any such historical claims, for it is difficult to conceive what kind of evidence there might be, or could be, for such claims. And if evidence is not required then the historical, empirical claim would collapse into some sort of Kantian, transcendental claim about which human capacities must exist in order to achieve rule-constrained conduct.

Does the Humean narrative in Book III ii 2 provide some insight into how systems of justice are sustained! On this interpretation the point of Hume’s narrative of the building of the artificial virtue of justice would be to show the motives and reciprocity that supports and maintains systems of justice (or of promise-keeping or of allegiance or even of the whole moral system itself). It is an argument about existing justicial and moral systems. Such systems are supported by, inter alia, their felt internal reciprocity — i.e. the feeling of most members that one receives back more or less commensurately what one gives out — as distinct from the obligation which grows out of actual agreements. Very few rules governing social behaviour are ever actually agreed to by members of a society; the system of rules is accepted and approved of partly because of the reciprocal benefits it brings (Hume’s point about re­directed self-interest) and also partly because of sentiments of approval⁷⁴ that exist independently and in favour of compliance with the rules (Hume’s point about the sentiments of virtue annexed to the practice of justice), whether abiding by those rules is in our self­interest or not. And of course this is meant as an empirical claim, not some sort of logical or transcendental claim. The degree of support lent to a system by reciprocal self-interest (itself composed of passions, desires and causal reason) and felt moral sentiments is contingent. It varies. Co-operation could largely be achieved by force, as with slavery, or by actual agreement, as with town-hall democracy. But experience shows that co-ordinated social behaviour is not directly genetic like that of the ant colony, nor is it extensively the result of actual agreement or even often of force. The Humean insight can be interpreted as the assertion that rule-governed behaviour is generally maintained, inter alia, by both the self­interested desire to give only as long as you get and the ancillary sentiments that arise⁷⁵ in favour of the system.

This interpretation of Hume’s narrative gives it philosophical application to the problem of understanding and explaining (naturally and causally) existing moral and legal systems. As such, the evidence for and against its claims is there to be observed or not; there is no requirement for special historical evidence. Hume’s narrative on justice thus takes on an immediate relevance that some sort of historical claim never could. Best of all though, this interpretation preserves a consistent Humean position on reason. Justicial and moral systems of rules are not reason-based — that is, justice is not some sort of imperfect physical manifestation of rational social relations. There is no ideal justicial arrangement, no ideal distributive principle, waiting to be discovered by reason. Rather justice, a system of social constraints, owes its existence to a complex set of factors which includes individual passions and desires, merely guided or re-directed by causal reason, together with sentiments that have sprung up in favour of the maintenance of the system.⁷⁶ Hume’s is a sentimentalist view of justice, sentiments of re-directed self-interest and sentiments in favour of the system itself, not a rationalist view. The motives that underlie the system all reduce to areasonable sentiments.

On this argument then, the answer to my first question (A) — about the point of Hume’s justice story — is that it makes clearer the motives that help sustain a system of constraints on social action.

However, my interpretation of Hume’s account of justice, as being largely an account of the areasonable motives sustaining a system of justice, does not explain why Hume conceives of the core of justice in terms of stable possessions (i.e. property). Question (B) remains. Hume, after all, is explicit that it is by “leavfing] every one in the peaceable enjoyment of what he may acquire by his fortune and industry... [that] the passions are restrain’d in their partial and contradictory motions.” ⁷ But where rules for co-ordinated behaviour (in other words, a system of constraints on conduct) are the solution to scarcity of goods and the partiality of benevolence, why should property rules be somehow more fundamental than, say, rules for personal security?

Of course this second question (B) might be evaded completely by asserting that Hume thought rules for personal security were not needed at all. Perhaps personal security depends on what Hume called a natural virtue and we humans have an instinctive propensity not to kill or maim others? But such a response needs to posit some consistently manifested natural virtue or feature of human nature that is not only suspect but that Hume himself explicitly disavows when, in giving his account of the need for artificial rules of justice, he talks of humans’ limited benevolence and confined generosity. And if rules are also needed to ensure personal security, one again wonders why Hume makes property rules the more fundamental.

One might respond here by interpreting the pre-eminence Hume gives to property rules historically, as involving a temporal assertion that constraints with regard to goods arise before constraints with regard to other people. However, as 1 have argued above, such historical averments are almost impossible to test. One could, perhaps, look at cultures presently existing at the extremes of scarcity (e.g. the Arctic Inuit or desert bedouin) to see whether property rules or personal security rules are the more rudimentary. But such analogies are imperfect — the historical ‘facts’ may not have involved such extreme scarcity of resources — and anyway the philosophical application of a purely historical assertion (false or true) is obscure. It is much more in keeping with my interpretation of the Humean justice narrative, as being an insight into existing systems, to see Hume as suggesting that property rules are more fundamental to the whole system than personal security rules. However, is this suggestion persuasive?

Interpreted as a precursor to some sort of vague gesture affirming the primacy of economic relations and regulations I find any such suggestion unconvincing. While ‘the removal of competition for resources’ might accurately describe some breaches of rules of personal safety (e.g. X hurts Y physically or enslaves him as part of the fight for goods), the competition for goods is certainly not the only cause of conflict. Hume is just too optimistic⁷⁸ if this be his opinion. The emphasis on modern property rights, arguably understandable coming from an eighteenth-century enlightenment writer who lived through the rise of early capitalism and the development of modern property and contract law, is nonetheless misplaced if it is meant to ascribe a uniquely fundamental causal role to such rights. The maintenance of a system of rules constraining conduct that allows for co-ordinated social living does not depend more on the stable allocation of resources than it does on the guarantee of personal security.

My denial is a denial of both logical and empirical claims to priority or pre-eminence. There is no logical priority to property rights such that property rights could exist without personal security rights, but not conversely: either one without the other is equally conceivable, and equally implausible. Nor can an empirical, observed pre-eminence be claimed on behalf of property rights, such that property rights could be isolated as the factually most important support of the whole system of rules making social life possible. Certainly the scarcity of goods in relation to human wants is a fact (and, as Hume notes, this fact seems to continue however wealthy the society). So too, mutual vulnerability and limited benevolence,⁷⁹ and the various passions of human nature, are facts. But a claim to greater empirical importance for property rules must translate into a claim that rules of property can diminish the impact of scarcity in a way that rules against assault and violence cannot diminish the incidence of murder, rape, wounding and the rest. I do not see in what way that claim is true or can be justified. Nor can it be supported simply by contending that scarcity is more easily reduced than mutual human vulnerability. Any such contention, if it be accurate, could well depend solely on technological knowledge and innovation as opposed to rules. Claiming pre-eminence for stabilising the possession of goods and urging that property rules are of primary causal importance is quite a separate matter. So while the effects of scarcity, as well as of our natures and vulnerability, can be reduced and tempered by rules allocating goods to people and prohibiting violent behaviour — that is the purpose and utility of such rules — and while, of course, some variants of those rules will work better than others, it is a different and unconvincing claim to say that the fact of scarcity is more easily changed by rules, that in this sphere rules are more effective.⁸⁰

Thus I do not accept Hume’s apparent suggestion⁸¹ that greed is far more dangerous than all the other anti-social passions combined and consequently that property rules are more fundamental to an existing system of rules constraining action than, say, personal security rules. Nor would I attempt to salvage Hume by following one of Postema’s suggestions⁸² and draining (through over-enlarging) the term ‘property’ of most of its normal sense to make it possible to claim that, “It is the social role of property to underwrite and structure all social relations, positions and conditions. Given this social function of property, justice must be construed more broadly to embrace all basic social relations.”⁸³ But this simply is not what is usually meant by ‘property’; it is not the basic structurer of social relations. Crimes against property rest just as much on a pre­supposition of the establishment of society as do crimes against persons. It seems unwarranted to me to extend the concept of ‘property’ so that it alone somehow pre-dates the establishment of society. Nor can such an enlargement be supported as a Humean meaning when Hume explicitly speaks of “bestow[ing] stability on the possession of... goods”. ⁴

Yet what does it matter whether one can salvage Hume’s complete position? That he focused unduly on property rules and gave them unwarranted pre-eminence in discussing justice need not prevent one from accepting his insights into the motives that sustain a system of rules that make social life possible. Justice, after all, does have to do with the structuring of social relations and positions. And it is such artificial structuring, such rule-based behaviour and sentiments, that Hume was concerned to explain’⁵ and did explain in terms of re-directed self-interest and the distinct sentiments in favour of the system. The rules of stable possession are a major — even if not an exalted and fundamental — component of that structuring and perhaps an obvious enough candidate for Hume to single out that he can be excused.

To summarize my position on the two questions prompted by Hume’s account of justice,⁸⁶ I say firstly that the point of Hume’s narrative is to give a causal explanation of certain of the motives that sustain and maintain a system of justice — an explanation which again signals the ancillary, inactive role of reason. Secondly, I say that in the light of this ahistorical interpretation of the justice narrative, Hume’s emphasis on property rules can be no more than a simplified illustration of how convention, reciprocity, self-interest, causal reason, limited benevolence and other natural virtues combine to support and produce the complex myriad rules and sentiments that make-up an actual and complete justicial and moral system. It is an explanation of part (i.e. the rules of property) to throw light on the whole. But to the extent that Hume would try, in fact, to make property rules fundamental, or worse to claim temporal priority on their behalf, then I merely note that I would disagree or be sceptical.⁸⁷

It may now be possible to begin to see how Hume’s feeling­based, areasonable moral theory attempts to explain the ‘objectification’, in normal speech and thought, of moral evaluations.

These values, virtues and tastes are not objectively real in the way that natural features and acts in the causal, empirical world are clearly real and objective. Of course the particular sentiments individuals feel, of approval and disapproval, of ‘rightness’ and ‘wrongness’, are real. But rather than attribute an objective, mind-independent ‘rightness’ as somehow operating independently of those sentiments, corresponding to them,⁸⁸ and giving them validity and re­inforcement, the Humean approach is to explain such sentiments as the complex result of the psychological and sociological forces involved in sustaining a whole system of morality. Any system of morality is one in which sentiments and feelings are communicated (amplified, diminished and modified) between people. These shared sentiments as regards particular natural actions are a fact. They are real. But beyond the objective, natural features of actions and the real feelings they happen to inspire, the categorical quality of the evaluation is merely apparent. Hume’s explanation for this appearance involves a society-wide process which constantly creates, supports, re-creates and maintains the evaluative feelings. The process has two components: firstly, the dispositions and practices — the virtues⁸⁹ — for acting, and refraining from acting, in ways that encourage reciprocity and secondly, the tendency to feel approval and disapproval of acts which either coincide with or undermine, respectively, the system (i.e. for virtuous conduct and against unvirtuous conduct). According to Hume the first component is predominantly a function of self-interest. As he argues, if it were regard to general welfare that powered the convention, that produced the artificial virtues, then there would be no need for such virtues in the first place. Natures that instinctively looked to the public weal would have no need for artificially contrived standards. Moreover, these moral standards and practices are not deliberately agreed to (or rather the element of the system which can be traced to a deliberate agreement shaped by the predictions of causal reason is slight). Again, too, reason can only ever guide desires, never move action on its own. So in both these ways reason is not at the heart of the basic practices and established standards of morality.

The second component supporting a moral system, feelings of approval and disapproval, is, according to Hume, due to the principle of sympathy which is instinctive and contingent. Behind such sympathy there must also be a preponderance of benevolence since I could sympathize with you but unless I were generally benevolent (or at least indifferent) I would not approve of acts that were to your benefit. That is to say, it is not enough that sympathy makes me feel your pleasure or your pain, and so to that extent approve or disapprove (respectively) what had caused your — and so my — pleasure or pain (respectively). Were I, say, positively malevolent then my separate feeling of pain at your good fortune would outweigh the pleasure from sympathy (and likewise the pleasure from your misfortune would overwhelm the pain felt through sympathy). The same would hold for those individuals so self-interested that the principle of comparison regularly had more effect than sympathy. Fortunately, however, Hume thinks these are not often the case. Few people are this malevolent or self-absorbed, says Hume, ever the optimist, and so sympathy generally is able to lead on to approval or disapproval.

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