Why Approve of Just Acts?

The last section was concerned with the passage to justice. How and why do people come to do certain acts when the motivation to act is pretty clearly not natural or instinctive? Why leave others with their possessions for instance? The explanation Hume offers sees the core of justice as a system of rules for stability of possessions that become conventionally adopted.

If the world does indeed lack objective or mind-independent values then some such explanation for why people perform ‘just’ acts is obviously needed. The explanation, like Hume’s, must be from without in terms of that which is not intrinsically moral. However exposition of performance alone is not enough. Not only do we need to explain why just acts are done or performed, we also need to unravel why they are approved. So having shown how the core rules for stability of possessions could be conventionally adopted as basic reciprocal practices, Hume moves to the second question he set himself to answer in Book III ii 2, “viz. Why we annex the idea of virtue to justice, and of vice to injustice.''⁵⁵ For those who subscribe to a subjectivist moral theory, in which no values or virtues are objectively right or wrong but must be traced to areasonable sentiments in the evaluator, this second question is tantamount to asking ‘Why do humans approve of the observance of these conventionally established rules of justice and disapprove of their infringement?’. And the answer Hume gives is not self-interest — which was the main motive that fuelled the convention. For one thing, self-interest will point less frequently to observance of the rules of justice as society grows ever larger.⁵⁶ However, if we fail to observe the harm (from a broad, long-term perspective) of our own injustices to others, “we never fail to observe the prejudice we receive...

We partake of their uneasiness by sympathy, and as every thing, which gives uneasiness in human actions, upon the general survey, is call’d Vice, and whatever produces satisfaction, in the same manner, is denominated Virtue; this is the reason why the sense of moral good and evil follows upon justice and injustice.⁵⁸

Sympathy with the observed good effects of abiding by the system of justice, and with the bad effects of transgressions, leads to approval and disapproval respectively in an observer. We see the advantages and disadvantages to people in general, and even apply the general standards to ourselves. As Mackie puts Hume’s case, “Although the practices of justice arise primarily from self-interest, their moral characterization arises largely from sympathetic identification with the public interest.”⁵⁹ For Hume, approval and disapproval are the causal consequence of sympathy (together with natural inclinations such as benevolence).⁶⁰ But for justice, and all artificial, convention-built virtues, it is the effects of the finished system with which we sympathize.

So Hume’s answer to his own second question is that the approval and disapproval of justice are the result of the perceived utility of the system and the contingent fact of sympathy. Thus these sentiments of approval and disapproval which arise after the convention, being the causal consequence of sympathy and instinctive traits like benevolence, are in that sense natural⁶¹ or half-natural (although then aided, encouraged and extended by politicians, education and love of reputation⁶²). Book III ii 2, Of the origin of justice and property, comes to this final conclusion:

Thus self-interest is the original motive to the establishment of justice: but a sympathy with public interest is the source of the moral approbation, which attends that virtue.⁶³

I wish to set aside until section e) of this chapter consideration of this view that sympathy alone is a sufficient causal explanation of moral evaluations, of why people approve and disapprove as they do, and return to Hume’s conventionalist narrative of the origins of justice to consider two questions it prompts:

(A) What is the point of Hume’s explicitly ahistorical story? and

(B) Why should justice start with property?

Examination of these two questions, never articulated by Hume, is important and both need to be answered.

d)