The Humean Mind by Angela M. Coventry Alexander Sager

Author:Angela M. Coventry,Alexander Sager
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

Justice, property, and social order

It is now time to consider Hume’s identification of the conventions of justice to rules of property, as it is at the core of Hume’s theory of justice, as well as a subject of criticism from many scholars (with the notable exception of Friedrich Hayek). Hume is often accused of having reduced justice to rules governing property (Harrison 1981: 42). Moreover, Hume does not question the justice or fairness of such rules: their interest to the public, i.e. to quote Rawls, the fact that they form the “practically best scheme,” is sufficient to legitimize them (Rawls 2000: 64). Finally, Hume considers that a distribution of property which applies these rules as just by definition. Let us now show how such a “reduction” is achieved in his system. Let us show how he justifies it philosophically, far from adopting it under the influence of an unfortunate conservative prejudice.

From Hume’s point of view, this so-called reduction of justice to the rules of property consists in revealing their co-implication, which he makes when determining the content of the most fundamental rule of justice, the first “law of nature.” Since, on the one hand, the main obstacle which justice must overcome is the mobility of external goods joined to their scarcity, and because, on the other hand, scarcity cannot be overcome institutionally, it follows that the instability of the possession of those goods is to be compensated by human conventions. Thus, the first law of nature is directly deduced from the circumstances which Hume carefully identified: it is the convention for the stability of possession of external goods. Here is its obvious justification: preserving society implies the elimination of the main social “disturbances,” and this “can be done after no other manner, than by a convention to bestow stability” to goods whose possession is naturally precarious (T 3.2.2.9; SBN 489). Property – which Hume defines as “a constant possession” – thus appears with the institution of this convention, which means that it is introduced with justice: “the same artifice gives rise to both,” as well as to the ideas of “right” and “obligation” (T 3.2.2.11; SBN 490–491). The reason why justice and property are identical, or rather imply each other, is thus simply that they appear together.

Now Hume insists that this coextensivity of justice and property directly contradicts the “vulgar definition of justice” as “a constant and perpetual will of giving every one his due” (T 3.2.6.2; SBN 526).8 Indeed, what is due to someone is what is proper to him, what he has a right to, and that others ought to respect, so that the vulgar definition in fact presupposes that the notions of right, property, and obligation are antecedent to justice (see T 3.2.2.11; SBN 490–491).9 For Hume the reverse is true: human conventions – i.e. justice – determine those notions.

It is thus the necessity of preserving social order which justifies in Hume’s eyes the content of the most fundamental law of justice, namely the establishment of property.

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