ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the sensible knave passage neither signals nor requires any significant change in David Hume's official Treatise story of the artificial virtues. It summarizes this official account and explains the challenge David Gauthier and Stephen Darwall believe the sensible knave poses to this account. Gauthier and Darwall both take the sensible knave as a concession by Hume that the interest account fails, a concession which clears the way for their revisionist interpretations of Hume's real theory of the artificial virtues. To enable Hume to avoid this inconsistency, Gauthier and Darwall suggest accounts of the moral obligation of the artificial virtues which compete with the interest account for the title of "Hume's real view" of justice and promise-keeping. Gauthier thinks Hume's real view is an "error theory" in which the natural moral sentiments respond to first-order motives which are themselves produced by an erroneous supposition of the agent's own interest.
