ABSTRACT
David Hume’s moral and political inquiries comprise three theories: a theory of moral sentiment, a theory of property and justice, and a theory of government and obedience. My concern is with the latter two, and my basic thesis is that, contrary to what may seem Hume’s explicit avowals, these theories are both contractarian. In supporting this thesis I shall accept the following ground rules:
My interpretation will not contradict Hume’s actual anti-contractarian avowals. I shall argue that he rejects—and for good reason—that understanding of contractarianism dominant in the Whig opinions of his time. But that rejection is inconclusive if there are, as I shall try to show, other, and deeper, ways of developing a contractarian position.
My interpretation will not question the evidently non-contractarian character of Hume’s theory of moral sentiment. Thus I shall be committed to a distinction between that theory, which I shall usually call Hume’s moral theory, and his theory of property and justice. Since Hume treats justice as a moral virtue, these theories must be connected, but connection is not identification.
Contractarianism is a species of normative conventionalism, but my interpretation will not reduce to triviality by identifying species with genus. In particular, utilitarianism may also be understood as a species of conventionalism, and my subordinate thesis is to refute the view that Hume is a proto-utilitarian.
My interpretation will rest on the Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, and on the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (henceforth Essays and Enquiry). References to the Treatise of Human Nature will be subordinate, or comparative. Were my purpose either to glean from Hume an approach to contemporary issues in moral theory, or to place Hume in a history of contractarian thought, my reliance on his later works would be perverse, for, at least in my view, the Treatise is at once more profound and more contractarian. But my purpose here is to interpret Hume, and in this endeavour I find myself bound by his explicit description of the Treatise as ‘the juvenile work, which the Author never acknowledged’, by his statement that he later corrected ‘some negligences in his former reasoning and more in the expression’, and most especially by his injunction that ‘the following Pieces [which include the Essays and the Enquiry] may alone be regarded as containing his philosophical sentiments and principles’. 2 Others have chosen to disregard Hume’s Advertisement on these matters; I shall prefer to establish that interpretation of his argument which Hume could not but find himself obliged to acknowledge.
