ABSTRACT
The idea that justice arises from particular social circumstances led Hume to believe that justice was an artificial virtue. Those circumstances, however, are not ones that any moral agent could ever avoid. The potential for conflict over the use and occupation of the external world gives rise to the moral question of how such conflicts should be adjudicated. Questions of adjudication inevitably lead to questions of the application of force. Any judgement of whose choice may override others ultimately requires a judgement of when physical force may be used to override the choices of others when they do not comply with the relevant judgement. Justice, then, tells us when we may use force. Claim-rights describe those actions which a person may engage in without being subjected to force by another. Such claim-rights must therefore be compossible so as not to actually avert the potentiality of interpersonal practical conflict. A guarantee of compossibility must be obtained from a contextualised understanding of the intentional action or actions that a claim-right protects from interference and not a set of time-indexed spatial components tout court.
