Hume’s Peculiar Definition of Justice

This chapter situates Hume’s treatment of justice in the modern natural law tradition in order to bring out what is, in that tradition’s terms, both unsurprising and peculiar in the definition of justice that Hume works with. For Hume justice is the essential element of an analysis of the minimal conditions of human sociability. But Hume defines justice exceedingly narrowly, as respect for rights of property. His definition has been severely criticised, both by his contemporaries and in recent Hume scholarship. The chapter argues that it was Hume’s particular version of the argument against Hutchesonian moral sense theory that led him to define justice as he did.