Appearing in Hume Studies 33.2 THE FIRST MOTIVE TO JUSTICE: HUME’S CIRCLE ARGUMENT SQUARED

‘Justice ’ is Hume’s most common term for respect for property. On Locke’s view, the obligation to respect property is an original moral obligation imposed through a divinely instituted natural law that exists prior to and independent of human conventions. Hume expresses his disagreement with Locke’s view by calling justice an “artificial virtue”— meaning by this that it is only “by means of an artifice or contrivance ” that it produces the moral approbation that constitutes it as a virtue (T 3.2.1.1; SBN 477)1. In his discussion of justice in A Treatise of Human Nature 3.2.1-4, he begins by arguing that justice (which he also calls “equity ” and “honesty”) is “artificial ” before going on to explain the origin of the convention on which it depends and why adherence to that convention is regarded as a virtue.2 Central to his defense of his anti-Lockean claim that justice is an artificial virtue is a line of argument that is known (at least in some circles) as his “Circle Argument. ” Hume applies this line of argument in Treatise 3.2.1 (“Justice, whether a natural or artificial virtue?”) The argument depends on a core thesis of his virtue-based approach to ethics: that the moral merit of an action is derived entirely from the moral merit of the virtuou