David Hume as a

Social Theorist

BRI AN BARRY
London School of Economics
This article examines Russell Hardins interpretation of Humes argument that great
social order depends on coordination convention. The main argument shows that despite
an apparent move in that direction Humes main argument is that justice and the other
convention-based virtues rest on a cooperative convention which solves a prisoners
dilemma problem and that states are required when a society exceeds some small
size because only states can solve the large number prisoners dilemma problems that
constitute the problem of social order. In this Humes argument is indebted to the
original form of this argument found in Hobbess Leviathan.
I. HUME AND HOBBES
Russell Hardin is a man with a mission. In his book on Hume, he
seeks to convince us that Hume was an acute and profound social and
political theorist or proto-social scientist, in the face of what he takes
to be widespread scepticism about Humes credentials on this score, as
represented by Barry Strouds assertion that, if Humes contributions
are to be judged as part of the empirical science of man, they will
appear ludicrously inadequate and there will be no reason to take him
seriously.
1
My primary objective here is to assess Hardins claim for
the originality and fecundity of Humes ideas, especially in relation to
what Hardin calls the problem of social order. According to Hardin,
Humes solution to this problem, which rests on convention and slow
evolution. . . fails to convince many people, in many cases perhaps
because they have not understood the analysis of convention.
2
I shall
suggest, however, that Hume has to bear part of the responsibility
for the difculties readers have found in understanding him because
he employed two sharply different accounts of convention without
distinguishing between them. Of these two, Hardin attributes one
to Hume and claims that is the correct one for the explanation of

This article began as a review of Russell Hardins David Hume: Moral and Political
Theorist (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007) but soon developed into a much longer paper.
Although the paper retains its basis in a discussion of Hardins interpretation of Hume,
it is clear that Barry chose to respond to Hardin with his own reinterpretation of Hume
along Hobbesian lines. I have therefore chosen to present the paper as a freestanding
article. The paper was refereed and accepted in late 2008. Brian Barry died in March
2009.
1
B. Stroud, Hume (London, 1977), p. 223.
2
R. Hardin, David Hume: Moral and Political Theorist (Oxford, 2007), p. 214.
Cambridge University Press 2010 Utilitas Vol. 22, No. 4, December 2010
doi:10.1017/S0953820810000300
370 Brian Barry
social order. I shall defend the view that the other is the one that
was predominantly held by Hume and is also the right answer.
With regard to originality, Hardin concedes that Hume has many
often striking afnities to Hobbes,
3
and cites Hobbes as Humes only
precursor in the analysis of social order.
4
But I believe that Humes
originality is greatly overstated by Hardin, at the expense of Hobbes.
The problemof social order is howto create and maintain a peaceful and
productive society, with stable possession of property and high levels
of obedience to government. There are, Hardin says, three possible
solutions. The rst two are: (1) draconian force, as represented by
Hobbes, [and] (2) shared values, as represented by many moral sense
theorists in Humes time, many religious philosophers, Talcott Parsons,
and contemporary communitarians.
5
Hardin does not name names,
but Michael Walzer and David Miller would seem to t the bill. So
would Rawls: the well-ordered society of A Theory of Justice is one in
which everyone accepts and knows others accept the same principles of
justice,
6
and the later overlapping consensus still requires agreement
on the principles, driven by a shared sense of the value of the political.
7
The third solution is coordination on order as mutually benecial even
for people whose values may be widely varied, which was Humes
unique invention.
8
I shall devote the next section to this interpretation
of Hume. Before that, I want to make a few remarks about Hobbess
solution to the problem of order and the relation between Hobbes and
Hume.
I believe that it is a travesty to identify Hobbes with a position
in which social order depends solely on draconian force. Hume
undeniably said that as FORCE is always on the side of the governed,
the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is on
opinion only that government is founded.
9
But Hobbes was equally
aware of the fragility of political power and for that reason devoted
half of Leviathan the third and fourth of its four parts to refuting
religious ideas inimical to the authority of an absolute sovereign. If
[the sovereign] give away the government of Doctrines, men will be
frighted into rebellion with the feare of Spirits.
10
The sovereign also
needs control over political doctrines, as is shown by the way in which
3
Hardin, David Hume, p. 213.
4
Hardin, David Hume, p. 215.
5
Hardin, David Hume, p. 105.
6
J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford, 1971), p. 454.
7
J. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York, 1993), pp. 13372.
8
Hardin, David Hume, p. 105.
9
D. Hume, Of the First Principles of Government, Essays: Moral, Political and
Literary, rev. edn., ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis [1777] 1987), p. 32.
10
T. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1991), p. 127.
David Hume as a Social Theorist 371
the widespread belief that power could be divided between king, lords
and commons contributed to the Civil War. Except the vulgar be better
taught than they have hitherto been, belief in the division of powers,
with its destructive effects, will resurface whenever the lessons of the
last breakdown of order (such as the Civil War) have been forgotten.
11
Again, Hume certainly says that the stability of government rests
heavily on the shared belief among the subjects that it has a right
to power.
12
But Hobbes matches this by saying that the power of
the sovereign rests (where it is stable) on a shared belief among its
subjects that they have a moral obligation to obey it. Hardin takes
issue with this interpretation, saying that many and maybe even most
scholars. . . suppose [Hobbes] argues that we are inherently morally
obligated to obey our sovereign because we promised or agreed to when
we entered the social compact.
13
But Hardins attempted refutation of
these scholars is unconvincing because it rests on a misinterpretation
of what Hobbes says about the obligation to obey a sovereign by
acquisition. Hardins error is evident from his describing a sovereign
by acquisition as a matter of imposition as against compact, where
compact is taken to be the origin of a sovereign by institution.
14
But
there is a moral obligation to obey a sovereign by acquisition too. It also
derives from a compact, but this time vertically between subject and
sovereign rather than horizontally among the subjects-to-be as in the
case of a sovereign by institution.
A Common-wealth by acquisition, is that, where the Sovereign Power is
acquired by Force; And it is acquired by force, when men singly, or many
together by plurality of voyces, for fear of death, or bonds, do authorise all
the actions of that Man, or Assembly, that hath their lives and liberty in his
Power.
15
The only difference, then, is that a sovereign by institution is set up by
a covenant entered into by the future subjects out of fear of one another,
whereas an existing sovereign gains newsubjects by their entering into
a covenant with it out fear of what it can do to them.
It is not therefore the Victory that giveth the right of Dominion over the
Vanquished, but his own Covenant. Nor is he obliged because he is Conquered;
that is to say beaten, and taken, or put to ight; but because he commeth in,
and Submitteth to the Victor.
16
11
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 127.
12
Hume, Of the First Principles of Government, p. 33.
13
Hardin, David Hume, p. 110.
14
Hardin, David Hume, p. 110.
15
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 138, emphasis suppressed.
16
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 141.
372 Brian Barry
This makes it clear that in both cases there is an obligation to obey
the sovereign that arises from covenant. The only difference lies in the
identity of the parties to the covenant.
Contrary to what Hardin claims, Hobbes is not ambivalent or
confused about the meaning of obligation in Leviathan. The confusion
is Hardins and arises from his utter unwillingness to take on board
the denition of obligation that Hobbes provides and then sticks to
faithfully, according to which an obligation arises from the voluntary
act (which counts as voluntary even if entered into out of fear) of
renouncing or transferring a right.
17
The mutual transferring of Right,
is that which men call CONTRACT. And a species of contract is a
covenant, which occurs where one party deliver[s] the Thing contracted
for on his part, and leave[s] the other to perform his part at some
determinate time; and in the mean time to be trusted.
18
Hence, Hardin
is simply wrong to say that for Hobbes
any obligation that you or I have to [a sovereign by institution] follows from its
capacity to enforce its will once it is in place, not from the way it has come into
being. Indeed, Hobbes does not think we are morally bound, and obligation is
the wrong word unless its meaning is that we are merely coercively obliged to
be obedient, so that it is in our interest.
19
On the contrary, Hobbes says that we are obliged (morally obliged if you
like the terminology) to obey the sovereign in virtue of our covenant,
either with our fellowsubjects or the sovereign, depending on the way in
which obligation to obey arises. Thus, it is completely mistaken to hold,
as Hardin does, that there is nothing to Hobbess answer to the question
Why should I obey the sovereign? than an appeal to draconian force.
20
Where Hobbes and Hume do differ, and Hume scores, is in their views
of the possibility of peaceful and harmonious social interaction that is
not imposed by the government. Especially in the Enquiry, Hume goes
on at some length about the various rules that arise without any control
17
Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 923.
18
Hobbes Leviathan, p. 94.
19
Hardin, David Hume, p. 213.
20
Hardins scepticism about Hobbess claim that the obligation to obey the sovereign
arises from covenant is created by his view that Hobbes generally insists that contracts
have value only if they will be enforced by a greater power (Hardin, David Hume, p. 213).
For starters, the problem arises not from contracts, where the exchange is simultaneous,
but from covenants, where one party has to perform rst and the other is due to perform
later. It is perfectly true (though Hardin does not quote it) that Hobbes said covenants
without the sword are but words. But the sword comes in not to compel obedience but
to provide the background condition of assurance that makes the covenant a valid one.
Hence, even in the state of nature a covenant is binding on the second party that is due to
performwhere one of the parties has performed already. The other condition that makes
a covenant valid is where there is Power to make him performe (Hobbes, Leviathan,
p. 102). And we should be clear that the him is the party that is due to perform second.
Thus, the sovereign supplies the guarantee that makes the covenant to obey it valid.
David Hume as a Social Theorist 373
or direction by government to make social interactions enjoyable and
harmonious. The laws of good manners [are] a kind of lesser morality,
calculated for the ease of company and conversation. . . . Everything,
which promotes ease, without an indecent familiarity, is useful and
laudable.
21
Politeness is clearly a virtue that rests on convention, since
the notion of a polite action abstracted from its context in the laws of
good manners is unintelligible. There are also rules in societies for
play, which are conventional (in a great measure . . . capricious and
arbitrary), while waggoners, coachmen, and postilions have principles,
by which they give the way; and these are chiey founded on mutual
ease and convenience.
22
Hume does not mention the rule of the road
(drive on the left or drive on the right), which Hardin takes as the
paradigm of a coordinating convention. (Before the advent of the
turnpike, were roads so narrow that the only issue between vehicles
was which one pulls to the side when two of them meet?) But Hume
does mention a pedestrian analogue: the right-hand entitles a man
to the wall, and prevents jostling, which peaceable people nd very
disagreeable and inconvenient.
23
Hume need not be taken to mean that such rules could be maintained
in a Hobbesian state of nature. The lawstill has to be in the background
to inhibit the escalation of quarrels about marked cards into shoot-outs,
as happened in the Wild West (or at any rate in the Hollywood take
on it). But with basic security in place, a whole mass of rules, many
of them customary, can be operative without any state involvement.
Common interest and utility beget infallibly a standard of right and
wrong among the parties concerned, as Hume sums it up.
24
All of these
complex institutions of civil society are missing fromHobbess analysis.
Hardin draws a contrast between Hume and Hobbes along somewhat
different lines.
It is sometimes noted that major philosophers, such as Kant, have a moral
theory that does not lead to a political theory or, like Hobbes, they have a
political theory that does not build on a moral theory. Hume is distinctively
different because his moral and political theories are cut from a single cloth.
The differences between the two are essentially a matter of scale or numbers
involved.
25
To cash this out, on both the micro and macro scale, it is equally
the case that for Hume virtues are those character traits that conduce
21
D. Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the
Principles of Morals, 3rd edn., ed. L. A. Selby-Biggs and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975),
p. 209.
22
Hume, Enquiries, p. 210.
23
Hume, Enquiries, p. 210, n. 1.
24
Hume, Enquiries, p. 211.
25
Hardin, David Hume, p. 106.
374 Brian Barry
to utility, either of their possessor or of others. Now it is true that
Hobbes does not have a political theory that builds on a moral theory,
but Hardin does not claim that for Hume either. Rather, Hume has
the same theory for the small scale (e.g. promise-keeping) and the
large scale (e.g. respecting others property). Hobbes chooses not to
address small-scale interactions explicitly: he has only two categories
of laws of nature, those that are a means to the preservation of men
in multitudes and other things tending to the destruction of particular
men: as Drunkenness and all other parts of Intemperance, which he
says are not pertinent enough to this place.
26
But Hobbes, just as much
as Hume, has a unied theory for interactions, in the sense that he
brings to bear a single criterion for all rules, which is their prospective
contribution to peace and prosperity.
In fact, if we look at Hobbess laws of nature, we can discern a
nascent theory for small-scale interactions there, which could easily
have been developed. Thus, for example, the fourth law of nature
is: That a man which receiveth Benet from another of meer Grace,
Endeavour that he which giveth it, have no reasonable cause to repent
of his good will.
27
General observance of this in groups of any size
(including dyads) would surely encourage benevolence or trust: [and]
consequently. . . mutual help, as Hobbes says it will, sovereign or
no sovereign. Again, Hobbess fth law is That every man strive to
accommodate himself to the rest, and this is the essence of polite
behaviour.
28
The next three, which require willingness to pardon,
caution in seeking revenge and care in not showing contempt for others,
are in just the same way entirely appropriate to small-scale relations.
My conclusion is therefore that Hume and Hobbes both had scale-
independent criteria, of a roughly similar kind.
II. COORDINATION, COOPERATION AND CONVENTION
The third of Hardins theories of social order is coordination on order
as mutually benecial.
29
Hardin says that the relevant concept of
convention was claried only when David Lewis published his book
Convention,
30
and that it is clear that the meaning [Hume] has in
mind is that of Lewiss analysis.
31
But he does not spell out what that
meaning is. A simplied version of Lewiss nal denition (which is all
we need) runs as follows:
26
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 109.
27
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 105, emphasis suppressed.
28
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 106, emphasis suppressed.
29
Hardin, David Hume, p. 105.
30
D. Lewis, Convention (Oxford, 1986).
31
Hardin, David Hume, p. 83.
David Hume as a Social Theorist 375
One of my dening conditions for the conventionality of a regularity Rregarding
choice of action by agents in a situation S has been: In any instance of S among
members of P [some group], everyone prefers to conform to R on condition that
the others do, since S is a co-ordination problem and uniform conformity to R
is a coordination equilibrium in S.
32
Elsewhere he writes A coordination equilibrium [is] a combination [of
different peoples actions] in which no one would have been better off
had any one agent alone acted otherwise, either himself or someone
else.
33
By taking over Lewiss conception of convention, Hardin is thus
committing himself to the claimthat virtues such as justice, delity and
allegiance, whose value depends on convention, represent coordination
equilibria. For this reason, he takes as the paradigmof a convention the
rule of the road. This is also one of Lewiss eleven sample coordination
conventions.
34
Hardin describes this as the rare case. . . of an ideal type
that is actually instantiated in the world, and he warns us that Humes
explanations of social practices and social order will have to allow for
a lot of slack and for some degree of failure to followthe convention that
governs the behavior of most of us.
35
I propose instead that the problem
of social order (notably the stability of property and government) is not
solved by a coordination convention at all.
Does Hume agree with Hardin that social order (primarily stable
property and government) rests on a coordination convention? Yes and
no. In favour of the position that he does agree is the way in which
Hume immediately goes on from introducing justice (respect for others
possessions) as a convention to what are indubitably coordination
problems, presenting them as illustrations of the same idea:
Thus, two men pull the oars of a boat by common convention for common
interest, without any promise or contract: thus gold and silver are made the
measures of exchange; thus speech and words and language are xed by human
convention and agreement.
36
These three examples are such paradigmatic cases of coordination
conventions that they are also included in Lewiss list of sample
coordination conventions.
37
What makes these into coordination cases
is that every single transaction is mutually advantageous. The two men
may never expect to meet again, but if it takes two men to row the boat
(because the boat is congured so that two people have to sit side by
side and take an oar each) and they have a common destination, it is
32
Lewis, Convention, p.68.
33
Lewis, Convention, p. 14.
34
Lewis, Convention, pp. 6 and 445.
35
Hardin, David Hume, p. 86.
36
Hume, Enquiries, p. 306, emphasis supplied.
37
Lewis, Convention, pp. 58, 44 and 4851.
376 Brian Barry
C D
C 2,2 0,3
D 3,0 1,1
Figure 1. Prisoners Dilemma
a simple matter to agree that they will join forces. Similarly, a would-
be seller will fail if he accepts only currency that nobody has and a
would-be buyer will fail if he offers only currency that nobody uses.
Assuming a trade is mutually advantageous, buyer and seller have a
common interest in xing on the same currency. And if you want to
communicate with somebody, you had better speak (or sign) in some
language that the other person understands. But again the mutual
advantage is fully contained in a single transaction: you may have no
wish to strengthen the language the other person speaks and may even
wish that it would die out. Now contrast all this with what Hume says
about justice, immediately before introducing these three examples:
if it be allowed . . . that the particular consequences of every particular act
of justice may be hurtful to the public as well as to individuals; it follows
that every man, in embracing that virtue, must have an eye to the whole
plan or system, and must expect the concurrence of his fellows in the same
conduct and behaviour. Did all his views terminate in the consequences of each
act of his own, his benevolence and humanity, as well as his self-love, might
often prescribe to him measures of conduct very different from those which are
agreeable to the strict rules of right and justice.
38
Hume could hardly make it plainer, in the absence of the actual
vocabulary of game theory, that he is here making justice a cooperative
convention in an indenitely iterated prisoners dilemma.
Let me explain. A prisoners dilemma is a game with the payoff
structure laid out in gure 1. Played once, there is only one equilibrium,
D/D (both players defect): if the Column player chooses C, the Row
player (whose payoffs are on the left in each cell) gets 3 rather than 2
by playing D; and if the Column player chooses D, the Row player gets
1 rather than O by playing D. Of course, C/C is better for both than
D/D, but neither has a self-interested reason for choosing C. (Contrary
to a surprisingly common idea, this is not a question of trust: even
if Column has already chosen C, Row is still ahead playing D.) In a
38
Hume, Enquiries, p. 306.
David Hume as a Social Theorist 377
one-shot game, then, defection is a dominant strategy. But this fails to
carry over to indenitely iterated plays, because what each player does
can be made contingent on what the other player(s) did previously.
We can now understand a cooperative convention to exist when a
convention to play the cooperative move in an indenitely iterated
prisoners dilemma is established among the members of a group.
The most compelling way of showing the difference between a
coordination convention and a cooperative convention is as follows.
Where a coordination problem exists, it is advantageous to any one
agent to play C where the other parties all play C, regardless of any
expectations about what the other player(s) will do in future. But where
a cooperative problem exists, it is advantageous to any one agent to
play C only if that agent has a well-founded expectation that what he
or she does this time will change what the other player(s) will do in
future. In an indenitely iterated prisoners dilemma (which is to say a
cooperative problem), it is always better to play D if you do not believe
that what you do will change the future behaviour of the other player(s).
Thus, in a two-person case, if the other player will play C regardless,
D/C beats C/C, and if the other player will play D regardless, D/D beats
C/D. Once we take away the shadow of the future, the iterated game
collapses into a series of one-shot plays. In a cooperative problem, the
cooperative behaviour of others is always a potential opportunity to
be exploited by defecting. By contrast, if all others play the cooperative
move in a coordination problem, cooperating myself is unconditionally
advantageous to me. There is simply no room for the idea of taking
advantage of others cooperation.
The obvious difculty for Hume is this: somehow he has to convince
us that, when faced with a cooperation problem, acting in accordance
with the strict rules of right and justice really does without any
exceptions best serve the interests of the actor. In the case of a two-
person prisoners dilemma, this is not too problematic. It is well known
that if both parties play a tit-for-tat strategy, for example, they will
normally nd themselves in a cooperative equilibrium. That is to say,
if the rst party plays C and thereafter each follows a C with another
C and a D with another D, each will serve his own interests as well as
can be hoped for by playing C every time. Following a C with a D (the
dominant strategy in a one-shot play) will always reap an immediate
gain, but risks bogging down the interactions of the parties in a long
(perhaps indenite) series of Ds from one party followed by Ds from the
other.
Hume in fact provides an example to illustrate the virtues of tit-
for-tat. This is the case of two farmers whose corn ripens at different
times. If they cooperate on both harvests, they will both get their crops
reaped. But this will not happen if they take no thought for the morrow
378 Brian Barry
because they will not cooperate. The farmer whose crops ripen later
will not risk losing his labour, which is what will happen if the other
fails to reciprocate when the time comes. As a result, the cooperation
will not get off the ground and they will both lose (part of) their crops.
But things go well if I learn to do a service to another without bearing
him any real kindness; because I forsee, that he will return my service,
in expectation of another of the same kind. So, he is in turn inducd to
perform his part, as foreseeing the consequences of his refusal.
39
Scale matters critically in cooperative contexts. For example, two
neighbours with a eld in common will be able to drain it simply by
each indicating to the other a willingness to cooperate. The idea will,
obviously, be that neither will carry on digging unless the other digs
as well. But tis very difcult, and indeed impossible that a thousand
persons shoud agree in any such action.
40
One reason Hume gives is
the difculty of planning and executing the work. But this could be
met if the thousand people chose someone to plan the drainage scheme,
and the problem of executing it could be solved by collecting money
from each rather than requiring all thousand to take part in the work.
But that brings us to the other impediment: the free-rider problem.
Hume says that each seeks to free himself of the trouble and expense
and woud lay the burden on others.
41
The only solution here is a
state, with its power to fund public projects by taxation and arrange
for them to be executed: political society easily remedies both these
inconveniences. . . . Thus bridges are built; harbours opend; ramparts
raisd; canals formd; eets equipped; and armies disciplined; every
where by the care of government.
42
Although Hardin treats public goods cases such as these as collective
action problems n-person prisoners dilemmas he distinguishes
them, as we have seen, from the stability of property and government,
which he categorizes as coordination problems. But Hume recognizes, I
believe, that these are just as much prisoners dilemmas cooperation
problems as is the provision of public goods. Justice is introduced
39
D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd edn., ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H.
Nidditch (Oxford, 1977), p. 521.
40
Hume, Treatise, p. 538.
41
Hume, Treatise, p. 538.
42
Hume, Treatise, pp. 53839. The ramparts, armies and eets are paradigmatic public
goods. But the bridges could be paid for by tolls (and still are in some places), while the
canals could be paid for by barges and the harbours by shipping that uses it, though
it might have been hard in a relatively undeveloped economy to raise the money up
front to pay for carrying out these works before there would be any offsetting revenue
stream. (But turnpikes illustrate the possibility of building toll roads privately, even in
the eighteenth century.) However, to the army and navy might be added the police and
the entire criminal justice system, and we could replace harbours with lighthouses. Of
course, a state is still required to enforce the collection of user charges but this is quite
different from the states having to fund and carry out these projects with tax money.
David Hume as a Social Theorist 379
by Hume with a two-person case of cooperation in respecting the
possessions of one another. Cooperation here depends on something
like mutual tit-for-tat strategies and these plausibly produce the
cooperative outcome over time.
I observe, that it will be for my interest to leave another in the possession of
his good, provided he will act in the same manner with regard to me. He is
sensible of a like interest in the regulation of his conduct. When this common
sense of interest is mutually expressd, and is known to both, it produces a
suitable resolution and behaviour.
43
In contemporary terminology, the players have common knowledge
that each will pursue a tit-for-tat strategy. Hume thinks that this line of
reasoning can be extended to groups larger than a dyad, and makes the
very strong claim that even every individual person must nd himself
a gainer on balancing the account, since, without justice, society must
immediately dissolve and collapse into a Hobbesian state of nature.
44
If a single act of injustice would precipitate all that, there would be an
overwhelming reason for refraining fromcommitting any such acts. But
Hume concedes that it may be askd, how any disorder can ever arise
in society if this account is correct.
45
He needs to answer that question
because he invokes the breakdown of the justice convention without
enforcement to provide an explanation of our need for government,
with its corresponding virtue of allegiance.
To the imposition then, and observance of these rules [of justice, men] are at
rst movd only by a regard to interest; and this motive, on the rst formulation
of society, is sufciently strong and forcible. But when society has become
numerous, and increasd to a tribe or nation, this interest is more remote; nor
do men readily perceive, that disorder and confusion follow upon every breach
of those rules, as in a more narrow and contracted society.
46
Hume presents this as a cognitive issue, a kind of perceptual error:
a failure to assess accurately the effects of an individual act of theft
on the general stability of property. But as soon as a society becomes
large, it really does become true that a single act of theft or even
a number of them will not bring the whole system crashing down.
But even if we were to accept Humes version, and say that a lot of
people are liable to calculate incorrectly, we would still get the result
that the justice convention collapses whenever we have a large group.
How large is large? If a thousand men could not drain a meadow in
the absence of a state, it seems to me highly doubtful that we would
need to get to anything like the size of a tribe or nation before the
43
Hume, Treatise, p. 490, emphasis in original.
44
Hume, Treatise, p. 497.
45
Hume, Treatise, p. 534.
46
Hume, Treatise, p. 499.
380 Brian Barry
justice convention failed to bring about stability of possessions. The
solution, as with public goods, is the state. Thus, the origin of civil
government and allegiance lies in the advantage to all in having civil
magistrates, kings and their ministers, our governors and rulers who
are satised with the status quo, so they are not only inducd to observe
[the] rules [of justice] in their own conduct, but also to constrain others
to a like regularity, and inforce the dictates of equity thro the whole
society.
47
Hume actually brings together justice and allegiance at one point,
treating them as parallel cases. Government, by deciding disputes and
enforcing its decisions, provides security for possessions, which Hume
describes as protect[ing] men in those conventions [as those of justice],
they make for their mutual interest. Hume then adds the public goods
case under the description oblig[ing] them to make such conventions,
and forc[ing] them to seek their own advantage, by a concurrence
in some common end or purpose.
48
It will be observed that Hume
continues here to employ the language of convention, but once we have
a rule that is enforced we have lost whatever traction the concept of
convention can give us in the explanation of social order. In particular,
I can see no reason why every compulsory contribution to the cost
of a public good should be described as obliging taxpayers to make
conventions when the whole point is that the kind of convention that
enables two men to drain a meadow without enforcement has broken
down. Why not simply talk about property laws and taxes?
Partly for ideological reasons (he implausibly tries to recruit Hume
as a forerunner of . . . Friedrich Hayek and the Austrians in social
theory),
49
Hardin is quite exercised about what he calls the public-
goods theory of the state. This he takes as having two elements. One
is the claim that certain characteristics of public goods require that
they be provided by a central agency acting on behalf of a larger
group of beneciaries.
50
He contrasts this with the view that collective
provision merely has advantages over individual provision. Hardin
says of the second that this is surely true in some cases, which
implies that the rst claim is false.
51
But while Hardin may believe
this personally, it is completely wrong as an interpretation of Hume,
since he said that it was impossible rather than merely difcult for
a thousand men to drain a meadow in the absence of government.
52
Thus, it is simply false to suggest that what Hume has to say about the
47
Hume, Treatise, p. 537.
48
Hume, Treatise, p. 538.
49
Hardin, David Hume, p. 231.
50
Hardin, David Hume, p. 122.
51
Hardin, David Hume, p. 122.
52
Hume, Treatise, p. 538.
David Hume as a Social Theorist 381
capacity of states to provide public goods is consistent with both the
rst and second claims.
53
Humes view is plainly that there are some
benets for which states are indispensible, and I do not see how this
could reasonably be denied.
The other element in the public goods theory of the state is
explanatory: states exist because they are the solution to the problem
of providing public goods for a large group.
54
Hume is clear that the
initial impetus is the need to secure property rights in a large group.
55
But he is equally clear, as we have seen, that states then take on the
additional job of providing public goods. Hardin complains that this
idea
is circular if it is supposed that the state is a public good [the solution to a
cooperation problem]. In frustration at failing to provide ourselves some public
goods, we merely provide ourselves with one that then provides the one we
failed to provide.
56
Hardin says that the fallacy involved is the one pointed out by Mancur
Olson
57
in The Logic of Collective Action. According to this logic, I
rationally contribute to the provision of a collective good only if I get
53
Hardin, David Hume, p. 122.
54
Hardin, David Hume, p. 123.
55
It is not easy to reconcile Humes explicit statement that government takes its
origins in protecting property rights with his suggestion in the Treatise, which is also the
line adopted in the essay Of the Origin of Government, that states originated in the need
for members of small-scale societies to band together in order to ght their neighbours,
see Hume, Of the Origin of Government, Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, revised
edn., ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1987), pp. 3741. According to Hume, hunter-
gatherers do not have enough portable possessions to make it worth the while of the
members of the group to ght over them: An Indian is but little tempted to dispossess
another of his hut, or steal his bow (Hume, Treatise, p. 539). But Hume believes that
warfare between such groups will nevertheless occur, though it is not apparent what
these societies would be ghting about, since they would have no cause for conict over
possessions. Be that as it may, Hume picks up on Indians again to explain the remote
origins of states. He says that in the American tribes, . . . men. . . never pay submission
to any of their fellows, except in time of war, when their captain enjoys a shadow of
authority, which he loses after their return from the eld, and the establishment of peace
with the neighbouring tribes (Hume, Treatise, p. 540). The normal state of these societies,
then, would be one lacking government, but in which justice, that is, the observation of
those three fundamental laws concerning the stability of possession, its translation by
consent, and the performance of promises, was maintained in the absence of coercion
(Hume, Treatise, p. 541). I have to confess that Hume seems to me to be running two
alternative accounts, deriving the origin of government from the need to secure property
in one place and from the exigencies of inter-societal warfare in another. For the present
purpose, perhaps all that matters is that we can say that the need to secure property
certainly stands up as an adequate basis for a state, even if there is another basis as
well. Hardin, incidentally, refers only to the version in which the rise of government . . .
was to secure defense against foreign attackers (Hardin, David Hume, p. 212, emphasis
suppressed).
56
Hardin, David Hume, p. 121.
57
M. Olson Jr, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, Mass., 1965).
382 Brian Barry
more value from the bit of the collective good that my contribution
buys than the contribution costs me.
58
Thus, the two men draining
the meadow each get half the value of the improved meadow, which
may well make it worthwhile to contribute a half share of the effort to
do the job. But if my contribution will produce only one-thousandth of
the value to me of having the meadow drained, it is highly plausible,
to say the least, that contributing will not look like a good deal from
a self-interested viewpoint. Hence, although all of us might receive a
large net benet if we all contribute, none of us may have any interest
in contributing individually.
59
What Olson explodes, then, is the fallacy that in an n-person
prisoners dilemma it is sufcient to give everyone a self-interested
reason for cooperating that C/C is a higher payoff than D/D. This
shows that collective action (prisoners dilemma) problems involving
large numbers of agents cannot (in the absence of special conditions
that we need not enter into here) be resolved by counting on voluntary
contributions to the public good in question. But the conclusion that
Olson goes on to draw from this problem is that what is needed to get
this sort of public good supplied is what he called selective incentives,
which could be understood to include selective deterrents. These are
rewards or penalties that are individualized to give each potential
contributor a self-interested reason for coming through with a fair
share of the cost of supplying the public good. And the paradigmatic
case of an entity that can produce selective incentives and deterrents
is the state. Thus, there is no vicious circle created by bringing in the
state as the solution to the public goods problem, because the state
is a special kind of public good: a body that provides enforcement of
its own edicts. Hardin objects that if the government is an ongoing
resolution of a continuing society-wide prisoners dilemma or collective
action interaction, it cannot be stable, because it can be brought down
by free-riding at any time.
60
But free-riders are deterred by the power
that the state provides to enable fare dodgers to be prosecuted. Public
transport does not normally rely on voluntary contributions to its cost.
Hardin adds that coordination is the dominant feature of stable
social organization because its continuing resolution faces no. . .
problems [of free-riding] and is therefore stable.
61
This begs the
question by assuming that states actually do create something that
can properly be described as stable social organization. But waiving
that question for a moment, we might try to unpack this argument
58
Hardin, David Hume, p. 121.
59
Hardin, David Hume, p. 122.
60
Hardin, David Hume, p. 123.
61
Hardin, David Hume, p. 123.
David Hume as a Social Theorist 383
as follows: (1) cooperative problems cannot have stable solutions; (2)
social organization (e.g. the system of property and the governmental
regime) is stable; therefore (3) the existence of social order proves that
it cannot be the solution of a cooperative problem; and (4) by a process
of elimination we arrive at the conclusion that social order must be the
solution to a coordination problem. Otherwise it could not occur at
any rate in large groups.
How persuasive is the claim that social order must solve a
coordination problemto account for its stability? An immediate problem
that crops up even in interpreting this claim is that Hardin mixes
together two different notions of stability. A solution, whether it
involves a convention or not, may be stable in the sense that it secures a
high level of compliance among the members of some group (call this c.s.
or compliance stability). Alternatively, a solution may be stable in the
sense that changing [it] through spontaneous actions is commonly hard
to do, because the individuals rst have to coordinate with each other
on switching the convention
62
(call this i.s. or inertial stability). These
two kinds of stability can form four combinations, which I number as
follows:
(1) High c.s. and high i.s.
(2) High c.s. and low i.s.
(3) Low c.s. and high i.s.
(4) Low c.s. and low i.s.
The last combination is of no interest for present purposes, but the
others all have examples in Hume and in reality in at least one
kind of convention and one size of group.
(1) Lewiss coordination conventions with large numbers provide
compelling incentives for compliance and are hard to change except
by a political authority (as with the Swedish change in the rule of
the road at 5 a.m. on 3 September 1967), or by a market leader (as
with the standard time zones introduced by the American railroads).
63
If Hume is right that a group of people larger than two but smaller
than a thousand could arrive at the convention of regarding one
anothers possessions as off-limits, they would have a compliance-stable
cooperative convention. But in any but an extremely small group it
seems plausible that whatever pattern of possessions had already been
arrived at would also be inertia-stable. This is because permitting
disputes about rival claims to possess some good or piece of land would
open up a can of worms that would threaten the whole scheme.
62
Hardin, David Hume, p. 91.
63
Hardin, David Hume, p. 90.
384 Brian Barry
(2) High compliance stability and lowinertial stability can be found in
many small-number coordination situations. Inertial stability in large-
number situations is high. Thus, What makes a soda fountain, coffee
house or bar in is the existence of a convention in some social circle
that it is the place to go when one wants to socialize.
64
This coordination
convention might be hard to change spontaneously, though we do know
that there are cases in which what is in can become out quite fast,
as with fashion in clothes. But if two people have agreed to have lunch
at a certain time and place, they can change their minds quite easily
and switch to a different one.
65
This combination of high c.s. and low
i.s. could also hold for small-scale cooperative problems. Thus, the two
neighbours would have to agree on a plan for draining the eld, but they
could easily agree to change it as the work progressed. This cooperation
would be compliance-stable if each gave the other to understand that
he would work as long as the other did and not otherwise (a form of
simultaneous tit-for-tat), but its focus could be changed by agreement.
(3) Genuine coordination problems have a built-in incentive for
everyone to comply with the solution regardless of the size of the group.
If you refuse to trade with one or more people except in a currency
they do not accept, you will miss out on the opportunity of mutually
benecial exchange; if you set your watch to some idiosyncratic time,
you will miss trains and appointments; and so on. Thus, in coordination
problems, there is no difculty in securing compliance with an ongoing
convention, regardless or the size of the group. It is only in cooperative
problems (prisoners dilemmas) that non-compliance becomes an issue.
As the size of the society grows, the property convention becomes more
subject to non-compliance, either through hope of gain (free-riding on
64
Lewis, Convention, p. 43.
65
For Hume, agreements between two people will count as conventions. His two men
agree (not promise), he says, to rowthe boat together by convention. Similarly, two people
could state mutual intentions (which fall short of promises) to go to a certain place at a
certain time for lunch, and this would constitute a Humean convention. Lewis suggests
that the two men in the boat get under the wire only because in the process of rowing
they have to coordinate their timing: see Lewis, Convention, p. 44. This may be true
for Lewiss own analysis of convention, but as far as Hobbess account is concerned it
is a gratuitous addition, since it is enough to establish a convention for the two men to
agree to row together. Hardin buys in to the same idea as Lewis, that for a convention
some coordinating beyond that of agreeing to row together is needed. But he reaches
the opposite conclusion about the case from Lewis, saying that once they have agreed to
row the two men have no alternative to synchronizing their efforts, so we do not really
have a coordinating convention at all. It may be worth mentioning that in the Treatise
Hume talks about convention and agreement in the same breath: the two men in a boat
pull the oars . . . by an agreement or convention, tho they have never given promises to
each other. Even justice respect for property is indifferently a matter of convention
or agreement: thus justice establishes itself by a kind of convention or agreement; that
is, by a sense of interest, supposd to be common to all, and where every single act is
performd in expectation that others are to perform the like (Hume, Treatise, p. 498).
David Hume as a Social Theorist 385
others compliance) or fear of loss (the anticipation that if I alone
comply amid general licentiousness I shall become the cully of my
own integrity).
66
Compliance stability is thus liable to be low in a large
group. But inertial stability as long as the convention can still be said
to hold at all will be high, since it would be extremely hard to change
the form of the convention (such as the distribution of property rights)
to another one by spontaneous individual actions. We witness the
complete collapse of compliance stability wherever government ceases
to have effective control over its territory. Somalia ts this description
fairly well, and the Congo has done so to a horrendous degree in the
recent past and is still subject to outbreaks of violence which the
government is powerless to control. At the same time, this kind of
anarchy is inertially stable in the sense that there is no way in which
concerted acts by individual citizens can end it by bringing into being
a government whose writ runs throughout the country.
I suggest that Hardin uses the term stability in different
senses when he says Large numbers stabilize social conventions in
coordination contexts but undercut standard kinds of cooperation in
collective action contexts.
67
The sense in which the rst claim is true
is that of inertial stability, which we have seen increases as a function
of group size in both coordination and cooperative problems. It would
not be true of compliance stability because all coordination conventions
are compliance-stable, regardless of size. To say (the second point) that
large numbers undercut cooperation in collective-action contexts (or
n-person prisoners dilemmas generally) is not to compare like with
like. For, as I have said, inertial stability increases in cooperation
conventions just as much as it does in coordinating conventions. The
instability here is compliance instability. Hardin is thus guilty of an
equivocation, employing different senses of stability in his two claims.
This equivocation underlies the fallacious argument mentioned
earlier. This runs as follows. Stability in large-number cases can be
provided only if they are coordination problems. And since states are
stable, this means that they must be the solution to a coordination
problem. But the way in which large numbers make states stable is
that they make spontaneous individual action to change the form of
government to another one very difcult.
68
This proposition would
66
Hume, Treatise, p. 535.
67
Hardin, David Hume, p. 86, emphasis suppressed.
68
The political regime in small groups could be changed by agreement among the
members of the group if Hume is right in saying that government arises out of the choice
of the members of the society. When men have once perceivd the necessity of government
to maintain peace, and to execute justice, they woud naturally assemble together, woud
chuse magistrates, determine their power, and promise them obedience. As a promise is
supposd to be a bond or security already in use, and attended with a moral obligation,
386 Brian Barry
hold for inertial stability equally well if the state were the solution
of a prisoners dilemma problem. We cannot therefore deduce from
anything said so far that a state must be the solution of a coordination
problem. Then we have the assertion that large numbers destabilize
prisoners dilemma problems. This is true of compliance stability. But
why should we accept that this refutes the idea that states are the
solution to a cooperation problem? Perhaps we should say that states do
suffer from varying degrees of non-compliance, ranging from some non-
compliance to total non-compliance where a situation has degenerated
into anarchy, and that this actually supports the conclusion that social
order is a cooperative rather than a coordination problem.
If a state is the solution (to the extent that it is) to a cooperation
problem, it will always be beset by the potential advantage to
individuals or small groups of breaking the law. Hardin treats anybody
who points to this difculty as asking an invalid question: by far the
most common query or challenge is to pose a particular case in which a
person is a loser from the application of the law, the rules of property or
some other convention for mutual advantage. This is, he says, based
on a fundamental misconception because
having the overall system. . . of lawmakes us better off than we would have been
without the system of law. . . . To be a credible objection it must be formulated
as a whole-cloth rejection [this should read assertion] of the idea that the
chaos of an unordered society would be preferred by at least one person over a
well-ordered society.
69
This is to commit precisely the fallacy picked out in Olsons logic of
collective action: the idea that if all-C in a large group is better for
everybody than all-D, that gives each person a self-interested incentive
to play C.
No doubt it is true that even a devoted thief must prefer a society
that is well enough organized to produce enough to steal.
70
But the
tis to be considerd as the original sanction of government, and as the source of the
rst obligation to obedience (Hume, Treatise, p. 541). If this early form of government
arises from actual agreement among group members, there is presumably no reason for
a different choice not being made the next time round. For unlike Hobbes, Hume clearly
does not maintain that a group can be said to act only if it has a sovereign to act for it.
However, Humes use of actual contract to get government going clashes with Hardins
claim that Hume does nothing but pour scorn on contract theories for the justication of
the state: for Hume the whole apparatus of contracting is a silly idea (Hardin, David
Hume, p. 121). It is true that Hume does not think that the duty of allegiance rests on
mutual promises now. But his account of the origins of government is in all essentials
identical with Hobbess account of the origins of sovereigns by institution. Hardin is
simply incorrect to say that for Hume government arises from. . . convention and slow
evolution (Hardin, David Hume, p. 214).
69
Hardin, David Hume, p. 184.
70
Hardin, David Hume, p. 184.
David Hume as a Social Theorist 387
choice between refraining from stealing and living in a society with no
property worth stealing is not one that faces any individual thief in a
large society, because a single act of theft (or even a whole career of
theft) will not sufce to switch a society from comprehensive order to
comprehensive disorder, as Hume admitted when he conceded that a
sensible knave may think that an act of iniquity or indelity will make
a considerable addition to his fortune, without causing any considerable
breach in the social union and confederacy.
71
And in his essay Of
the Origin of Government, Hume again says: Some extraordinary
circumstances may happen, in which a man nds his interests to be
more promoted by fraud and rapine, than hurt by the breach which his
injustice makes in the social union.
72
The fundamental objection to Hardins whole approach is that to
make a state the solution of a coordination problem is far too good
an explanation of social order. Coordination conventions have built-in
self-enforcing mechanisms that give everybody a strong incentive to
comply without any need for any additional enforcement. By contrast,
a state has to rely heavily on its ability to call down heavy sanctions
on those who break its laws or fail to pay its taxes. Even then, states
achieve nothing remotely like the high levels of compliance effortlessly
created by coordination conventions. A recent survey found that people
in Britain admit to breaking the law several times a week on average.
These are mostly trafc offences, but the clear-up rate on crimes such as
car theft and burglary is extremely low, while tax evasion is estimated
to cost many billions of pounds a year. At the other end of the scale
from relatively law-abiding Britain there are places where social order
has broken down completely, but in addition there are many other
countries that suffer from a very high level of offences against property
and person.
South Africa, for example, has thirty times the murder rate of Britain
and has been estimated to have more violent deaths per head than
any country not involved in warfare. It is a society sliding towards a
Hobbesian war of all against all. In addition to the high level of ordinary
crime, there have also been pogroms directed against refugees from
other African states, which have killed some and made many destitute
71
Hume, Enquiries, p. 282.
72
Hume, Of the Origin of Government, p. 38. Hume says that it is according the
imperfect way in which human affairs are conducted that the sensible knave sees
prospects of net gain (Hume, Enquiries, p. 282). This has to mean that Hume is
talking about conditions here and now, with legal penalties attached to theft, fraud,
embezzlement, and so on. It is not only the possibility of damaging social order that the
knave has to put in the balance but the chance of being caught and punished. Indeed, one
of Humes counter-arguments is that knaves may overreach themselves and undertake
further exploits that result in their being detected (Hume, Enquiries, p. 283).
388 Brian Barry
and homeless. Troops have been deployed in the townships for the
rst time since the end of apartheid, and the minister responsible for
the police has accepted the responsibility if they shoot rst and ask
questions afterwards. Again, there are studies suggesting that Latin
Americas income could be 25% higher if its crime rate, which began
soaring in the 1980s, was similar to the rest of the world. The head
of the Organization of American States has described drug trafcking,
kidnapping and other crimes as an epidemic, a plague on our continent
that that kills more people than Aids or any other known epidemic. It
destroys more homes than any economic crisis.
73
Across the world,
William Dalrymple, in The Age of Kali, described the breakdown of
social order in all its forms in the northern Indian state of Bihar:
crime is completely out of control: 64,085 violent offences. . . took place between
January and June 1997. . . . According to [local editor] Sengupta, what was
happening in Bihar was nothing less than the death of the state. . . . In the Patna
hospital there were no bedsheets, no drugs and no bandages. The only X-ray
machine in the city had been out of order for a year: the hospital could not afford
to buy the spare parts. . . . Outside the capital, electricity had virtually ceased
to be supplied. . . . Without power, industry had been brought to a grinding
halt. No roads were being built. There was no functioning system of public
transport.
74
Coming up to date, in Orissa state there is one district within which
there has been a two-month orgy of sectarian violence which has left
at least 59 people dead, 50,000 homeless and thousands of houses and
churches burnt to the ground.
75
There is one nal reection I want to offer. While it is true that
regimes are seldom overthrown by non-organized individual action,
they certainly cannot be replaced by these means. They are quite
frequently changed in other ways. It is quite common in Africa
and Latin America for a fairly small group of military personnel to
overthrow a constitutional regime or for a constitutional president to
turn into a dictator by an autogolpe. This fact does not in itself point
us more towards states being solutions to one kind of problem rather
than the other. But if we reect on its signicance, we shall surely
see how implausible it makes the idea that states are solutions to
coordination problems. Nobody sheds blood over the time zone, the rule
of the road, or the system of weights and measures, even if they arouse
some degree of disagreement. Political power is only at the extreme
73
R. Carroll, Rampant Violence in Latin Americas Worst Epidemic, The Guardian,
9 October 2008, p. 23.
74
W. Dalrymple, The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters (London, 1998),
pp. 17 and 19.
75
G. Chamberlain, Thousands Flee as a New Hindu Rampage brings Fire and Sword,
The Observer, 19 October 2008, p. 31.
David Hume as a Social Theorist 389
margins concerned with coordination problems such as these. Control
of the government enables those who hold it to enrich themselves
corruptly (or in accordance with corrupt laws they have created), to
channel costs and benets to some regions and ethnic groups and away
fromothers, and so on. Especially where other means of enrichment are
scant, this power is worth ghting for. I apologize for the obviousness
of these reminders, but they seem to be needed.
III. DID HUME HAVE A NORMATIVE THEORY?
The bulk of Hardins book is devoted to the thesis that I began
by stating: that Humes social and political theory has not received
sufcient credit. But Hardin goes beyond seeking to substantiate
his claim that Humes social theory is both sophisticated and in all
essentials correct. He also argues that Humes objectives in the Treatise
and the Enquiry are solely explanatory: he has a consistent and
systematic . . . anti-normative stance.
76
Yet at the same time, Hardin
has chapters entitled Value Theory and Utilitarianism. According
to Hardin, Humes value theory is, in the current jargon, welfarist: the
only measure of value is subjective individual utility. And Humes moral
theory is utilitarian: the goodness of a state of affairs is some function
of the utilities of the people in it. Hume is not an aggregative utilitarian
on the lines of Bentham or Sidgwick: he has no use for the notion of
a sum of interpersonally comparable cardinal utilities. According to
Hardin, Hume is an ordinalist utilitarian or Paretian: situation A is
better than situation B if each person has more subjective utility in A
than in B (or at least some have more and none have less). I shall take
this up in a moment, but the immediate issue is that these claims look
awfully like asserting a rst-order moral commitment made by Hume
in his own right. Can the circle somehow be squared?
I do not see how this could quite be done. But if Hume were to be
taken as saying that everybody is as a matter of fact a utilitarian, he
could simply tag along and associate himself with everybody else, which
would be pretty innocuous. Now it is true that Hume does sometimes
make such a claim. In the Enquiry (where utility plays the central role)
he says at any rate that the circumstance of utility, in all subjects, is
a source of praise and approbation. . . . That it is the sole source of that
high regard paid to justice [etc., and] inseparable from all the other
social virtues.
77
In A Dialogue he goes even further, and claims that
there never was any quality recommended by any one, as a virtue or
moral excellence, but on account of its being useful, or agreeable to a
76
Hardin, David Hume, p. 7.
77
Hume, Enquiries, p. 231.
390 Brian Barry
man himself or to others.
78
But saying that Hume is simply describing
the way things are will not stand up against Humes constant sallies at
views of morality that quite obviously y in the face of this utility-based
normative criterion.
Although Hardin makes passing mention of the monkish virtues
79
he does not stop to notice that Humes contempt for themis inconsistent
with any idea of utility as the universal foundation of morality. Hume
has to recognize that some people do in fact hold non-utilitarian
doctrines before he can disparage them. In his strongest statement,
he says that:
as every quality whichis useful or agreeable to ourselves or others is, incommon
life, allowed to be a part of personal merit; so no other will ever be received,
where men judge of things by their natural, unprejudiced reason, without the
delusive glosses of superstition and false religion. Celibacy, fasting, penance,
mortication . . . and the whole train of monkish virtues; for what reason are
they everywhere rejected by men of sense, but because they . . . neither advance
a mans fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable member of
society . . .? We justly, therefore, transfer them to the opposite column, and
place them in the catalogue of vices.
80
Who are we here? Surely Hume is associating himself with the
men of sense and says that those who extol the monkish virtues
are just plain wrong. In A Dialogue, Hume explicitly concedes that
his utilitarian theory simply does not work for those who, like Pascal,
depart from the principles of common reason and are subject to the
illusions of religious superstition or philosophical enthusiasm.
81
It is
all very well for Hume to say that an experiment . . . which succeeds in
the air, will not always succeed in a vacuum.
82
But if Humes objective
had been to explain all moral judgements, rather than to endorse some
and condemn others as mistaken, he would surely have had to accept
that he needed to come up with an explanation that covered all the
varieties of moral judgement that are actually found in the world,
whether they t the utilitarian model or not.
Hardin concedes that Hume occasionally slips into what he calls
panegyric and advocates particular moral beliefs and actions. On one
occasion he virtually apologizes for the slip even while slyly defending
it: But I forget, that it is not my present business to recommend
generosity and benevolence, or to paint, in their true colours, all the
genuine charms of the social virtues.
83
Hardin might more tellingly
78
Hume, Enquiries, p. 336.
79
Hardin, David Hume, pp. 31 and 1645.
80
Hume, Enquiries, p. 270.
81
Hume, Enquiries, p. 343.
82
Hume, Enquiries, p. 343.
83
Hardin, David Hume, p. 7, quoting Hume, Enquiries, p. 177.
David Hume as a Social Theorist 391
still have cited Humes remarks right at the close of the Treatise,
where he says that his system may help us to form a just notion of the
happiness, as well as the dignity of virtue. He goes on there to say that
he forbear[s] insisting on this subject. Such reexions require a work a-
part, very different fromthe genius of the present. The anatomist ought
never to emulate the painter.
84
But praises of the virtues are not the
right place to look for Humes breaches of his ofcial role as a scientist
dissecting the phenomenon of morality an anatomist. My proposal
is that we instead direct our attention to the many places, especially in
the Enquiry, where he drops the mask and denounces what he regards
as pseudo-virtues that conduce to the benet of neither their possessor
nor anyone else.
Let me now return to the question of what sort of utilitarian Hume
is. Hardin has to be right in saying that when Hume talks about public
interest he never means a sum of interpersonally comparable cardinal
utilities along Benthamite lines. But Hardin is saddling Hume with
his own ideas when he claims that Humes utilitarianism (ordinalist or
Paretian) supports pursuing the interests of others only where there
is mutual advantage, so that the actor benets along with others.
This leaves out fully half of Humes utilitarianism: that part which
covers the social virtues of humanity and benevolence as against the
social virtues of justice and delity.
85
Hume actually addresses the
conception of morality attributed to himby Hardin when he writes that
those philosophers were excusable, who fancied that all our concern for
the public might be resolved into a concern for our own happiness and
preservation, the excuse lying in that close union of interest, which is
so observable between the public and each individual.
86
Against this,
Hume says that:
we have found instances, in which private interest was separate from public;
in which it was even contrary: And yet we observed the moral sentiment
to continue, notwithstanding this disjunction of interests. . . . If usefulness,
therefore, be a source of moral sentiment, and if this usefulness be not always
considered with a reference to self; it follows, that everything, which contributes
to the happiness of society, recommends itself directly to our approbation and
good-will.
87
Of course, the public and society are only the outer limits of our
altruistic appraisal. In contrasting humanity and benevolence with
justice and the other convention-based virtues, Humes examples are
a parent or a friend. And as the good, resulting from their benign
84
Hume, Treatise, p. 620.
85
Hume, Enquiries, pp. 3034
86
Hume, Enquiries, pp. 21819.
87
Hume, Enquiries, p. 219.
392 Brian Barry
inuence, is in itself complete and entire, it also excites the moral
sentiment of approbation.
88
Hardins difculty in coming to terms with
these virtues (natural as against articial in the Treatise) may have
something to do with his analysis of strategic types, in which he puts
benevolence inthe category of Pure Conict.
89
This is curious, because
conict should involve an opposition of wills. It is true of course that,
if I give you money that you need or help you to move house, I am
disposing of money or time that I might have used on myself. But if
I want to help and choose to do so, and you want my help, there is a
coincidence of wills rather than a conict. There remains a question
about how far Hume thinks that people are moved to be benevolent by
the thought that benevolence is a virtue (as he says they are moved at
least to some degree by the thought that injustice is a vice) and how
far by a direct impulse to help, as a parent or a friend, for example.
But I do not see that anything much turns on this, since either way
benevolence is for Hume a virtue as lustrous as justice.
IV. CONCLUSION
Coming full circle, where does all this leave Hardins objective of calling
attention to Humes merits as a non-normative social and political
theorist? This claim is, I suggest, vindicated. Without the benet of any
formal apparatus, Hume showed a remarkably sure grasp of strategic
analysis. Hardins specic argument that Humes great contribution
was to show that social order depends on coordination conventions
fares less well. It is true that Hume shows a pronounced wobble in that
direction immediately after introducing the idea of justice as resting on
a convention by adducing as illustrations three paradigmatic examples
of a coordination convention. But Humes overall line is that justice and
the other convention-based virtues rest on a cooperative convention
which solves (to the extent that it does) a prisoners dilemma problem
and that states are required when a society exceeds some small size
because only states can solve the large number prisoners dilemma
problems that constitute the problem of social order. However, this
does not detract from Humes merits quite the contrary, since it is
the right answer. Admittedly it makes Hume less original than Hardin
would have him be, since Hobbes also held that the problem of order is
a prisoners dilemma. But I think it is fair to say that, while Hobbes is
the superior writer, Hume is the more precise and subtle thinker.
88
Hume, Enquiries, p. 304.
89
Hardin, David Hume, p. 62, table 3.1.