hume i

“Of the Original Contract”

§1. Introductory Remarks

So far we’ve talked about Hobbes and Locke, and have gone over them rather quickly.1 That is inevitable, given the scope and aim of these lectures, and I’m not going to apologize. I just hope you are aware that there is, of course, much more that we could talk about in each of them. The problem facing us today is to get some sort of natural transition from talking about Hobbes and Locke, who are two writers in the social contract tradition, to talking about Hume and Mill, who are two writers in the utilitarian tradition. We seek a point of view that highlights the main points of contrast between them and brings out the philosophical differences that divide them and concerning which the debate took place.

One might say that any main philosophical tradition, whether in political thought or elsewhere, often bases itself on certain intuitive ideas, and requires the elaboration and development of these ideas; and you find various authors over time doing that in different ways, and so different variants arise. The intuitive idea of the social contract tradition is the notion of agreement—agreement between equal persons who are at least rational, and their somehow agreeing to a certain way of being governed, either, as in Hobbes’s case, to authorize a sovereign, or in Locke’s case to join a community and then to organize somehow the will of the majority to set up the legislative power or the constitution. That notion of agreement is, I think, intuitively appealing. If I agree to something, then I am bound by the terms of the agreement, and that goes back, you might say, to the basic idea

1. [The two Hume lectures are derived from transcriptions of recording tapes of lectures delivered on March 4 and 11, 1983, for Rawls’s class in Modern Political Philosophy at Harvard University. Relevant passages from Rawls’s handwritten lecture notes have been added. —Ed.]

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of consent, or promising. I think Locke takes the notion of promising as somehow given, as something that we all understand. There is not any attempt on his part to derive it from the fundamental laws of nature.

Of course, the social contract view will vary in many ways, depending on how the notion of agreement is spelled out in some sort of detail. What are the conditions of agreement? Who agrees to it? How are the persons who agree described? What are their intentions? What are their interests? A lot of other things have to be developed and worked out. We made a contrast between Hobbes and Locke when, in the case of Hobbes, I emphasized the point that he seems to be concerned with giving everyone compelling reasons, addressed to their own interests, for why it is rational for them to want an effective sovereign to continue to exist. That’s a notion, then, that would try to base obligations on peoples’ rational and fundamental interests. In Hobbes there is not, on the whole, an appeal to the past. If the sovereign exists now, then everyone has an interest in wanting the sovereign to continue to exist, and it does not matter how the sovereign power actually arose in the past. We are obliged, each of us, in terms of our fundamental interests, to support an effective sovereign now.

Locke’s view is, of course, quite different. It begins with a condition of equal rights in the state of nature, and then imagining that through a series of agreements over time, each of these agreements having to satisfy certain conditions, a regime is established. For Locke, a legitimate regime will be one that could have been established in a certain way and that meets certain conditions. This is true whether or not any regime can be shown to have come about in this way historically. Therefore, in his case legitimacy depends on the form of the regime, and how it could have come about, and its actual protection of certain legitimate rights.

If you spell out the contrasts here between the Lockean and the Hobbesian arguments—the form that they would take, say, in public discussion in 1688 and 1699—a Hobbist would say, after William and Mary were securely established, that everyone had an obligation to comply with their regime because it was an effective sovereign. If a sovereign is effective then we are obliged to support that regime. Whereas a Lockean argument would actually be somewhat different. It would say, presuming that we apply Locke’s argument to the same situation, that the previous regime had violated the rights of the people. Political power had then reverted to the

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people, and through the process of revolution and restoration a new regime had been set up that respected the rights of the people. “Respecting the rights of the people” means that it is a legitimate regime, one that could be contracted into from a state of equal rights. So, those arguments of Hobbes and Locke are rather different, although both do have a kind of social contract view involving the notion of agreement.

The utilitarian tradition has a different sort of intuitive idea. It involves the idea of the general interest, or general well being of society, of public good, public interest—all different phrases that you will find Hume uses. And utilitarian doctrine starts from the idea of producing the greatest social (or public) good. On this view we have a reason for supporting a government or supporting a regime if, very roughly, its continued existence and effectiveness promotes the welfare of the people, or would lead to a greater welfare or to greater well-being than any regime that could be set up as an alternative to it at the time. The utilitarian, then, will make arguments that will appeal to the general well-being or the general good of society. Again, there are many refinements that have to be made in the notion of well-be- ing, and in going deeper into Hume and Mill we’ll look into some of the problems involved in doing that. One ought to notice that the notion of promises, or of origins, or of contracts do not enter into the utilitarian view in any way. What the utilitarian does is to look to the present and future and simply ask whether the present form of regime, the present organization of social institutions, is such as to promote the general welfare in the best and most effective way.

The utilitarian view differs from Hobbes inter alia in these three ways:

(a) Utilitarianism rejects psychological egoism [except for Bentham], and it insists on the significance of the sentiments of affection and benevolence. Although here, Hume’s thesis of limited generosity is important in his account of justice and politics. (b) Utilitarianism rejects Hobbes’s relativistic conventionalism regarding the distinction between right and wrong, and insists on the reasonableness and objectivity of the principle of utility. (c) Utilitarianism rejects Hobbes’s view that political authority rests on force. It maintains that instead political authority is founded on governments’ working to the good of society as a whole (for social welfare), as that is defined by the principle of utility, which different utilitarians will define in different ways.

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Before I actually turn to Hume I might point out that he is one of a long line of utilitarian writers, only a few of whom we will be able to discuss. Utilitarianism was, and still is perhaps, the most influential and longest continuing tradition in English speaking moral philosophy. While it perhaps can claim no writer of the stature of Aristotle and Kant (their ethical works being in a class by themselves), taking the tradition as a whole, and viewing its extent and continuity and ever increasing refinement in certain parts of the view, utilitarianism is perhaps unique in its collective brilliance. It has run at least from the early part of the 18th century to the present time and has been marked by a long line of brilliant writers who have learned from each other. These include Frances Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam Smith; Jeremy Bentham, P. Y. Edgeworth, and Henry Sidgwick, the main classical utilitarians; and John Stuart Mill, whose views include many non-utilitarian features. As a result, having evolved continuously over nearly three centuries, it is probably the most impressive tradition in moral philosophy.

One must remember that utilitarianism is historically part of a doctrine of society, and is not simply a detached philosophical doctrine. The utilitarians were also political theorists and had a psychological theory. Also, utilitarianism has had considerable influence in certain parts of Economics. Part of the explanation for this is that if we look at the more important economists in the English tradition before 1900 and the wellknown utilitarian philosophers, we’ll find that they’re the same people; only Ricardo is missing. Hume and Adam Smith were both utilitarian philosophers and economists, and the same is true of Bentham and James Mill, John Stuart Mill (though he is questionably a utilitarian, for reasons I shall discuss later) and Sidgwick; and Edgeworth, while he was known primarily as an economist, was something of a philosopher, at least a moral philosopher. It is not until 1900 that this overlap in the tradition stops. Sidgwick and the great economist Marshall were both in the same department at Cambridge when they decided to found a separate department of economics, I believe in about 1896. Since that time there has been a split, although utilitarianism still influences economics, and welfare economics has a close connection historically to the utilitarian tradition. Still, since 1900 the tradition has divided into two more or less mutually-ignoring groups, the economists and the philosophers, to the reciprocal disadvantage of both;

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at least insofar as economists concern themselves with political economy and so-called welfare economics, and philosophers with moral and political philosophy. This division is not easy to rectify given the pressures of specialization, and much else. It is also very difficult nowadays to get a sufficient grasp of topics in both subjects for one person intelligently to discuss them.

Of course, I haven’t time to cover all the important utilitarians, and therefore, I am just going to talk about Hume and Mill and attempt to give some of the flavor of this alternative view and the intuitive idea that underlies it. For Hume, I suggest that you read “Of the Original Contract,” and the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), with special attention to sections I–V, IX, and Appendix III (roughly 80 pages in the Oxford edition, and slightly over half of the whole).2

First, a word about Hume the man:

(a)His dates: 1711–1776.

(b)He was born into a Scottish gentry family in Berwick, not far south of Edinburgh.

(c)He attended University of Edinburgh beginning at age 11—for a few

years.

(d)At age 18 (1729) he was seized with the idea of writing the Treatise.

(e)Some significant dates in Hume’s life:

(i)1729–34: Hume read and reflected at home.

(ii)1734–37: Hume lived in France where he worked on the Treatise.

(iii)1739–40: Treatise published when Hume returned to England.

(iv)1748, 1751: Publication of Enquiry Concerning Principles of Understanding and of Morals (respectively).

(v)1748: “Of the Original Contract,” which appeared in the third edition of Hume’s Essays Moral and Political as a new essay in that edition.

2. [Rawls’s 1979 lecture notes have the following paragraph here. The lectures on Sidgwick referred to below appear in the Appendix to this volume. —Ed.]

“My aims here are limited: I shall focus entirely on what I shall call the Historical Tradition, and distinguish three variants of utilitarianism: (a) that of Hume, which I discuss today and next time . . .

(b)Then I shall take up the Classical line of Bentham-Edgeworth and Sidgwick.

(c)Finally, J. S. Mill.

Our task is to relate these in some way as we proceed.”

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What was the guiding idea of the Treatise which seized Hume’s imagination and led him to labor on it more or less in isolation for ten years? We can only surmise from the work itself.

(a)The key I think lies in the subtitle: A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into MORAL SUBJECTS.

(b)A word on the meaning of “moral”—it is not the same as today, for it included psychology and topics concerned with social theory.

(c)“Experimental” has also changed in that it has become more specific.

For Hume it meant methods of science—an appeal to experience and observation, and thought experiments and theory. Newton was the great exemplar, as becomes clear from the introduction to the Treatise. Hume aims to apply his methods to moral subjects: that is, the subjects related to understanding the first principles that account for (1st Bk.) human beliefs and knowledge; (2nd Bk.) human passions, that is, feelings and emotions, desires and sentiments, character and will; (3rd Bk.) the human phenomena of the moral sentiments (more narrowly speaking), including our capacity for making moral judgments and how we do this; how far we can be moved to act from these judgments, and so on.

(d) Hume approached these topics in a completely different way than Locke:

(i)Locke is like a constitutional lawyer working within the system of law defined by the Fundamental Law of Nature; and Locke argues the case for resistance to the Crown within a mixed constitution within that framework. The argument proceeds within the moral system of the FLN; it is, as it were, legal and historical.

(ii)Hume’s view is that of a naturalist observing and studying the phenomena of human institutions and practices, and the role of moral concepts, judgments, and sentiments, in supporting these institutions and practices, and in regulating human conduct.

(iii)Hume wants to ascertain the first principles that govern and explain these phenomena, the moral phenomena—judgments and approvals, etc.—included. Much as Newton ascertained the first principles of the laws of motion, Hume stressed certain laws of association as 1st principles re knowledge and belief; and he traced moral judgments in the Treatise as deriving importantly from our

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