Abstract
This paper begins by identifying two prominent features of the modern tradition of natural jurisprudence. First, Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf and Locke adopted narrow concepts of justice. And second, they were deeply concerned with the origin of property. Given this seventeenth century background, the paper explores and clarifies the ways in which Hume transformed the tradition of natural jurisprudence and paved the way for Bentham’s utilitarianism. First, Hume adopted even a narrower concept of justice. He took over Grotius’s concept of justice as alieni abstinentia, and narrowed it further by excluding a human body and its attributes
from the realm of justice. Hume reduced alienum to another’s ‘external possessions’ by considering ‘three different species of goods’ (THN 3.2.2.7) and arguing that external possessions alone were the proper object of justice. This argument actually involves a fallacy, but it did function to destroy the natural lawyers’ idea that justice serves to protect human dignity. Second, Hume transformed the earlier conventionalist theories of the origin of property. He developed a new naturalistic concept of convention by radically transforming a set of agreement related concepts; pactum (Grotius), covenant (Hobbes), and pactum or conventio (Pufendorf).
Unlike the old concepts, Hume’s is entirely free from the notion of willing. He sees convention as a convergence or concurrence of more than two person’s senses of interest. Besides having this naturalistic concept, Hume resorts to an Epicurean principle. He explains the virtue of justice in terms of the feeling of pleasure which is produced, in a spectator’s mind, by the public utility of the system of justice. In spite of some existing differences between Hume and Bentham, these naturalistic and Epicurean strands in Hume did make a significant contribution to the rise of Bentham’s utilitarianism.
