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Hume Studies Volume 31, Number 1, April 2005, pp. 93-122 Obligation, Justice, and the Will in Hume's Moral Philosophy MARGARET WATKINS TATE I. Introduction Recent Hume scholarship has shifted from the traditional view that Hume's account of the will and practical reason directly opposes Kantian rationalism about morals. Some scholars now find common ground between Hume's motivational psychology and Kantian understandings of reason and obligation. Although this trend has corrected certain misreadings of Hume as, for example, a straightforward subjectivist, it goes too far in other respects. In the following, I argue that we can understand one aspect of Hume's study of morals—his explanation of the artificial virtue of justice—in a way that avoids such mistakes. I begin by considering Stephen Darwall's argument, in The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought,' that features of Hume's account of justice reveal both an inadequacy in the empirical naturalist tradition of which Hume is the hero and underlying commitments to the proto-Kantian tradition.11 suggest that the puzzles about Humean justice identified by Darwall can be dissolved by calling on broader aspects of Hume's ethics and reinterpreting crucial passages in his discussions of justice. I defend Hume against the charge of inconsistency by suggesting an alternative interpretation of Hume's theory of the will and his arguments about the development of justice as a virtue. Finally, I argue that Hume's theory of the will can consistently account for motives to Humean justice, properly understood. Margaret Watkins Tate is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Baylor University, PO Box 97273, Waco, TX 76798-7273, USA. e-mail: Margaret_Tate@baylor.edu 94 Margaret Watkins Tate In the Treatise, Hume says: '"Tis from the prospect of pain or pleasure that the aversion or propensity arises towards any object: And these emotions extend themselves to the causes and effects of that object, as they are pointed out to us by reason and experience" (T 2.3.3.3; SBN 414).2 When we act on this propensity or aversion, we say that we exercise our will, defined as "nothing but the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind" (T 2.3.1.2; SBN 399). "The will exerts itself," he tells us later, "when either the good or the absence of the evil may be attain'd by any action of the mind or body" (T 2.3.9.7; SBN 439). In the next line, he suggests that we may interchange for "good" and "evil" the words "pleasure" and "pain."3 These statements reflect a theory of the will shared by Hume with other early modern British moralists in what Darwall calls the empirical naturalistTradition.4 Empirical naturalists—Hobbes, Cumberland, Hutcheson, Hume, and Locke—share a "desire to account for normativity in fully natural terms, without reliance on supernatural posits and without attributing to reason any powers beyond those involved in empirical inquiry. "5 According to this view, reason may be theoretical and instrumental, but not practical; it neither gives us ends nor motivates.6 On the other hand, autonomous internalists—Cudworth, Shaftesbury, Butler, and (sometimes ) Locke—maintain that "obligation consists in conclusive motives raised through the exercise of autonomous practical reasoning (that is, the practical reasoning that realizes autonomy.)"7 These thinkers anticipate ideas that inspire Kant's explicit identification of the self with self-legislating pure practical reason. As hero of the empirical naturalist tradition, Hume occupies a crucial position in Darwall's study of the development of these competing understandings of normativity. Darwall portrays him as an insightful thinker—so insightful that he recognizes features of justice that he cannot explain in his home tradition's terms. In the end, Hume must "avail himself of the idea that agents can choose an action not because that action may be instrumental in achieving natural goods, but because it is mandated by a ... normative principle they accept."8 In availing himself of this idea, Hume espouses an understanding of normativity closer to the ideas of the opposing tradition than his own. If this interpretation of Hume...

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