Annette Baier is one of the leading philosophers publishing on David Hume. She possesses a versatile pen and a sensible grasp of Hume's thinking ranging from his philosophical works to what Hume himself referred to as ‘polite literature written in a more easy style and manner’, which is not to forget Hume's History of England. Her previous works have changed the way we think about Hume, and her latest is a thought-provoking book.
Hume's account of justice includes aspects of genius and features that have been a source of frustration and interpretative problems for his contemporaries and notably for his readers during the last fifty years of growing Hume scholarship. A widely acknowledged merit of Hume concerns the origin of justice and the role of conventions, issues that have preoccupied Baier's thinking throughout her career. Hume's idea in his Treatise of Human Nature (THN) – resembling Bernard Mandeville's account – is that the security of private property, after it has first been invented, serves everyone's self-interest. Baier is comfortable detecting Hobbesian and Mandevillean echoes in Hume and her title, The Cautious Jealous Virtue, means that rules of justice determine what is mine and thine, and compared to generosity or benevolence this ‘conformity to cooperative schemes’ is cautious and jealous (p. 227).
Several commentators, including John Rawls, have been impressed by Hume's account of the ‘circumstances’ of justice. Many scholars have also been taken by the subtleness of Hume's idea of artificial virtues and convention-making in general. Annette Baier has an ability to turn these complicated issues into an approachable topic while maintaining the coherence of her argument, namely that we need to understand justice in accordance with Hume's general account of human social conventions (including marriage and chastity). Her strong emphasis on and careful analysis of the role of promises in Hume's ethics made at least this reader acquire some new Baierian beliefs about Hume.
Baier has quite a remarkable philosophical ability to put her finger effortlessly on vital problems. For example, her insistence on the importance of trust (and lack of it) for Hume's moral philosophy is often ignored. In Baier's hands, it becomes understandable how, for Hume, fellow-members of any given society are the makers and breakers of one's reputation, and how, at the same time, the possibility of never being trusted again plays a fundamental role in Hume's theory of justice, expanding its core beyond simple questions of private property and rule obedience.
Some problematic parts of Hume's account concern the nature of justice. Hume's contemporaries were already puzzled about his idea that moral approbation of justice is sympathy with public interest. Hume introduces justice as an artificial virtue and there seem to be additional problems when it comes to fitting this account with his overall definition of virtue as requiring non-moral motivation because the reasoning is circular. As mentioned, these puzzles have always fascinated Baier. Her renowned Progress of Sentiments (1991) discussed social artifices at length. While this earlier work was also more interested in governors and legislators changing people's motives with reward and punishment (an aspect almost altogether abandoned in this latest book), many of the themes regarding justice there have now been either recast or expanded (including crucial symbolic transfer of property, promise and trust, and the restricted view of justice in THN). In her more recent prose, it turns out that she has adopted quite strong views of what Hume should have been doing. Metaphorically speaking, her voice now is also sharper and louder.
The most pressing puzzle that Baier attempts to fix is Hume's narrow conception of justice in THN. While today we think that social justice and modern ideas of distribution are fundamental aspects of justice, Hume restricts justice to private property and its transference, promises and allegiance to government. In THN, he appears to operate with an even more restricted conception because, according to Baier, it does not include the most basic parts of what we understand as jurisprudence, namely criminal justice and prohibitions against bodily harm.
Baier sees the narrowness of justice in THN as consisting largely in the formal absence of equality and desert. Baier sees a way out of this problem because Hume discusses his artificial justice together with what is sometimes taken as the natural virtue of equity. Baier traces a change in Hume's thinking by emphasizing the importance of desert for justice that is present in a short paragraph in Hume's Enquiry Concerning Principles of Morals, which leads her to interpret Hume as stressing equity and what resemble modern notions of social justice. This is an interesting aspect, opening new doors to evaluate Hume. At the same time, it is a slightly awkward perspective and a very personal reading of Hume. Baier shows little concern for the ongoing debate about it being problematic to discuss social justice in the Rawlsian sense in eighteenth-century texts. The close connection between justice and equity expands into one of Baier's main themes and while she has been able to uncover some new evidence for her case – especially when she sees Hume's account of justice developing throughout his publishing career – much is still based on speculation.
Baier further expands her argument to what she considers a more complete idea of justice by introducing material from Hume's History of England that brings criminal justice and questions of bodily harm into the discussion. Her conclusion is that by the time he wrote his late essay ‘Of the origin of government’, Hume should have considered rewriting the entire account of justice because he had finally come to emphasize that governments exist ‘to maintain twelve judges, and so protect all the rights the courts protect’ (p. 86), and that justice includes aspects of criminal justice and prohibitions of murder and assault. Hence, property rights are included in the concept, but justice is not based upon private property. This is an intriguing idea, but it leaves one wondering what relevance this solution will have for future scholarship. Baier offers a luminous analysis of Hume's idea of corrected sentiments and reflectively approved customs and conventions, but it does not remove the narrowness of justice in THN.
Baier's Hume on Justice is structured so that her new case, the solution to how Hume's conception of justice expanded over time, is put forward in the first part of the book. The second part, consisting of previously published essays partly supporting the case and concerning related matters, functions as a series of appendixes. All these articles are good and substantial and the one entitled ‘Promises, Promises, Promises’ is simply brilliant. The problem with the structure is that the first part turns out to be more polemical, while the second part remains as a series of self-contained philosophical essays, even when it is clear that the material there could have easily functioned as the backbone for a monograph.
The ethics of Baier's Hume is radical and reformist in spirit, rejecting church hierarchy and familial patriarchy. She puts quite a lot of weight on the idea that in Hume's system there is at least a theoretical choice for rejecting disadvantageous schemes of action (e.g. tyranny). She is particularly fierce in discarding attempts to link the approved motive of justice to anything recalling Kant or some form of deontology. For Baier, a list of duties is simply un-Humean. This is mostly visible in the first part of the book, which opposes the idea that Hume can be read as a proto-game-theorist. She goes on to state that ‘Hume's theory of justice is part of his moral philosophy, not part of his political philosophy’ (pp. 52–3).
Baier's perception of Hume is clear and at best superbly devoid of prejudice. Hence, the rejection of political philosophy seems somewhat odd and unnecessary. Some of her articles engage with the natural law tradition, but a fuller treatment of the topic in the first part of the book would have been beneficial. For example, her discussion of Hume's idea of equality seems to border on overstatement (e.g. in the case of Hume's supposed positive view of the Levellers that is brought up more than once). In the second part of the book, she clearly draws out the differences between Hume's theory of human artifice and the voluntarist accounts of Pufendorf and Locke and how Hume's account of promises uses the terminology of natural law tradition but empties it of its theological and rationalist implications. Yet, her treatment would noticeably have benefited from considering Hume's theory of justice also as part of his political philosophy in the early modern context. Sharply distinguishing between moral and political philosophy is rather arbitrary in the context of early modern philosophy.
Baier's account of Hume's theory of social artifice (including justice) is original and useful, perhaps the best we have got. For this, as well as for other reasons, her work will make a lasting impression on future scholarship. This book is part of that legacy.
