Rawls J. Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy

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people, and through the process of revolution and restoration a new re-

gime 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 govern-

ment or supporting a regime if, very roughly, its continued existence and ef-

fectiveness 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 fu-

ture and simply ask whether the present form of regime, the present orga-

nization 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 ac-

count 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 dis-

cuss. Utilitarianism was, and still is perhaps, the most inﬂuential and lon-

gest continuing tradition in English speaking moral philosophy. While it

perhaps can claim no writer of the stature of Aristotle and Kant (their ethi-

cal 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 doc-

trine 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 Eco-

nomics. Part of the explanation for this is that if we look at the more

important economists in the English tradition before 1900 and the well-

known utilitarian philosophers, we’ll ﬁnd that they’re the same people; only

Ricardo is missing. Hume and Adam Smith were both utilitarian philoso-

phers 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 philoso-

pher. 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 econom-

ics, 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 tra-

dition 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 politi-

cal philosophy. This division is not easy to rectify given the pressures of spe-

cialization, and much else. It is also very difﬁcult nowadays to get a suf-

ﬁcient 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 under-

lies 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 edi-

tion, and slightly over half of the whole).

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.

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 Under-

standing 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.

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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 Tradi-

tion, 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.

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 imagi-

nation 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.

For Hume it meant methods of science—an appeal to experience and observa-

tion, 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 senti-

ments, 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 ar-

gues the case for resistance to the Crown within a mixed consti-

tution 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 ex-

plain 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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capacity for sympathy—which is replaced in the Enquiry by the

Principle of Humanity. Hume’s account of the “judicious specta-

tor” is one of the most important ideas in moral philosophy (dis-

cussed in Lecture II below).

(iv) These details we cannot cover here: the point to stress is that

Hume’s background and philosophical point of view are alto-

gether different from Locke’s. He approaches the subject of mo-

rality from the point of view of an observing naturalist. Even

when Hume and Locke are discussing the same topic, they do so

from a different point of view. They are not in general trying to

answer the same questions.

§2. Hume’s Critique of Locke’s Social Contract

Now I will turn to Hume’s critique of Locke’s social contract view. It ap-

pears in at least one prominent place—in Hume’s essay “Of the Original

Contract,” which appeared in 1748 in the third edition of his Moral and Po-

litical Essays. The essay is divided into four parts. I often ﬁnd it helpful to

count paragraphs: ¶¶1–19 is the ﬁrst part; ¶¶20–31 is the second; and ¶¶32–

45, the third part, presents Hume’s philosophical argument contrary to

Locke’s social contract. And then ¶¶46–49 is the conclusion.

The way Hume organized the essay, it isn’t clear where the breaks are,

and I think it might be helpful to have some preliminary idea of what is in

it. In part 1, Hume begins by granting that both the Tory view of the divine

right of kings, and the Whig view that government rests on the consent of

the people, have some truth in them—but not, of course, in the way in

which they each intend. The truth that Hume concedes would hardly be

the sort of truth that the proponents of each of those views would want.

For example, he’s most brief with the Tory view, and somewhat deliber-

ately insulting, I would assume. He says that the Crown may rule by divine

right, but no more so than does a thief who takes my purse, because all

powers derive from the supreme being (¶3). This is obviously not intended

seriously, but I suppose is intended to wake up the reader in the course of

the argument.

Hume then mocks the Whig view, which, he says, supposes “that there

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is a kind of original contract by which the subjects have tacitly reserved the

power of resisting their sovereign whenever they ﬁnd themselves aggrieved

by that authority with which they have...voluntarily entrusted him” (¶1).

I assume Locke and his social contract view to be the target, or among the

targets of Hume’s argument here, although Locke is not actually men-

tioned when Hume says (¶4) that if by the original contract is meant the

ﬁrst origin of government, say in the woods and deserts when people ﬁrst

associated together, then it cannot be denied that all government at ﬁrst is

founded on contract. For at that time people were nearly equal in bodily

force and mental powers, and culture and education having not yet given

rise to inequality. In those circumstances, then, consent was necessary for

political authority as well as for people’s sense of the advantages that peace

and social order would bring for them. Yet, he goes on to say that “this con-

sent was very long imperfect, and could not be the basis of a regular admin-

istration” (¶5). That is to say, the idea of social compact, or the original

compact, as Locke presents it, was beyond the comprehension of people at

that time. And since that is the time when government ﬁrst originated, he

therefore thinks that Locke’s doctrine—which he says afﬁrms “that all men

are still born equal and owe allegiance to no prince or government unless

bound by the obligation and sanction of a promise” (¶6)—is hardly strictly

applicable, or strictly accurate, even with regard to this ﬁrst origin of gov-

ernment. Although it does have, as he says, some truth in it.

Hume then proceeds to enumerate a number of objections which he

thinks show that consent can hardly count as a foundation of government

and a basis of obligation at the present time. For example, he says that so-

cial contract doctrine is not recognized or even known by most parts of the

world. “We ﬁnd everywhere princes who claim their subjects as their prop-

erty [that being an actual practice at the time] and assert their independent

right of sovereignty from conquest or succession” (¶7). He adds that magis-

trates would imprison propounders of the theories of consent as dangerous

and seditious people, “if our friends did not before shut you up as delirious

for advancing such absurdities” (¶7). (This seems a somewhat extreme re-

mark, but this is his view of the matter.) If such doctrines are not even ac-

cepted in most places, and if they’re not now understood, how can consent

be binding? His point is that in order for consent to have the kind of effects

that Locke says it would, consent would have to be publicly recognized and

understood to be the basis of political obligation. Hume is not offhand de-

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nying that possibility. He is just saying that those are not the present cir-

cumstances. So, consent cannot be the basis of government or authority. In

any case, he goes on to say, the original consent being ancient, that is, “too

old to fall under the knowledge of the present generation” (¶8), it cannot

be binding now. For parents cannot bind their descendants down to remote

generations (¶8).

Another objection Hume makes is that almost all governments that

presently exist were founded on usurpation or conquest (he mentions Wil-

liam the Conqueror in 1066), and in any case they have arisen through force

and violence “without any pretense of fair consent or voluntary subjection

of the people” (¶9). In some cases they have arisen by marriage, by dynastic

considerations and so forth, which treat the people of a country as part of a

dowry or legacy (¶11). Still another objection is that elections do not carry

any great weight for they are often controlled by a combination of a few

great ﬁgures, and the social contract idea of consent, a particular originat-

ing consent, has no correspondence to the facts (¶12). Nor would the con-

sent given in the Revolution of 1688 and 1689 be any different, on Hume’s

view. He says that a majority of about seven hundred people (members of

Parliament), and not the nation of some ten million as a whole, determined

where the political authority would lie at that time (¶15). So, in conclusion,

consent has rarely taken place, and when it does take place, on Hume’s

view it is so irregular and limited to so few people that it can hardly have

any such authority as Locke ascribes to it. Again, he doesn’t mention Locke

by name.

Beginning in part 2, ¶¶20–31, Hume says there must be some founda-

tion of government other than consent. I now want to give a rough ac-

count of this argument. He does not deny that consent is “one just founda-

tion of government,” and when it does obtain he says that it is “surely the

best and the most sacred of any” (¶20). But he argues that because it so sel-

dom actually is the basis, it can’t be the only one. He says that for consent

to bind and to be a foundation of government certain conditions have to

hold, and he gives a series of reasons why they do not. For one thing the so-

cial contract view presumes a state of knowledge of and regard for justice

that people do not actually have. On Hume’s view, it asks too much of hu-

man nature. It asks for a kind of state of perfection that is much superior to

our past or present state.

Again, the social contract view presupposes that people believe their

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obligation to government depends on their consent. But, common sense

nowhere supposes this. People think, actually, that their allegiance to a cer-

tain prince—who “from long possession has acquired a title independent of

their choice or inclination” (¶22)—is decided by their place of birth. And it

is absurd to hold that past consent is a signiﬁcant basis of political obliga-

tion when the people who are alleged to consent do not themselves believe

that allegiance depends on their agreements (¶23). Then in ¶24, an often

quoted paragraph, and a very strong one, Hume says that to suppose that a

poor peasant has a free choice to leave the country when he knows no for-

eign language and has no funds to depart and to make a fresh start abroad,

is like supposing that someone, by remaining in a vessel at sea, freely con-

sents to the domination of the captain, though he was carried aboard while

asleep, and to leave, must jump overboard and drown. So, what Hume is

saying is that to suppose that peasants or other working people—any but

perhaps the few hundred who determine the form of regime—consent in

any way that’s binding, would be like saying that the person taken aboard

the ship while asleep had given his consent to be aboard. The most plausi-

ble case of passive or tacit consent, Hume thinks, is that which binds a for-

eigner who settles in a country the government and the laws of which he is

acquainted with ahead of time. In that case, in Hume’s view, although the

allegiance is more voluntary than that of a native subject, the government

actually expects less of it and depends less on it (¶27).

Hume says in ¶28 that if one generation died all at once, and another

took its place as a group all at once, suddenly arriving at the age of reason

with sense enough to choose their government, they then might by general

consent establish their form of civil polity without regard to precedent. But

the conditions of human life are not like that, and from its circumstances,

with “one man every hour going out of the world, another coming into it,”

we can see that a new consent for each generation is impossible in any ef-

fective way. In order to achieve stability (a necessity in government) “the

new brood should conform themselves to the established constitution” and

make no “violent innovations” (¶28).

Finally, Hume remarks that to say that “all lawful government arises

from the consent of the people” is to “do them [governments] far more

honor than they actually deserve or even expect and desire from us” (¶30).

Starting with ¶31, Hume introduces what I call the philosophical cri-

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tique of Locke’s view. He begins by distinguishing between natural duties,

for example duties like love of children, gratitude toward our benefactors,

etc., and duties that are founded on a sense of obligation—that is, duties

that presuppose a recognition of the general interests and necessities of so-

ciety and the impossibility of orderly social life if these duties are neglected.

He calls these latter duties “artiﬁcial duties.” The term “artiﬁcial” has of

course changed since Hume’s time. Then it was a term which meant

artiﬁce of reason, conveying a notion that such duties are in an important

way rational. When Charles the Second ﬁrst went into Saint Paul’s Cathe-

dral after it was rebuilt from Christopher Wren’s design after the ﬁre, Wren

stood with him under the dome waiting with great apprehension to see

what Charles would say. He was greatly relieved when Charles looked up

and he said that it was “awful and artiﬁcial”—not very high praise today,

but then it meant both awe inspiring and rational.

Among the artiﬁcial duties are (a) those of justice, a regard for the prop-

erty of others; (b) ﬁdelity, keeping one’s promises; and (c) the civic duty of

allegiance to government. Hume’s philosophical argument against Locke

here is that these duties, justice, ﬁdelity, and allegiance, are explained and

justiﬁed by the notion of utility, that is to say, by reference to “the general

necessities and interests of society.” (Particularly relevant here are ¶¶35–38

and ¶45.) If the duties of justice and ﬁdelity were not generally recognized

and honored by members of society, then on Hume’s view orderly social

life would be impossible. “Society cannot possibly be maintained with-

out the authority of magistrates” (¶35). This is the basic philosophical ex-

planation, he thinks, of these duties. Thus it is quite pointless, Hume

thinks, to try to justify, or to explain our allegiance to government, by an

appeal to the duty of ﬁdelity, or keeping promises, that is, by reference

to some presumed or actual social compact based on the consent of indi-

viduals. For if we ask why we should honor any compact or agreement that

we have made, or to treat individual consent as binding, Hume claims that

we have no alternative but to resort to the principle of utility as an explana-

tion. Therefore, when asked for the grounds of our allegiance to govern-

ment, instead of taking the extra step of appealing to the principle of

ﬁdelity to a presumed contract why not appeal directly to the principle of

utility? Nothing is gained by way of a philosophical justiﬁcation by found-

ing the duty of allegiance on the duty of ﬁdelity. In this sense, Hume re-

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gards Locke’s social compact view, we might say, as an unnecessary shufﬂe,

and moreover, one that tends to conceal that the justiﬁcation for all duties

must appeal to the general necessities of society, or what Hume in other

contexts calls “utility.”

Hume’s conclusion, therefore, is that as a philosophical doctrine, the so-

cial contract is not only implausible, and contradictory to common sense in

that it goes against all kinds of things that people actually believe, and it is

against widespread political opinion, as he argued in the earlier parts of the

essay. But it is also superﬁcial in that it fails to bring out what has to be the

real ground of political obligation, namely, the general necessities and inter-

ests of society.

Hume comments at the end of the essay, in ¶48, that in morals it is im-

possible to ﬁnd anything that is new, and that opinions that are new are al-

most always false. He believes that in questions of morals, it is the general

opinion and practice of mankind that is decisive when it exists. He says,

“New discoveries are not to be expected in these matters.” In other words,

he regards Locke’s view, which he ﬁnds to be historically inaccurate, as a

newfound doctrine, and one that therefore goes against the general practice

and opinion of humankind.

How are we to assess Hume’s criticism of Locke? His critique is forceful

and convincing, or at any rate highly plausible in many respects, but weaker

in others. I think it may be said that Hume’s essay (and Bentham’s later es-

say, although Bentham says essentially the same thing that Hume does) was

historically very inﬂuential in weakening the social contract view. There

tend to be, at least in England, no successors to a doctrine like Locke’s. On

that evidence, Hume’s essay was historically very effective.

Hume, however, seems to read Locke as saying that our allegiance to

government as it exists now depends upon original consent, or an original

compact, some generations in the past, and that it is this consent that binds

us now. But Locke does not actually say this. He does not believe that the

consent of the ancestors can bind the descendants, and he says this explic-

itly in ¶116 of the Second Treatise: “Whatever engagements or promises any

one has made for himself, he is under obligation of them, but cannot by any

Compact whatsoever, bind his children or posterity.” Each person is born,

Locke thinks, to natural freedom, even now. And this state we can only

leave by our actions after we have attained the age of reason. So Hume

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