Hume’s Justice And Its Significance

Justice contains people’s pursuit of order, aspire for equality and expectation towards equity. The pursue for justice remains the same ideal of human society since ancient time. The discussion about justice runs through the entire human intellectual history. Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Hume and Rawls, the philosophers who had great influence in human intellectual history they all conducted profound exploration towards justice. As a representative ideologist of bourgeoisie in the 18 th century in the UK, Hume had unique understanding about this issue. His opinion towards justice not only provided theoretical defend for the bourgeoisie and promoted the development of capitalist economy at that time, but conducted huge influence to the development of ethical political thoughts in later ages, especially the justice thoughts and provided realistic references for construction of socialist market economy system in China. Hume’s opinion towards justice was affected by other ideologists, such as the justice opinion of Plato and Aristotle and political thoughts of Hobbes and Locke. His empiricism epistemology and Emotionalism ethics compose the internal theoretical basis of his justice opinion. He firstly displayed the conditions how justice created and thought justice generated human selfish or limited generosity and insufficient natural resources. As for Hume, justice was the combination of Artificiality, regularity and utility quality, while the core content was the property right. Therefore, Hume carried out a detailed discuss towards the relationship between justice and property right and put forward there basic rules of property right. Towards the function of justice, Hume thought it protected the property right and maintained social order, which was safeguarded by government. Although there remained limitation of Hume’s justice opinion, it did have significant theoretical and realistic meaning. This article restores the overall perspective, displays the system of of Hume’s justice opinion and provides references for people’s further understanding of Hume’s opinion towards justice by means of analyzing the background, content, limitation and significance of Hume’s opinion towards justice comprehensively and synthetically.