This essay treats the final version of Hume’s Essays, Volume 1, as an artfully shaped whole. Framed by essays on taste that address the interaction of personal and social dynamics, the volume is organized into loose clusters of political and moral essays that share a common pattern of offering multiple approaches to the issues they examine and pursuing a given idea until it reaches a point of excess that generates a salutary correction. This activity circumscribes an inexact range of balance, which is left for the reader to resolve or, better, to continue. In this, Hume’s Essays invite readers to participate in the interaction between self-formation and cultural forms that is motor of Hume’s post-skeptical philosophy and the genre of the essay alike.

There is a prominent place in recent work on Hume’s moral philosophy for the idea that Hume is best placed in the tradition of virtue ethics. I argue in this paper that Hume’s theory of justice cannot be given a virtue-theoretic construal. I argue that Hume should rather be placed in the tradition of theorizing about justice inaugurated by Grotius. In this tradition, the moral obligation to justice is spelled out in terms of the necessity of respect for property, for contracts, and for political authority in a stable and peaceful society. In this tradition, furthermore, justice is regarded as primarily as a matter of respecting perfect rights, and, relatedly, as primarily manifest in omissions rather than in actions. The search for an agent-state definitive of Hume’s just person is fruitless, I suggest, because Hume himself gives reasons to believe that there is no such thing. I argue that for Hume the just person is, simply, someone who obeys the conventions that define the nature of justice, regardless of why she does so.

Hume’s sections on the reason of animals are considered. He claims that animals show what we find extraordinary sagacity, in nest building and migration, as well as needing to learn many things from experience, just as we do. He issues a challenge to any rival account of our own powers to do as well or better than he does in accounting for the continuities, and discontinuities, between animal and human cognitive achievements. Yet when he looks at our ability to recognize familiar lasting things, only in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding does he allow that animals do this just as we do. Does his Treatise account of what exactly we do, noting constancies and coherence in our impressions, so overlooking interruption and disguising variation, fail his own touchstone?