Ideas as Remedies to Inconveniences: David Hume

This chapter locates the roots of the pragmatic genealogical tradition in David Hume’s explanations of artificial virtues as remedies to inconveniences. The motivation for Hume’s turn to genealogy is examined, and it is shown how viewing his accounts of the virtues of justice and fidelity to promises through the lens of pragmatic genealogy sets them apart from the Enlightenment genre of conjectural history. Four functions performed by Hume’s fiction of a counterpossible state of nature are identified, and it is shown how Hume introduces two key ideas: that under certain circumstances, the motivations to engage in a practice need to be non-instrumental motivations if the practice is to be stable; and that shared needs can give rise to practices that serve a point for participants even when those fail to grasp what that point is. This prevents genealogies from becoming overly intellectualist or circular.