The forensic notion of the self and the sensible knave

The key to understanding Hume’s discussion of the sensible knave in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals is a stretch of text in Shaftesbury’s “Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor” that has received very little attention from twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars. This chapter argues that scholars to date have not only misinterpreted Hume’s answer to the knave, but they have also misinterpreted the knave himself (his motives, his questions, and his concerns). In fact, Hume’s knave is an only slightly modified version of what Shaftesbury calls the “moderate” knave in his essay, and Hume’s answer to the knave deliberately parallels Shaftesbury’s own in ways he could have reasonably expected his eighteenth-century readers to immediately recognize. Of special significance in this light is Hume’s remark that the knave will lack “consciousness of integrity.” What Hume meant by that phrase, why he thought it was something the knave would care about, and why Hume thought the knave would necessarily lack “integrity” in this sense are all features of Hume’s answer to the sensible knave that draw on the parallel discussion in Shaftesbury’s essay. And once we see this, we’ll see that Hume has a very good answer to the knave indeed.