 According to the Treatise, artificial virtues include justice, fidelity to promises, allegiance to government, and chastity. Hume devotes much discussion to justice, which he treats as a paramount and paradigmatic artificial virtue. Hume understands justice primarily as honesty with respect to property or conformity to conventions of property (T 3.2.2.28). Establishing a system of property allows us to avoid conflict and enjoy the possession and use of various goods. The social value of conventions involving property seems obvious. Yet one reason that justice receives such attention from Hume is that it poses a problem about moral motivation and moral approval. Hume claims that there must be a natural (non-moral) motive for morally good actions. Otherwise they could only be done because they are morally good, which would be circular, since our judgment of acts as morally good reflects our approval of the motives and traits that give rise to the acts in question (T 3.2.1.7, 3.2.1.17). But this position makes it hard to see how justice can be a virtue; for it is hard to find the requisite natural, nonmoral motive for it. Self-interest is the natural motive that justifies our establishing rules regarding property (T 3.2.2.24); but self-interest is neither always satisfied by just acts, nor approved in the way that traits we call virtues generally are (T 3.2.1.9–10). Benevolence cannot be such a motive either, since it sometimes favors bending or suspending the rules of justice, and benevolence lacks the power to motivate just conduct when it’s difficult (e.g., T 3.2.1.12). Hume himself says that “a sympathy with public interest is the source of the moral approbation, which attends that virtue” (T 3.2.2.24). But since sympathy with the public interest itself seems neither nonmoral nor inherent in human nature, this claim redescribes the problem rather than solves it. Hume must ground sympathy for the public interest in more obviously natural sentiments, and explain its development from them (e.g., as self-interest, corrected or redirected through education or the contrivances of politicians). Otherwise, Hume must abandon his claim that all morally good actions—even those associated with artificial virtues—have non-moral, natural motives. (See Gauthier 1979; Mackie 1980: ch. 5; and Darwall 1995: 302–316.)