 As an account of the genesis of property, Hume’s theory has the advantage over its main rivals of acknowledging that the early eras of human history are eras of conflict largely unregulated by principle and opaque to later moral enquiry. It does not require us to delve into history to ascertain who did what to whom, and what would have happened if they had not. Once a settled pattern of possession emerges, we simply draw an arbitrary line and say, ‘Property entitlements start from here.’ The model has important normative consequences for the present as well. Those who are tempted to question or disrupt an existing distribution of property must recognize that far from ushering in a new era of justice, their best efforts are likely to inaugurate an era of conflict in which all bets are off and in which virtually no planning or cooperation is possible. The weakness of the Humean approach is the obverse of its strength. The moral considerations that it marginalizes actually do matter to us. For example, we would not be happy with a Humean convention ratifying slavery or cannibalism, but for all that Hume shows it may well be a feature of the equilibrium emerging from the age of conflict that some people are in possession of others’ bodies. The point is that even if Hume is right that the sentiment of justice is built up out of a convention to respect one another’s de facto possessions, that sentiment once established can take on a life of its own, so that it can subsequently be turned against the very equilibrium that engendered it (Waldron 1994).