All the laws of nature, which regulate property, as well as all civil laws, are general, and regard alone some essential circumstances of the case, without taking into consideration the characters, situations, and connexions of the person concerned, or any particular consequences which may result from the determination of these laws in any particular case which offers. They deprive, without scruple, a beneficent man of all his possessions, if acquired by mistake, without a good title; in order to bestow them on a selfish miser, who has already heaped up immense stores of superfluous riches. Public utility requires that property should be regulated by general inflexible rules; and though such rules are adopted as best serve the same end of public utility, it is impossible for them to prevent all particular hardships, or make beneficial consequences result from every individual case. It is sufficient, if the whole plan or scheme be necessary to the support of civil society, and if the balance of good, in the main, do thereby preponderate much above that of evil. Even the general laws of the universe, though planned by infinite wisdom, cannot exclude all evil or inconvenience in every particular operation. (emphasis added)
The puzzle: Why do we honor the laws of property when they appear to take from the poor, beneficent man and give to the wealthy miser?
The answer: Because law forces us to deal abstractly and formally with matters of property. We cannot take into account the relative deservingness of the parties. We must enforce "general inflexible rules" because they ultimately best serve the "public utility."
This is a familiarly Humean thought. Hume is, after all, the great theorist of rules, norms, and conventions. Good rules need not return the just outcome in every particular instance, what matters is that they promote utility taken on the whole.
In that sense, Hume is broadly read as anticipating "rule consequentialist" improvements on utilitarianism.
But that interpretation misses a key detail of this passage. Consequentialism, even of the rule-sort, is interested in maximization. But Hume's point here is not that these inflexible property rules will maximize public utility in the long run. His point is that these rules are good enough. The reason to enforce these rules is because in the long run they promote substantially more good than harm.
The obvious reply is: Well what if we can develop a system of property that does better than the current laws in the long run?
Importantly, Hume doesn't go down that path. Indeed, the calculating, maximizing instinct characteristic of utilitarianism is broadly absent in the Humean system.
Hume's focus on rules/laws that get us good enough is key to understanding Hume's conservatism. For Hume, it is a miracle that anything works at all. The laws of property are to be defended not because they are perfect, and not because they are utility maximizing, but because they do a good enough job of staving off the dysfunction characteristic of feudal and primitive societies.
The right question for politics is not: How do we maximize utility. It is rather: How is it that anything functions at all? The instinct of asking how to best maximize any desirable output would probably appear to Hume the path of madness.
In "Of the Original Contract," Hume makes the anti-revolutionary character of this "it's-good-enough-conservatism" clear:
Did one generation of men go off the stage at once, and another succeed, as is the case with silk-worms and butterflies, the new race, if they had sense enough to choose their government, which surely is never the case with men, might voluntarily, and by general consent, establish their own form of civil polity, without any regard to the laws or precedents, which prevailed among their ancestors. But as human society is in perpetual flux, one man every hour going out of the world, another coming into it, it is necessary, in order to preserve stability in government, that the new brood should conform themselves to the established constitution, and nearly follow the path which their fathers, treading in the footsteps of theirs, had marked out to them. Some innovations must necessarily have place in every human institution, and it is happy where the enlightened genius of the age give these a direction to the side of reason, liberty, and justice: but violent innovations no individual is entitled to make: they are even dangerous to be attempted by the legislature: more ill than good is ever to be expected from them: and if history affords examples to the contrary, they are not to be drawn into precedent, and are only to be regarded as proofs, that the science of politics affords few rules, which will not admit of some exception, and which may not sometimes be controuled by fortune and accident. The violent innovations in the reign of Henry VIII. proceeded from an imperious monarch, seconded by the appearance of legislative authority: Those in the reign of Charles I. were derived from faction and fanaticism; and both of them have proved happy in the issue: But even the former were long the source of many disorders, and still more dangers; and if the measures of allegiance were to be taken from the latter, a total anarchy must have place in human society, and a final period at once be put to every government.
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