In the first chapter I noted how David Hume traces the provenance of justice to an experience of natural scarcity. The notion of equity arises, he speculates, as a practical means of coping with a world where there is not enough food, shelter, or property to satisfy everyone, prompting the need for a regulatory system governed by principles and enacted through laws. A state of permanent abundance – recall the bounty of Huck Finn's six-foot catfish – would make justice irrelevant, since there would be no need either to be possessive or to share. At the other extreme, a state of utter deprivation would impose a perpetual emergency in which justice would be ineffectual. The former would have no need for justice, the latter no use for it. In both, “[b]y rendering justice totally useless, you thereby totally destroy its essence, and suspend its obligation upon mankind” (Hume 16).