The question of whether humans are inherently good or evil might seem like a throwback to theological controversies about Original Sin, perhaps one that serious philosophers should leave aside. After all, humans are complex creatures capable of both good and evil. Maybe so. But what Hobbes and Rousseau saw very clearly is that our judgements about the societies in which we live are greatly shaped by underlying visions of human nature and the political possibilities that these visions entail.
We care about our reputation, as well as our material wellbeing, and our desire for social standing drives us into conflict as much as competition over scarce resources. Rousseau saw societies divided by inequality and prophesised their downfall. If we want to live together peacefully, Hobbes argued, we must submit ourselves to an authoritative body with the power to enforce laws and resolve conflicts. Politics is characterised by disagreement and if we think that our own political or religious convictions are more important than peaceful coexistence then those convictions are the problem, not the answer.
Hobbes had seen the horrors of the English Civil War up close and civil war remains the most compelling illustration of his state of nature.
Today, readers are often inclined to dismiss his ideas as overly bleak — but that probably says more about us than him. Hobbes saw lasting peace as a rare and fragile achievement, something that those of us lucky enough never to have experienced war are worryingly liable to forget. But much of human history has been war-torn, and unhappily there are still many people who live in states ravaged by conflict and war — in such cases, Hobbes speaks through the ages. Rousseau thought not, and accused Hobbes of mistaking the characteristics of his own society for timeless insights into our nature.
On the Hobbesian analysis, an authoritative political state is the answer to the problem of our naturally self-interested and competitive nature. Rousseau viewed things differently and instead argued that we are only self-interested and competitive now because of the way that modern societies have developed.
Returning to the Hobbesian phenomena of glory-seeking, it seems unlikely that prudential Natural Laws would develop in an environment that facilitates glory-seeking behavior in the absence of moral deliberation via empathetic considerations.
Considering that the perspective-taking process is intertwined with the Second Natural Law, for instance, it becomes somewhat nonsensical to suggest the simultaneous existence of both glory-seeking and a negative derivation of the golden rule without moral consensus. Although, Hobbes would argue that they can exist at the same time since the ones doing the glory-seeking are, in effect, dissenting from any contractual obligations that would prohibit this behavior.
Nonetheless, it seems dubious to suggest that Natural Laws, like the second one, would ever develop in the first place. I reviewed his concept of diffidence and how it relates to an expressed zero-sum mentality and fundamental reciprocity failure.
I also visited his argument concerning the nonexistence of moral consensus in a state of nature and the simultaneous existence of glory-seeking behavior. I illustrated how moral consensus does play a role in the relationships between individuals in a state of nature. Regarding the intended purpose of his arguments, which is a counterfactual justification for the state apparatus, I do believe it is fair to conclude that he did not successfully do this insofar as a substantial portion of his argument is derived from epistemological assumptions of human behavior that were not entirely warranted or were, at times, insufficiently supported.
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Gary, Browning. Hobbes Studies , vol. Hobbes, Thomas Leviathan []. Richard Tuck, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hobbes, Thomas. Kavka, Gregory S. Ethics , vol. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press. McNeilly, F. The Anatomy of Leviathan. London: Macmillan Publishers, Oxley, J. Palgrave Macmillan, Piirimae, P. Read, James H. Accessed 21 Oct. In The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes , — Wolff, Jonathan. An Introduction to Political Philosophy. Oxford University Press, Villarreal, B.
Philologia , 12 1 , pp. Villarreal BD. Philologia , 12 1 , 20— Villarreal, Bailey D.. Philologia 12 1 : 20— Philologia 12, no. Villarreal, B D.
Philologia , vol. Start Submission. Hobbes often makes his view clear, that we have such moral obligations. But then two difficult questions arise: Why these obligations? And why are they obligatory? Hobbes frames the issues in terms of an older vocabulary, using the idea of natural law that many ancient and medieval philosophers had relied on.
Like them, he thinks that human reason can discern some eternal principles to govern our conduct. These principles are independent of though also complementary to whatever moral instruction we might get from God or religion. In other words, they are laws given by nature rather than revealed by God.
But Hobbes makes radical changes to the content of these so-called laws of nature. In particular, he does not think that natural law provides any scope whatsoever to criticize or disobey the actual laws made by a government. He thus disagrees with those Protestants who thought that religious conscience might sanction disobedience of immoral laws, and with Catholics who thought that the commandments of the Pope have primacy over those of national political authorities.
Although he sets out nineteen laws of nature, it is the first two that are politically crucial. The remaining sixteen can be quite simply encapsulated in the formula, do as you would be done by. While the details are important for scholars of Hobbes, they do not affect the overall theory and will be ignored here. Every man ought to endeavor peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it, and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war.
Leviathan , xiv. This repeats the points we have already seen about our right of nature , so long as peace does not appear to be a realistic prospect. The second law of nature is more complicated:. That a man be willing, when others are so too, as far-forth as for peace and defense of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things, and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.
What Hobbes tries to tackle here is the transition from the state of nature to civil society. But how he does this is misleading and has generated much confusion and disagreement.
But the problem is obvious. If the state of nature is anything like as bad as Hobbes has argued, then there is just no way people could ever make an agreement like this or put it into practice.
That is: governments have invariably been foisted upon people by force and fraud, not by collective agreement. His basic claim is that we should behave as if we had voluntarily entered into such a contract with everyone else in our society—everyone else, that is, except the sovereign authority. How limited this right of nature becomes in civil society has caused much dispute, because deciding what is an immediate threat is a question of judgment. It certainly permits us to fight back if the sovereign tries to kill us.
But what if the sovereign conscripts us as soldiers? What if the sovereign looks weak and we doubt whether he can continue to secure peace…? The sovereign, however, retains his or her, or their right of nature, which we have seen is effectively a right to all things—to decide what everyone else should do, to decide the rules of property, to judge disputes and so on.
Hobbes concedes that there are moral limits on what sovereigns should do God might call a sovereign to account. However, since in any case of dispute the sovereign is the only rightful judge—on this earth, that is — those moral limits make no practical difference. In every moral and political matter, the decisive question for Hobbes is always: who is to judge?
As we have seen, in the state of nature, each of us is judge in our own cause, part of the reason why Hobbes thinks it is inevitably a state of war. Once civil society exists, the only rightful judge is the sovereign. If we had all made a voluntary contract, a mutual promise, then it might seem half-way plausible to think we have an obligation to obey the sovereign although even this requires the claim that promising is a moral value that overrides all others.
If we have been conquered or, more fortunately, have simply been born into a society with an established political authority, this seems quite improbable. Hobbes has to make three steps here, all of which have seemed weak to many of his readers. First of all, he insists that promises made under threat of violence are nonetheless freely made, and just as binding as any others. Second, he has to put great weight on the moral value of promise keeping, which hardly fits with the absence of duties in the state of nature.
Third, he has to give a story of how those of us born and raised in a political society have made some sort of implied promise to each other to obey, or at least, he has to show that we are bound either morally or out of self-interest to behave as if we had made such a promise.
In the first place, Hobbes draws on his mechanistic picture of the world, to suggest that threats of force do not deprive us of liberty.
Liberty, he says, is freedom of motion, and I am free to move whichever way I wish, unless I am literally enchained. If I yield to threats of violence, that is my choice, for physically I could have done otherwise.
If I obey the sovereign for fear of punishment or in fear of the state of nature, then that is equally my choice. Such obedience then comes, for Hobbes, to constitute a promise that I will continue to obey.
Second, promises carry a huge moral weight for Hobbes, as they do in all social contract theories. The question, however, is why we should think they are so important. Why should my coerced promise oblige me, given the wrong you committed in threatening me and demanding my valuables? His theory suggests that in the state of nature you could do me no wrong, as the right of nature dictates that we all have a right to all things.
Likewise, promises do not oblige in the state of nature, inasmuch as they go against our right of nature. But as the sovereign is outside of the original contract, he sets the terms for everyone else: so his threats create obligations.
As this suggests, Hobbesian promises are strangely fragile. Implausibly binding so long as a sovereign exists to adjudicate and enforce them, they lose all power should things revert to a state of nature. Relatedly, they seem to contain not one jot of loyalty. To be logically consistent, Hobbes needs to be politically implausible. Now there are passages where Hobbes sacrifices consistency for plausibility, arguing we have a duty to fight for our former sovereign even in the midst of civil war.
Nonetheless the logic of his theory suggests that, as soon as government starts to weaken and disorder sets in, our duty of obedience lapses. That is, when the sovereign power needs our support, because it is no longer able to coerce us, there is no effective judge or enforcer of covenants, so that such promises no longer override our right of nature.
This turns common sense on its head. Surely a powerful government can afford to be challenged, for instance by civil disobedience or conscientious objection? But when civil conflict and the state of nature threaten, in other words when government is failing, then we might reasonably think that political unity is as morally important as Hobbes always suggests.
A similar question of loyalty also comes up when the sovereign power has been usurped—when Cromwell has supplanted the King, when a foreign invader has ousted our government. Perversely, the only crime the makers of a coup can commit is to fail. Why does this problem come about? All the difficulties in finding a reliable moral obligation to obey might tempt us back to the idea that Hobbes is some sort of egoist.
However, the difficulties with this tack are even greater. There are two sorts of egoism commentators have attributed to Hobbes: psychological and ethical. The first theory says that human beings always act egoistically, the second that they ought to act egoistically. Either view might support this simple idea: we should obey the sovereign, because his political authority is what keeps us from the evils of the natural condition. For a psychologically egoist agent, such behavior will be irresistible; for an ethically egoist agent, it will be morally obligatory.
Now, providing the sovereign is sufficiently powerful and well-informed, he can prevent many such cases arising by threatening and enforcing punishments of those who disobey. Effective threats of punishment mean that obedience is in our self-interest.
But such threats will not be effective when we think our disobedience can go undetected. So, still thinking of egoistic agents, the more people do get away with it, the more reason others have to think they can do the same.
In other words, sovereignty as Hobbes imagined it, and liberal political authority as we know it, can only function where people feel some additional motivation apart from pure self-interest.
Moreover, there is strong evidence that Hobbes was well aware of this. Sometimes this does seem to work through self-interest, as in crude threats of damnation and hell-fire. Religious practices, the doctrines taught in the universities! Much like the dramatic revolutions, radical theorists like Hobbes and Locke come to mind easily, while moderates like Montesquieu and Burke do not provide easy answers to hard questions about reform. The process of building and changing liberal regimes requires investing in a better understanding of the complicated web of considerations associated with large states.
A better understanding of theorists like Montesquieu and Burke will provide better answers, albeit more complicated ones. Tags: government liberty rights. The king is dead, long live chaos! Why Hobbes was wrong and Burke was right. May 30, Government Philosophers Political Science The 17th and 18th centuries marked a turning point in Atlantic history that caused the Western world to move from governments run by absolute monarchs to governments run by and for the people. Hobbes, Locke, and the Social Contract Hobbes stripped inequality down to its most brutish element: strength.
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