In the course of explaining in Chapter VI that the passions should be understood in terms of appetites and aversions, Hobbes declares that good and evil themselves are really nothing more than names for what we like and dislike:. But Hobbes does clarify why completion or perfection is a vain dream:. In other words, the passions must accommodate themselves to the absence of utmost aims and greatest goods. Rejecting the aristocratic notion that by virtue of birth or upbringing the passions of rulers — and clergy and landed aristocracy — are loftier than those of the common people, Hobbes advances a democratic thesis: The same logic applies to the passions of all men in all strata of political society alike.
All are impelled to constantly acquire more if only to secure what they already have. In the state of nature, each is equal in the sense that each is similarly vulnerable to injury and violent death at the hands of another. This fundamental equality is a result of the passions that move men — competition, diffidence or distrust, and glory — combined with the unlimited freedom they enjoy in the state of nature, which reflects the lack of a common standard or authority.
Because good and evil have no independent existence, because there is no utmost aim or greatest good, each in the state of nature has an unlimited right to all things, up to and including the limb and life of another. And because there is no recognized, common authority to keep individuals in line, each can and must fully exercise his right to preserve himself, which is always the fundamental human imperative. In such a condition, even the weakest are capable of dealing a deadly blow to the strongest.
Human equality so understood is nothing of which to be particularly proud. And the natural freedom in which it is rooted is of small value because it guarantees the constant fear of violence by others, all of whom possess the same unlimited right to all things. It is said that he provides little historical evidence to back up his claims; overlooks the forms of culture and social organization that antedate, and serve as preconditions for, the state; and ascribes to individuals in the state of nature vices that are actually acquired in modern bourgeois society.
Outside the law and beyond the political order, the preeminent human passions — to stay alive, to acquire wealth and property, to achieve honor or esteem in the eyes of others — come to the fore and produce chaos, which frustrates any and all of the reasonable desires that individuals may have, above all the desire to preserve their lives, which is the precondition for satisfying all other desires.
To those who doubt his inference from the passions, Hobbes appeals not to history but to contemporary realities. To demonstrate our abiding distrust of others, he points to our tendency within society to secure precious or private belongings from even our friends and close family members.
And to illustrate the consequences of the absence of a recognized legal and political authority — the very definition of a state of nature — he invokes the harsh realities of civil war. Peace is not merely the absence of fighting but a condition in which men are not disposed to use violence to achieve their goals. Peace is not a greatest good but the condition for the achievement of any and all goods.
And peace leads to prosperity because it allows men to preserve their gains, develop their talents, and plan for the future. Once Hobbes establishes the central features of nature and human nature and the desirability of peace, he proceeds to the main task of Leviathan , which is to set forth the principles of the properly constructed commonwealth.
Such a commonwealth takes human beings as they are — creatures of passion and pride, endowed with reason but easily deflected from its course by a self-interest that they tend to conceive too narrowly and shortsightedly, and by irrational fears for their eternal salvation.
And Leviathan spells out the beliefs, rules, and institutions that reason prescribes for the fashioning of a commonwealth that, by taking the broad and long-term view of self-interest, can secure peace. In particular, Hobbes argues that it is reasonable for men to covenant with each other to transfer a substantial portion of their naturally unlimited right to all things to an absolute and indivisible sovereign who, Hobbes allows, may be one, or few, or many, though he recommends a monarch.
This transfer requires individuals to give up the use of their private judgment in public matters and empowers the sovereign to enforce contracts, make and implement laws, settle disputes, and generally defend subjects from each other and from external threats.
The substantial limitation on natural freedom that the establishment of the sovereign entails, contends Hobbes, represents an expression, and a weighty increase in the value, of individual freedom, and the cardinal imperative of rational self-interest. I n sketching the lineaments of the properly constructed commonwealth, Hobbes accomplishes a variety of auxiliary tasks.
Of particular salience to contemporary debates in moral and political philosophy are the foundation for natural freedom and equality that he discovers in the humbleness of the human condition; his analysis of the laws of nature, the virtues, and their intimate connection; and his account of the sources and limits of sovereignty.
Generally, defenders of liberal democracy argue that our natural right to freedom, shared equally by all, is rooted in a faculty or capacity, usually reason, that sets human beings apart from and elevates them above nonhuman animals.
Others in the liberal tradition speak more simply of the dignity of man. Taking these criticisms to heart and then some, the liberal tradition grew timid about asserting the rationality of natural right.
This timidity opened the door to liberal relativism — the doctrine that we should embrace the value of diversity because all views about morals and politics are equally valuable — which emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Both forms of contemporary liberalism represent influential rivals to the classical liberal natural rights teaching. Another respect in which Hobbes shows that the absence of metaphysical foundations for moral and political life does not leave moral and political life bereft of foundations is in his derivation of the laws of nature.
Just as he infers the natural condition of mankind or the state of nature from the passions, so too he infers or derives from the state of nature 19 laws of nature that men must abide by to maintain the state. These precepts or general rules begin with the first and fundamental law of nature, which commands men to always seek peace.
It follows from his metaphysics that they do not reflect a universal conception of human flourishing, perfection, or salvation. But they do reflect, contends Hobbes, the lower, this-worldly good of peace, and the universal facts about human nature. They are immutable and eternal in the sense that conformity to them is everywhere and always rationally desirable. And this is because conformity to them everywhere and always secures and preserves peace or civil society, the precondition for satisfying the widest variety of human desires.
Failure to make the laws of nature generally applicable will everywhere and always tend to undermine civil society and lead to a war of all against all. Thus Hobbes reconceives the laws of nature as a form of rational or enlightened self-interest. Yet the two formulations have a common consequence. Near the end of Chapter XV, Hobbes makes the connection between the laws of nature and virtue explicit:. Given the significance he explicitly attaches to virtue and the significance conferred on it by the logic of his argument, it should be no surprise that, rather than thinking that readers would overlook the place of virtue in his political theory, Hobbes worried that his virtue teaching would cause him to be mistaken for a follower of Aristotle.
The classic case is fortitude or courage. It avoids the excesses of cowardice, or too much fear of death in battle, and recklessness, or too little fear, enabling one to face death in battle nobly. But it does mean we should not be misled by scientific imagery that stems from an in fact non-existent science and also, to some extent, from an unproven and uncertain metaphysics.
But while it is true that Hobbes sometimes says things like this, we should be clear that the ideas fit together only in a metaphorical way. Likewise, there is no reason why pursuing pleasure and pain should work in our self-interest. What self-interest is depends on the time-scale we adopt, and how effectively we might achieve this goal also depends on our insight into what harms and benefits us. The mechanistic metaphor is something of a red herring and, in the end, probably less useful than his other starting point in Leviathan , the Delphic epithet: nosce teipsum know thyself.
As we have seen, and will explore below, what motivates human beings to act is extremely important to Hobbes. The other aspect concerns human powers of judgment and reasoning, about which Hobbes tends to be extremely skeptical. Like many philosophers before him, Hobbes wants to present a more solid and certain account of human morality than is contained in everyday beliefs. Plato had contrasted knowledge with opinion. Hobbes has several reasons for thinking that human judgment is unreliable, and needs to be guided by science.
Our judgments tend to be distorted by self-interest or by the pleasures and pains of the moment. We may share the same basic passions, but the various things of the world affect us all very differently; and we are inclined to use our feelings as measures for others. When we use words which lack any real objects of reference, or are unclear about the meaning of the words we use, the danger is not only that our thoughts will be meaningless, but also that we will fall into violent dispute.
Hobbes has scholastic philosophy in mind, but he also makes related points about the dangerous effects of faulty political ideas and ideologies. We form beliefs about supernatural entities, fairies and spirits and so on, and fear follows where belief has gone, further distorting our judgment. Unfortunately, his picture of science, based on crudely mechanistic premises and developed through deductive demonstrations, is not even plausible in the physical sciences.
He is certainly an acute and wise commentator of political affairs; we can praise him for his hard-headedness about the realities of human conduct, and for his determination to create solid chains of logical reasoning. Nonetheless, this does not mean that Hobbes was able to reach a level of scientific certainty in his judgments that had been lacking in all previous reflection on morals and politics.
Many interpreters have presented the Hobbesian agent as a self-interested, rationally calculating actor those ideas have been important in modern political philosophy and economic thought, especially in terms of rational choice theories. It is true that some of the problems that face people like this—rational egoists, as philosophers call them—are similar to the problems Hobbes wants to solve in his political philosophy.
And it is also very common for first-time readers of Hobbes to get the impression that he believes we are all basically selfish. There are good reasons why earlier interpreters and new readers tend to think the Hobbesian agent is ultimately self-interested. Hobbes likes to make bold and even shocking claims to get his point across. What could be clearer? First, quite simply, it represents a false view of human nature. People do all sorts of altruistic things that go against their interests.
They also do all sorts of needlessly cruel things that go against self-interest think of the self-defeating lengths that revenge can run to. So it would be uncharitable to interpret Hobbes this way, if we can find a more plausible account in his work. Second, in any case Hobbes often relies on a more sophisticated view of human nature. He describes or even relies on motives that go beyond or against self-interest, such as pity, a sense of honor or courage, and so on.
And he frequently emphasizes that we find it difficult to judge or appreciate just what our interests are anyhow. The upshot is that Hobbes does not think that we are basically or reliably selfish; and he does not think we are fundamentally or reliably rational in our ideas about what is in our interests.
He is rarely surprised to find human beings doing things that go against self-interest: we will cut off our noses to spite our faces, we will torture others for their eternal salvation, we will charge to our deaths for love of country.
In fact, a lot of the problems that befall human beings, according to Hobbes, result from their being too little concerned with self-interest. This weakness as regards our self-interest has even led some to think that Hobbes is advocating a theory known as ethical egoism. This is to claim that Hobbes bases morality upon self-interest, claiming that we ought to do what it is most in our interest to do.
But we shall see that this would over-simplify the conclusions that Hobbes draws from his account of human nature. We are needy and vulnerable. We are easily led astray in our attempts to know the world around us. Our capacity to reason is as fragile as our capacity to know; it relies upon language and is prone to error and undue influence. What is the political fate of this rather pathetic sounding creature—that is, of us? Unsurprisingly, Hobbes thinks little happiness can be expected of our lives together.
The best we can hope for is peaceful life under an authoritarian-sounding sovereign. He claims that the only authority that naturally exists among human beings is that of a mother over her child, because the child is so very much weaker than the mother and indebted to her for its survival. Among adult human beings this is invariably not the case. Hobbes concedes an obvious objection, admitting that some of us are much stronger than others.
And although he is very sarcastic about the idea that some are wiser than others, he does not have much difficulty with the idea that some are fools and others are dangerously cunning. Nonetheless, it is almost invariably true that every human being is capable of killing any other. Leviathan , xiii. He is strongly opposing arguments that established monarchs have a natural or God-given right to rule over us. It could occur tomorrow in every modern society, for example, if the police and army suddenly refused to do their jobs on behalf of government.
Why should peaceful cooperation be impossible without an overarching authority? Hobbes provides a series of powerful arguments that suggest it is extremely unlikely that human beings will live in security and peaceful cooperation without government. Anarchism , the thesis that we should live without government, of course disputes these arguments. His most basic argument is threefold. This is a more difficult argument than it might seem. Hobbes does not suppose that we are all selfish, that we are all cowards, or that we are all desperately concerned with how others see us.
Two points, though. Moreover, many of these people will be prepared to use violence to attain their ends—especially if there is no government or police to stop them. In this Hobbes is surely correct. Second, in some situations it makes good sense, at least in the short term, to use violence and to behave selfishly, fearfully or vaingloriously. If our lives seem to be at stake, after all, we are unlikely to have many scruples about stealing a loaf of bread; if we perceive someone as a deadly threat, we may well want to attack first, while his guard is down; if we think that there are lots of potential attackers out there, it is going to make perfect sense to get a reputation as someone who should not be messed with.
Underlying this most basic argument is an important consideration about insecurity. As we shall see Hobbes places great weight on contracts thus some interpreters see Hobbes as heralding a market society dominated by contractual exchanges. In the state of nature such agreements are not going to work. Only the weakest will have good reason to perform the second part of a covenant, and then only if the stronger party is standing over them.
Yet a huge amount of human cooperation relies on trust, that others will return their part of the bargain over time. A similar point can be made about property, most of which we cannot carry about with us and watch over. This means we must rely on others respecting our possessions over extended periods of time. One can reasonably object to such points: Surely there are basic duties to reciprocate fairly and to behave in a trustworthy manner? Even if there is no government providing a framework of law, judgment and punishment, do not most people have a reasonable sense of what is right and wrong, which will prevent the sort of contract-breaking and generalized insecurity that Hobbes is concerned with?
Indeed, should not our basic sense of morality prevent much of the greed, pre-emptive attack and reputation-seeking that Hobbes stressed in the first place? He makes two claims. The second follows from this, and is less often noticed: it concerns the danger posed by our different and variable judgments of what is right and wrong. Naturally speaking—that is, outside of civil society — we have a right to do whatever we think will ensure our self-preservation.
The worst that can happen to us is violent death at the hands of others. If we have any rights at all, if as we might put it nature has given us any rights whatsoever, then the first is surely this: the right to prevent violent death befalling us. But Hobbes says more than this, and it is this point that makes his argument so powerful. We do not just have a right to ensure our self-preservation: we each have a right to judge what will ensure our self-preservation.
Hobbes has given us good reasons to think that human beings rarely judge wisely. Yet in the state of nature no one is in a position to successfully define what is good judgment. Others might judge the matter differently, of course. Almost certainly you will have quite a different view of things perhaps you were just stretching your arms, not raising a musket to shoot me. Because we are all insecure, because trust is more-or-less absent, there is little chance of our sorting out misunderstandings peacefully, nor can we rely on some trusted third party to decide whose judgment is right.
We all have to be judges in our own causes, and the stakes are very high indeed: life or death. For this reason Hobbes makes very bold claims that sound totally amoral. Hobbes is dramatizing his point, but the core is defensible. New readers of Hobbes often suppose that the state of nature would be a much nicer place, if only he were to picture human beings with some basic moral ideas.
Some think that Hobbes is imagining human beings who have no idea of social interaction and therefore no ideas about right and wrong. In this case, the natural condition would be a purely theoretical construction, and would demonstrate what both government and society do for human beings. A famous statement about the state of nature in De Cive viii. Others suppose that Hobbes has a much more complex picture of human motivation, so that there is no reason to think moral ideas are absent in the state of nature.
The problem here is not a lack of moral ideas—far from it — rather that moral ideas and judgments differ enormously. This means for example that two people who are fighting tooth and nail over a cow or a gun can both think they are perfectly entitled to the object and both think they are perfectly right to kill the other—a point Hobbes makes explicitly and often. It also enables us to see that many Hobbesian conflicts are about religious ideas or political ideals as well as self-preservation and so on —as in the British Civil War raging while Hobbes wrote Leviathan , and in the many violent sectarian conflicts throughout the world today.
But what sort of ought is this? There are two basic ways of interpreting Hobbes here. This line of thought fits well with an egoistic reading of Hobbes, but it faces serious problems, as will be seen. The other way of interpreting Hobbes is not without problems either.
This takes Hobbes to be saying that we ought, morally speaking, to avoid the state of nature. We have a duty to do what we can to avoid this situation arising, and a duty to end it, if at all possible.
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? Next ». References Thomas Hobbes. Katherine J. Challenging Stereotypes in Glee , or Not? Exploring Masculinity and Neoliberal Flexibility. From the Inquiries Journal Blog. Related Reading Philosophy » Political Philosophy. Environmental Studies » Climate Change. Nature or Culture? The Anthropocene as Social Narrative. History » Government. John Locke and the Second Treatise on Government.
Psychology » Decision-making. Would You Cheat? Monthly Newsletter Signup The newsletter highlights recent selections from the journal and useful tips from our blog. Follow us to get updates from Inquiries Journal in your daily feed. Their protest challenged the paradigm of power as it existed at the time, specifically by revealing the limitations of the state's ability to exercise its will even in a situation where the state wielded seemingly absolute MORE ».
Is it possible to objectively define the Anthropocene? This essay argues that whether or not it is precisely definable as a geological epoch, its true value, as a concept grounded in futurity, lies within the social realm. The origins of the term are discussed and several hypotheses for defining the Anthropocene are considered This was the result of what is now known as the Glorious Revolution, or the Revolution of Naturalist and political philosopher John Locke was present to witness these events and was so compelled by them, he wrote what is known as the Second Treatise Endeavors to explain actions that are considered immoral strike at a fundamental philosophical issue: whether people are innately good and it is the world that corrupts them; Follow IJ.
Latest in Political Science Comparative Politics. More and more countries are democratic, but at the same time, the number of people dissatisfied with it has constantly been increasing during the last two decades. Read Article ». American Politics.
0コメント