Hobbes / Lecture 7
.docCORE11-120 Week Seven
Hobbes and the Legitimacy of Sovereigns
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is one of the two principal founding figures of modern philosophy. The other is the 17th century French philosopher, Rene Descartes. Hobbes, like Epicurus, is a materialist. He argued that all things, including thoughts and emotions, are physical phenomena. Descartes, on the other hand, was a dualist, believing in the distinct existence of body and mind. While Descartes’ view dominated philosophy in the 18th and 19th centuries, Hobbes’ materialist view has come to dominate philosophy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. However, we are concerned with Hobbes’ ethics and political theory and it is these topics we will discuss in today’s lecture.
Hobbes is the first modern philosopher we have encountered and his views are strikingly different from the views of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas. All of these earlier philosophers thought of ethics as arising from human nature in one way or another. For each of them, to be moral is to be fully and non-defectively human. Hobbes, by contrast, did not have such an optimistic view of human nature. He thought of morality as an imposition upon us. According to Hobbes, morality restricts our freedom; it constrains our choices; it limits our pursuit of things we really desire; it is a burden upon us. Morality is not something that comes naturally to us and is not something that is good in itself. The value of morality resides entirely in what it can do for us. Roughly, Hobbes thinks that it is better to live in a properly ordered moral community than it would be to live in an environment without morality and once we agree to live in a moral community, we inherit moral obligations. One way to put this (not Hobbes’s) would be to say that living by the strictures of morality is the lesser of two evils.
The view that Hobbes develops has come to be called “contractarianism”. This is not Hobbes’s term, but a contemporary term for the kind of philosophical position Hobbes develops. Hobbes gives us the first really powerful development of this position, though you will find echoes of it in Socrates and in Epicurus. According to contractarianism, morality is a set of obligations that we enter into by a kind of contract or agreement. Morality is based on agreement between self-interested and rational parties. Although we don’t explicitly form this contract, or explicitly agree to abide by the strictures of morality, we are bound by it anyway. The contract on which morality is based is hypothetical – it is the contract we would agree to if we were in the position of making contract with other members of our community as to what kind of society we wish to live in. The kind of contract Hobbes has in mind, and which is taken up by subsequent philosophers, is called a “social contract”. The basic idea then, is that morality and politics is grounded in the social contract.
Let us investigate this view by starting at the beginning. What would life be like if there were no system of morality and no system of social control, i.e. if there were no civil society? Imagine that you recognize no moral restrictions on how to behave towards your neighbours, no laws or principles constraining what you may and may not do to them or to their property. Also, imagine that there is no system that polices how you behave towards your neighbour and no system to enforce appropriate standards of behaviour; imagine there is no authority that you can appeal to to resolve disputes between yourself and your neighbour. Without any thoughts about what you conventionally ought to do (e.g. respect their life, their liberty and their property), without any moral constraints on your desires or on your actions, what are you likely to do? This is hard thing to imagine in the first person, because we come already loaded up with highly developed moral sensibilities. So to imagine what life would be like without any sort of moral system, we have to propose an account of human nature, i.e. human nature without civil society and without the culture that civil society supports and enables. According to Hobbes, without any system of morality to constrain what we will do, humans will tend to behave in predictable ways, driven by their self-interest, their appetites, their passions and their calculating rationality.
Hobbes calls this situation – a world without civil and moral constraint of any kind – “the state of nature”. He is running what is called a philosophical thought experiment. That is, he is trying to imagine what life would be like without a civil society to support and enforce moral behaviour. So what would life be like in the state of nature? First, humans are creatures of desire, so we would all be after goods. Second, many goods are inevitably scarce. So the state of nature is marked by incessant competition. Third, without regulation, competition breeds mistrust. I will be aware, not only that I want my neighbour’s goods, but that I would take them without conscience if I could be sure of getting away with it. I’m rational, so I can anticipate that my neighbour thinks the same. She or he would take my goods without a moment’s thought, if she could be sure of getting away with it.
Fourth, I need a strategy for dealing with this situation. Defensive strategies won’t work. Recall, that my neighbour has absolutely no scruples at all (nor do I). They would and could do anything they like to secure my goods, including killing and robbing me. Building a high fence and hiding away is just a formula for impoverishment – and probably easily breached in any case. I might try to become stronger than my neighbour and frighten them out of any attempt to rob or kill me. But this won’t work. Hobbes points out that it is too easy to kill a person. A much stronger man can be easily killed by a physically weaker man with a crossbow, for example, so all men in the state of nature are more or less equally vulnerable. And then there is the possibility that my neighbour isn’t just in competition with me for scarce goods, but desires to increase his power and dominance. My neighbour might be ambitious and want to subject me for the sake of his ambition. Again, there is the possibility that my neighbour is vainglorious, because human beings are naturally vain and likely to seek revenge upon anyone who doesn’t accord them the respect they think they deserve. Finally, it is unlikely that a defensive strategy will afford me enough opportunities to acquire what I need to exist contentedly and comfortably. Even if my desires are relatively modest (I’m not dominating and vainglorious), it is unlikely that I will be able to satisfy them from behind a high wall. Purely defensive strategies thus probably won’t work against hostile, motivated, ambitious dominating, vain and unscrupulous enemies.
How am I supposed to defend myself against my neighbour – whether unscrupulous and competitive, vain and vengeful, or aggressively dominating – if purely defensive strategies are full of holes? Hobbes’ answer is pre-emptive action, or as he calls it “anticipation.” How else can I really secure the peace for myself except by doing away with my neighbour or dominating him to such an extent that he becomes no threat to me? So, rationally, the wisest thing for me to do is probably to kill off my neighbour at the first opportunity. (Remember, I am in a state of nature, without civil society and without conscience.)
The rub is that my neighbour will be thinking the same thing: the very same thing. So, by being rational and self-interested in the state of nature, I find myself inevitably drawn into war with my neighbour. The case generalizes. The state of nature will collapse into a war of all against all. Hobbes sums up the reasons for believing that human nature is self-destructive without civil society like this:
So that in the nature of man we find three principal causes of quarrel: first, competition; secondly, diffidence [i.e. mistrust]; thirdly, glory. The first make the men invade for gain; the second, for safety, and the third, for reputation.”
Leviathan, xiii, 6,7
The state of nature is a disastrous. Here is Hobbes famous description of just how bad the state of nature would be:
In such condition there is no place of industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, no culture of the earth, no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Leviathan, xiii, 9
The state of nature is so bad that we should rationally accept just about any deal guaranteed to get us out of it. How could we extract ourselves from the state of nature? Even in the state of nature we are rational. According to Hobbes, this means that we will accept the following principles. (Hobbes calls these Laws of Nature, but he doesn’t mean anything like Aquinas’s Natural Law – he is really talking about what it is basically reasonable and prudent to hold.) The first law of nature is to seek peace wherever there is hope of peace. The Second Law is to be prepared to give up certain freedoms for the sake of peace. The Third Law is that we abide by our agreements.
To extract ourselves from the state of nature we would have to surrender up many of the liberties “enjoyed” in the state of nature. This is a commitment we enter into, it is a kind of promise. And here is where the force of morality comes from. Once we commit ourselves to give up liberties, it would be wrong and unjust of us to go back on our word. (This is why the Third Law is crucial for Hobbes’s theory.) For Hobbes, morality arises out of the free agreement of people searching for peace in a violent and dangerous world.
For the trick to work, everyone has to surrender basic liberties and hold good to their agreement. This basic commitment of all members of a community is usually called a social contract, though Hobbes reserves the special title of “covenant” for it. It is a common agreement to form what Hobbes calls a “commonwealth.” By this Hobbes means a social group in which the peace of all is secured. Clearly, a commonwealth will not survive long if all it has to go on is common agreement, backed up by the fact that all members of the community have promised to abide by laws. If the arrangement is to work there must be an effective system of enforcement. As Hobbes puts it:
…there must be some coercive power to compel men equally to the performance of their covenants, by the terror of some punishment greater than the benefit they expect by the breach of the covenant.
Leviathan, xv, 3
This is the basic ethical position articulated by Hobbes. Our basic requirement is to escape the state of nature, and to do so we must make a commitment to give up a wide range of liberties that we had in the state of nature. This commitment brings us into the world of morality or ethics. Having committed ourselves to respect our neighbour’s life, it becomes morally wrong of us to take it without lawful reason. The commitment creates the moral obligation. The next point to observe is a practical one. Moral commitment by itself is pointless without the means of enforcing commitments. Having entered into a commitment to be morally decent, it won’t strictly be in my rational self-interest to stand by my commitment unless the consequences of my not do so are extreme. The consequences of my acting immorally should be so extreme as to undermine any temptation I might feel to act wrongly. Civil society, and the legal and police systems which enforce its rules, are designed to effectively deter.
There is one element of Hobbes’s philosophy which we should take a brief look at before leaving him, namely the political philosophy that Hobbes builds on this foundation. Hobbes is famous for proposing that the only way to effectively secure the commonwealth is for all its members to hand over absolute power to a sovereign. In setting up the commonwealth, we say to each other, in effect:
“I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to him, and authorize all his actions in like manner”
Leviathan xvii, 13
The sovereign cannot be justly deposed or overthrown, thinks Hobbes. Nor can the Sovereign breach the social contract which created him (or it). The social contract, on Hobbes’s story, was not made with the Sovereign, but between the members of the community. The contract creates the Sovereign, so can’t be made with the Sovereign. On the face of it, Hobbes’s political philosophy appears to recommend a highly authoritarian political organization. The justification of it resides in the necessity of our escape from the state of nature. But is this the only kind of escape possible? Is the state of nature as bad as Hobbes portrays? And can we really be said to be under the obligation of promises we never really made? The social contract is a kind of myth; its status is hypothetical; it is the contract that, rationally and prudently, we ought to have signed to get us out of the state of nature, were we in the state of nature. But we are not in the state of nature. So what is the social contract to us? We are going to take up these questions next week, when we examine the political philosophy of John Locke.