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Open Access for Academic Societies. About us. Stay updated. Corporate Social Responsiblity. Investor Relations. Review a Brill Book. 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! What are we to conclude, then, given the difficulties in finding a reliable moral or selfish justification for obedience?
In the end, for Hobbes, everything rides on the value of peace. Life is never going to be perfect for us, and life under the sovereign is the best we can do. For Hobbes, this moral value is so great—and the alternatives so stark — that it should override every threat to our self-interest except the imminent danger of death.
The million-dollar question is then: is a life of obedience to the sovereign really the best human beings can hope for? Hobbes has definite ideas about the proper nature, scope and exercise of sovereignty. Much that he says is cogent, and much of it can reduce the worries we might have about living under this drastically authoritarian sounding regime.
Many commentators have stressed, for example, the importance Hobbes places upon the rule of law. Some of these points continue to be relevant, others are obviously anachronistic: evidently Hobbes could not have imagined the modern state, with its vast bureaucracies, massive welfare provision and complicated interfaces with society. Nor could he have foreseen how incredibly powerful the state might become, meaning that sovereigns such as Hitler or Stalin might starve, brutalize and kill their subjects, to such an extent that the state of nature looks clearly preferable.
He faces a systematic problem: justifying any limits or constraints on the sovereign involves making judgments about moral or practical requirements. But one of his greatest insights, still little recognized by many moral philosophers, is that any right or entitlement is only practically meaningful when combined with a concrete judgment as to what it dictates in some given case.
It should be added that the one part of his system that Hobbes concedes not to be proven with certainty is just this question: who or what should constitute the sovereign power. But he was certainly very familiar with ancient forms of government, including aristocracy government by an elite and democracy government by the citizens, who formed a relatively small group within the total population.
Hobbes was also aware that an assembly such as Parliament could constitute a sovereign body. All have advantages and disadvantages, he argues. For Hobbes, dividing capacities to judge between different bodies is tantamount to letting the state of nature straight back in. Leviathan , xxix. Especially given modern experiences of the division of powers, however, it is easy to see that these examples are extreme and atypical. We might recall the American constitution, where powers of legislation, execution and case-by-case judgment are separated to Congress, President and the judiciary respectively and counter-balance one another.
Each of these bodies is responsible for judging different questions. There are often, of course, boundary disputes, as to whether legislative, executive or judicial powers should apply to a given issue, and no one body is empowered to settle this crucial question of judgment. Equally obviously, however, such disputes have not led to a state of nature well, at least if we think of the US after the Civil War. For Hobbes it is simply axiomatic that disputation as to who should judge important social and political issues spells the end of the commonwealth.
For us, it is equally obvious that only a few extreme forms of dispute have this very dangerous power. Dividing the powers that are important to government need not leave a society more open to those dangerous conflicts.
Indeed, many would now argue that political compromises which provide different groups and bodies with independent space to judge certain social or political issues can be crucial for preventing disputes from escalating into violent conflict or civil war.
What happens, then, if we do not follow Hobbes in his arguments that judgment must, by necessity or by social contract or both, be the sole province of the sovereign? If we are optimists about the power of human judgment, and about the extent of moral consensus among human beings, we have a straightforward route to the concerns of modern liberalism. Our attention will not be on the question of social and political order, rather on how to maximize liberty, how to define social justice, how to draw the limits of government power, and how to realize democratic ideals.
We will probably interpret Hobbes as a psychological egoist, and think that the problems of political order that obsessed him were the product of an unrealistic view of human nature, or unfortunate historical circumstances, or both. In this case, I suggest, we might as well not have read Hobbes at all. But hindsight shows grave limitations to his solutions.
Theoretically, Hobbes fails to prove that we have an almost unlimited obligation to obey the sovereign. His arguments that sovereignty—the power to judge moral and political matters, and enforce those judgments—cannot be divided are not only weak; they are simply refuted by the relatively successful distribution of powers in modern liberal societies. Not least, the horrific crimes of twentieth century dictatorships show beyond doubt that judgment about right and wrong cannot be a question only for our political leaders.
It might reasonably be thought that this is the central question of modern political thought. We will have no doubt that peaceful coexistence is one of the greatest goods of human life, something worth many inconveniences, sacrifices and compromises. We will see that there is moral force behind the laws and requirements of the state, simply because human beings do indeed need authority and systems of enforcement if they are to cooperate peacefully.
But we can hardly accept that, because human judgment is weak and faulty, that there can be only one judge of these matters—precisely because that judge might turn out to be very faulty indeed. Our concern will be how we can effectively divide power between government and people, while still ensuring that important questions of moral and political judgment are peacefully adjudicated.
We will be concerned with the standards and institutions that provide for compromise between many different and conflicting judgments. Garrath Williams Email: g. Thomas Hobbes: Moral and Political Philosophy The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes is best known for his political thought, and deservedly so. Introduction Hobbes is the founding father of modern political philosophy. Rogers eds. Springboard, P.
Books and Articles Abizadeh, A. Armitage, D. Ashcraft, R. Baumgold, D. Bobbio, N. Boonin-Vail, D. Byron, M. Collins, J. Curley, E. Giancotti ed. Curley ed. Curran, E. Darwall, S. Ewin, R. Finn, S. Flathman, R. Gauthier, D. Gert, B. Gert, ed. Goldsmith, M. Hampton, J. Herbert, G. Hoekstra, K. Hood, E. Johnston, D. Kapust, Daniel J. Kavka, G. Kramer, M. Krom, M. LeBuffe, M. Coleman and C. Morris eds. Macpherson, C. Macpherson ed. Malcolm, N. Martel, J. May, L. McClure, C. Moehler, M. Moloney, P.
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