Hobbes: Escaping the state of nature
One obvious answer to this question is simply “under no circumstances.” The view that control of a society by a government is never morally justifiable is anarchism: the claim that the state never has legitimate authority.
As we shall see toward the end of the chapter, anarchists can certainly offer arguments for their position, but it has never been widely supported either among ordinary people or among philosophers.One of the best-known answers to the question of justification of authority was given by Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher whose work I have mentioned already, in his classic book Leviathan. Unlike anarchism, Hobbes' answer is one that many philosophers have found compelling.
Hobbes began by considering what life would be like if we didn't recognize any authority, and he derived his answer from his view of human nature. Because he was concerned with the basic question of why we need states, Hobbes needed to consider those aspects of human nature that most affect our social lives. So he divided his attention, in effect, between the human tendencies that work for cooperation and those that work for conflict.
On one hand, Hobbes said, human beings have a “desire of Ease, and sensual Delight” and a “fear of death, and wounds,” which, along with a “desire of Knowledge, and Arts of Peace,” make us want to cooperate socially. But, on the other hand, we have tendencies, which Hobbes plainly thought more significant, that make us work against each other. These tendencies derive from the circumstances of human life.
Hobbes's consideration of the circumstances of human life began with the claim that human beings are very close to being equal in their physical and mental capacities.
Though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another; yet, when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he.
For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others.
Because of this rough equality of capacities, all of us have more or less the same chances of achieving our goals; and, Hobbes said, since our goals conflict—sometimes I want something you want and we can't share it—we become enemies.
We become enemies because we have to “destroy or subdue one another” if we are to get what we want. Since this is so, we have every reason to be suspicious of each other—and this is a second source of conflict. Finally, Hobbes says, we all want to be respected by others (Hobbes calls this the “desire for glory”), yet people often undervalue or even despise others. These three factors—competition for scarce resources, the mistrust that follows from it, and our desire to be respected—are what Hobbes calls the “principal causes of quarrel.” Competition leads us to use violence to get what we want; mistrust leads us to use violence to protect what we fear others want; and the desire for “glory” leads us to use violence against those who do not respect us.Because we are involved in a struggle against others, all of us have
a perpetual and restless desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in
Death. And the cause of this, is not always that a man hopes for more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.
It may seem, at first, that many people simply do not have this lust for power. But we must bear in mind that by power Hobbes means only the possession of the capacity to get what you want. In that sense of “power,” we all would probably like to have more power than we do.
Given this picture of human life and human nature, Hobbes goes on to ask what life would be like in a stateless society, without a recognized authority, without someone able to maintain control, if necessary, by force. Hobbes calls the condition of people without government a “state of nature.” He argues that, given the circumstances of human life that he has described, we cannot hope for security in a state of nature.
For why should someone who wants something we have not take it, killing us in the process if it is necessary?Hereby it is manifest, that during the time when men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called War; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man In such condition,
there is no place for 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.
That is Hobbes's famous and rather bleak picture of what life would be like without government. But Hobbes believed that any reasonable person could recognize that if we followed certain principles, which he called (rather misleadingly, as we shall see) “laws of nature,” we should be able to escape these perils of the state of nature.
Among the “laws” are such principles as these, which Hobbes called the first four “laws of nature.”
1. You should seek peace wherever it is possible; but if you cannot achieve peace, you should defend yourself by all means at your disposal.
2. You should give up the right to defend yourself to the extent that it is necessary to achieve peace, provided other people accept the same limitations.
3. You should keep your promises.
4. You should not give other people who keep their promises reason to regret doing so.
It is not hard to see why Hobbes's calling these principles “laws of nature” was misleading.
In his day, the laws of nature were thought of as moral rules, with divine authority, which everyone was obliged to obey even outside the constraints of the state. These laws were essentially conceived of as the moral laws that governed relations between people—and, in particular, between subjects and their monarchs—preexisting and overriding the laws of any state. We knew them by reason, because God, who made us, had given us, in reason, the capacity to recognize His will.Now just as Hobbes' use of the term “power” was rather special, so we must bear in mind that his use of the idea of a “law of nature” was distinctive. For his natural laws involve no moral ideas at all: they are, as he sometimes said, “maxims of prudence,” rules that our reason reveals to us it would be in our own interests to follow. Indeed, Hobbes thought that in the state of nature there are no moral principles. Morality is made possible by the state.
The view that moral considerations cannot apply outside a state is one that Hobbes does not seem to defend, and it is certainly not one that most of us would agree with. It is a natural view that moral principles not only do but also should operate among the Mbuti. They think certain actions are right and others are wrong, they criticize those who are unkind or irresponsible. And even if they did not, that would not mean that we could not criticize people in those circumstances for those vices.
Hobbes's defense of his laws of nature, then, is not that they are morally right, but simply that any reasonable person can see that we would be better off if everybody obeyed them. But he also believed that even once we did see this, we would not obey the laws of nature without the threat of sanctions.
All of us, for example, may seek to avoid obeying the laws of nature where it suits us, provided we think we can get away with it.
This is because what reason shows is not strictly that we will profit if we obey these rules, but rather that we have reasons for wanting everybody else to obey them. If we all agreed to obey these rules as long as everybody else did, I might try to get the benefits from your obeying the rules by appearing to obey them myself, while secretly deviating from them whenever I thought no one would find out. Pretending that I would go along with the rules might be enough to get everybody else to keep obeying them, as long as I wasn't caught. Provided I can get the benefits of your obeying a rule by simply appearing to obey it myself, I have no special reason actually to obey it; I would have no reason at all if I was as purely self-interested as Hobbes supposed all human beings to be.Without effective policing, then, Hobbes doubted that human beings would ever obey the laws of nature; thus, he thought, we would remain in a state of nature unless these (and other) laws could be enforced. It is for this reason that Hobbes held that it was essential to establish a state, with somebody exercising a monopoly of ultimate authority. We need a “common power” that will force us to keep the laws of nature if we are to achieve the benefits that reason shows us we can gain from keeping to them.
The only way to erect such a Common Power... is, to confer all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of men, that may reduce their Wills, by plurality of voices, unto one Will.
By making such an agreement or covenant a group of people is “united in one Person... called a COMMON-WEALTH.”
A Common-wealth is said to be Instituted, when a Multitude of men do Agree, and Covenant, every one, with every one, that to whatsoever Man, or Assembly of Men, shall be given by the major part, the Right to Present the Person of them all,...
every one, as well he that Voted for it, as he that Voted against it, shall Authorize all the Actions and Judgements, of that Man, or Assembly of men, in the same manner, as if they were his own, to the end, to live peaceably amongst themselves, and be protected against other men.Hobbes went on to argue that reasonable people would agree to such a covenant only if it gave the sovereign the right amount of power to do the job of securing the peace. And, he argued, to be able to do this job, the sovereign must have absolute power. The only exception he made was that we have the right to defend our own lives against the sovereign, because our lives are the major thing that the sovereign is supposed to protect.
Thus, to give someone sovereign power, for Hobbes, is both to allow that person to regulate society by any methods he or she deems appropriate, including the use of force against citizens, and to recognize their right to do so.
Once we give someone sovereign power, we enter into civil society, society organized in the form of a state. Hobbes, who lived in England when it was an absolute monarchy, suggested that we ought to give this power to a monarch, a king or queen. We are better off, he argued, handing it over to a monarch, even though we then run the risk of the monarch's using the power thus acquired to rob, bully, or kill us. But because the justification for the sovereign's power, which we each accept as a matter of self-interest, is that our lives would be at risk without it, we can reasonably rebel against a king or queen who so abuses the power that authority brings as to put our lives at risk. So long as we are better off under the sovereign than we would be in the state of nature, however, we have no basis for complaint.
Notice that on Hobbes' view, there is a very intimate connection between the factual and the evaluative conditions for authority. For it is only if sovereigns satisfy the factual condition and are able to enforce rulings that they can protect us from our fellow citizens and thus meet the evaluative condition by protecting us from a life that is “nasty, brutish and short.” This feature of Hobbes's theory is a very important one, for it shows that the connection between the factual and the evaluative conditions is not arbitrary. Hobbes' view does seem to set minimum conditions on what can be called a state. For a government to be legitimate it must both try to make the lives of citizens better than they would be in a state of nature, and have some success in the attempt. Someone who failed even to try to improve on the state of nature could not legitimately claim, according to Hobbes, to be a sovereign, with the right to govern.
Though this seems to be right, there are many problems with Hobbes' view. If he has correctly identified a minimum condition for being a government at all, he has not established that the only demand we can make of government is that it should improve on the state of nature. Let us consider some of the reasons why.
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