Problems for Hobbes
Because Hobbes derives the authority of the state not from moral considerations but from considerations that are meant to appeal to the rational self-interest of each of us, his view can be called “pru- dentialist.” We would be prudent, according to Hobbes, to confer on an absolute sovereign the power to regulate everybody's lives.
Hobbes makes a number of crucial steps in the long argument to his prudentialist conclusion.
First, because the covenant is among the citizens and not between the citizens and the sovereign (whether the sovereign is one person or an assembly), he holds that the sovereign has no obligations to the citizens.Second, he assumes that once you enter into the meeting to decide whether you should set up such a covenant, you are obliged to accept the majority verdict, whether you voted for it or not.
Third, he assumes that because we ought to keep our promises, once we have entered into such a covenant, we are bound by it, so that we should not break it under any circumstances short of a direct assault by the sovereign on our lives.
Fourth, he assumes that the sovereign can protect us from the dangers of the state of nature only by having absolute power, that is, by being unrestrained by any constitutional checks and balances.
Finally, as I have already said, he assumes that outside a state moral considerations do not apply.
I shall consider some objections to the first three assumptions in a moment, and I have already argued that the last assumption is unjustified. But many of us would surely want to follow up our objection to the last assumption by objecting very strongly to Hobbes's claim that the sovereign must have absolute power.
The existence of the Mbuti suggests that, at least in a society with a very simple level of material life, Hobbes' view of the dangers of the state of nature is somewhat exaggerated.
The dangers of a tyrannous sovereign with no obligations to the citizenry look considerably less attractive than the dangers of Mbuti life. So long as the Mbuti get along without the protection of a sovereign, they would have no reason to enter into a Hobbesian absolute state. It is surely reasonable to suggest that most people with a little familiarity with the history of humanity would not willingly enter into a covenant to create an absolute sovereign, with all the attendant risks of tyranny, if the alternative was the free, if simple, life of the Mbuti.Nevertheless, it does seem clear that, on the whole, we profit enormously from the existence of settled government. But, of course, we have achieved a system—democracy—that substantially reduces the risk of abuse of sovereign power. It does not guarantee that majorities will not oppress minorities, but it makes it less likely that a minority, let alone a majority, will ever be oppressed. Even if we do not need an absolute sovereign to protect us from the perils that Hobbes imagined in a state of nature, we all have something to gain from the existence of a government, provided it is not too oppressive. So a more reasonable reaction than Hobbes' would be to argue for a covenant that gave the sovereign effective powers but restricted his or her rights to just those powers that were necessary for enabling us to escape the perils of the state of nature. Which rights the sovereign should have is a question to which we shall return.
But this is only the first problem with Hobbes' argument. For his whole view depends, as we have seen, upon supposing that a political arrangement has been set up by agreement. Once we have made this agreement, according to Hobbes, we should stick to it. But not everyone is likely to find this argument convincing, for four sorts of reasons.
First of all, while we might have agreed to a covenant in a state of nature, we certainly didn’t freely enter into one.
Most of us were simply born citizens of our countries. And even those who were naturalized were not offered a contract they could enter into freely, for there was no negotiation. The Immigration and Naturalization Service of the United States simply says, as the Congress required it to, “take it or leave it.” And “it” includes the Constitution and all the laws of the United States. Since no one anywhere in the world is free nowadays to choose to live entirely outside any state, the fact that people accept citizenship of a country as their best option does not necessarily mean that he would prefer it to living in no state at all (or, of course, in some state that won't admit them).If Hobbes answered this objection by saying that the fact that we would have accepted the covenant is a reason to do what it requires, then we could ask whether this is true of agreements in general. And the answer is plainly no. Otherwise, if I would have agreed to buy your car if you'd offered it to me for $100, then, by a similar argument, I would owe you $100 if you gave me your car, even if I hadn't agreed to buy it! So the first objection is that since we didn't enter freely into a covenant, it is hard to see why it should be binding on us.
The second sort of objection, however, is even more damaging.
Even if we had agreed to a covenant, there is no reason to suppose that reasonable people would have accepted the particular covenant that Hobbes suggests. We have already seen that there is reason to doubt that any of us would willingly have instituted an absolute sovereign, one who had no obligations to the citizens. We thus have good reason to question Hobbes' first assumption.
But the third objection is that there is a further reason for doubting that we would have accepted the terms of Hobbes' covenant. Even if we had agreed to set up a meeting to agree to a covenant, we would be most unlikely to have agreed to the meeting being governed by the rules he suggests.
Why, for example, should we have agreed that the meeting to make the covenant should be governed by a majority vote? If we were out to protect our own self-interests, for example, we might have insisted on a rule of unanimity; as we shall see, other philosophers have thought that unanimity is preferable to being governed by the views of a majority. That is a reason for rejecting his second assumption.Finally, Hobbes' claim that we would be bound by the agreement we made, whatever happened, is unconvincing. For Hobbes' justification for the state appeals—because it is prudentialist—simply to our self-interest. If, once we had set up the covenant, we discovered that there was a way of getting around it that was in our self-interest, why would it not be prudent to use that way out? That is a basis for rejecting his third assumption. We now have reason to doubt every one of the five Hobbesian assumptions we began with.
Nevertheless, there is at the heart of Hobbes' argument a recognition of an important truth: that we usually gain from the existence of settled government advantages that it would be most imprudent either to give up once we have them or to refuse if, like the Mbuti, we do not. By and large, the existence of the state is, for most people in most societies, better than no state at all.
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