Normatively demanding creatures: Hobbes, the fall and individual responsibility

Res Publica

Volumn 6, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 301-319

  Williams, Garrath ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL LANCASHIRE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Agency; Hobbes; Moral conflict; Responsibility

Indexed keywords

EID: 0012693296     PISSN: 13564765     EISSN: 15728692     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1009697122784     Document Type: Article

References (59)

1. E.L.(I) xix.5 (likewise D.C v.5).
2. D.C xii.3.
3. D.C i.5.
4. Indeed, in L.Latin Hobbes uses his index of biblical passages to mark his citations of Genesis 2:17 and 3:5 as particularly important (fourteen other passages are similarly marked out). The only commentator I know of who treats Hobbes' account respectfully is Tom Sorrell, in his elegant study Hobbes (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 34ff., 124ff.
5. Generally, commentators have not noticed the account: indeed A.P. Martinich's recent Hobbes Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995) states that "[I]t is unfortunate for his own purposes that he [Hobbes] did not explicate the story of the first sin in Genesis, because it is clear that the author was conveying the idea that disobedience is the essence of sin" - 160.
6. Since my purpose here is not primarily Hobbes exegesis I will not dwell on the consequences for Hobbes interpretation that have followed from misunderstanding what is a first thrust of his moral philosophy, our disputes about the content of the good. I should note, however, that in the recent material, it is Richard Tuck who has best set out this aspect of Hobbes' thought: Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989),
7. "Hobbes's Moral Philosophy", in Tom Sorrell, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 175-207.
8. S.A. Lloyd-Ideals as Interests in Hobbes's Leviathan: The Power of Mind over Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) - has also written usefully on the role, not of moral ideas as such, but of political and religious ideals in generating Hobbesian conflict.
9. D.C. xii.1ff., xvi.2; L. xx.17, xxxv.3. D.H. x.2 also refers to the myth, but only with regard to the genesis of language.
10. D.C. xii.1. Cf. L. xxix.6ff., xliii.1.
11. D.C xii.1.
12. Genesis 2:17, cited at L. xxxviii.2; cf. xxxv.3, xliv.14, 29, L.Latin Appendices i.48ff. & iii.19ff. See also Curley, L. 508n.
13. L.Latin only, xiii.11.
14. A fourth consequence is not central here, but touches on the patriarchalism of Hobbes' political theory, the subjection of women that follows the Fall. On Hobbes' "sexual contract" see Carole Pateman's study of the same name (Oxford: Polity Press, 1988).
15. L. xx.17.
16. L. xx.17.
17. Curley, L. 134n.
18. D.C. xii.1.
19. D.C. xii.2.
20. Naturally Hobbes himself shows no reservations about offering up his own interpretations. The crucial importance of organisation is nicely summarised at D. C. xii.11.
21. Hobbes gives a whole series of reasons why our position is not akin to that of naturally sociable creatures, such as bees: E.L.(I) xix.5; L. xvii.6ff.
22. Cf. e.g. L. ii.8, xii, and much of Part IV.
23. See S.A. Lloyd, Ideals As Interests in Hobbes's Leviathan, op. cit., on how this results in a political solution more complex than often recognised - a matter of civic education and not simply brute force.
24. This point recalls an obvious criticism of crude emotivism: when we use the term "good" or "right", we do not mean "I like or approve of such-and-such" - a position which, in itself, does not ask anyone else to agree. Part of the meaning of such terms is their claim that others should share this valuation. So long as our standard of judgment is not as scientific as Hobbes claims his to be, however, such a demand provides a potent source of conflict.
25. Cf. e.g. E.L.(I) xvii.6, L. xv.30, xxvi.21.
26. D.C. "Epistle dedicatory", §2. Cf. also, more prosaically, D.C iii.20, 32.
27. Hobbes introducing his early translation of Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War [1628], David Grene, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) "[T]o the readers".
28. D.C. iii.31; likewise xiv.17, L. iv.24, xv.40. As noted above, of course, conflict arises because good and evil are not, properly, just "names imposed on things to signify desire for or aversion to things so named".
29. Cf.L. xi.21.
30. Of course, we might take God's view of our deeds as decisive: but unless we settle for something akin to solitary martyrdom (cf. L. xliii.23), there is still the demand that others appreciate (what we take to be) God's perspective.
31. Cf. E.L.(I) x.8, L. xi.16ff. Cf. also L. xxvii.36 on "the weak, that look not so much upon the way they go in, as upon the light that other men carry before them".
32. E.L.(I) xiii.6; cf. D.C. v.1, L. xviii.9. As many of his readers have noted, Hobbes will overstate this linkage - because of the high hopes and opinion he has of his own civil science. Thus D.C. "Epistle dedicatory", §6, which is certainly implausible, for quite Hobbesian reasons: "[F]or if the patterns of human actions were known with the same certainty as the relations of magnitude in figures, ambition and greed, whose power rests on the false opinions of the common people about right and wrong, would be disarmed, and the human race would enjoy such secure peace that ... it seems unlikely that it would ever have to fight again." Behemoth also notably harps on this theme; see Holmes' Introduction, xlv, n. 88.
33. L. x.12.
34. Cf. L. "Review & Conclusion", §§1-4.
35. E.L.(I) xix.5.
36. E.L.(II) xxvii.14; cf. E.L.(I) ix.11, D.C. ii.1, v.5, x.9ff, xii.12ff., L. xvii.10, xxv.12. Cf. his repeated image of men as coals, that singly are merely warm, but together work upon each other's passions (with the hot air of rhetoric, L.Latin xxv.15) to generate heat and conflagration: E.L.(II) xxiv.4, L.xxv.15.
37. See Hobbes' discussion of the term "multitudo", or "crowd": D.C. xii.8ff.; cf. L. viii.21.
38. E.L.(II) xx.10; similarly D.C. vi.9. Tuck ("Hobbes's Moral Philosophy", op. cit., 181) uses Hobbes' discussion of visual perception to illustrate this, as "a prime example of the way in which we have a profound conviction in the reality of what is in fact a wholly subjective experience". François Tricaud ("Hobbes's Conception of the State of Nature from 1640 to 1651: Evolution and Ambiguities", in G.A.J. Rogers & Alan Ryan, eds., Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 107-23, pp. 113ff.) notes similar passages (D.C. iii.31, L. xv.40) as indicating Hobbes' confusion in his ideas about the natural condition, disbelieving that "Hobbes's primordial war is so purely doctrinal" (114). Cf. note 28 above.
39. L. xv.16 (similarly xiv.8 and E.L.(I) xvi.6). Shortly before he has beautifully observed, however, that "[t]hat which gives to human actions the relish of justice is a certain nobleness or galantness of courage (rarely found) by which a man scorns to be beholden for the contentment of his life to fraud or breach of promise" - xv.10.
40. D.Cor. i.7.
41. Thus his famous definition, with echoes through all his writings, of "felicity" as "[C]ontinual success in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth__ For there is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense" L. vi.58.
42. L. xxvii.16; D.H. x.3.
43. L. vi.47; cf. also L.Latin xlvii.1; less optimistic, and more moralistic, are D.C. iii.27n. and E.L.(I) xix.2.
44. Cf. L. iv.4.
45. On the priests' use of sin to divide a man from his desires and hence strengthen religious control, see B. p. 26, Holmes' Introduction, xlvii ff.; and cf. L. xxvii.1.
46. D.C. i.5.
47. Cf. L. x, especially the multiple ironies in Hobbes' assertion, "let a man (as most men do) rate themselves at the highest value they can; yet their true value is no more than it is esteemed by others" - x.16.
48. Thus Hobbes claims that three things are necessary preconditions for rebellion: discontent (which we have seen may be induced by rhetoric); hope (which can of course be false); and, as I stress here, pretence of right. (See e.g. E.L.(II) xxvii, D.C. xii.)
49. L. vii.4; cf. L. xxix.7, E.L.(1) vi.8, and E.L.(II) xxiv.2: "if every man were allowed this liberty of following his conscience ... they would not live together in peace an hour". Hobbes can also be rather naive about conscience (cf. the lines preceding the above quotation from L. or D.C. iii.28ff., iv.21), but what he gives with one hand he certainly takes back with the other (D.C. xii.2, E.L.(II) xxv.12, L. xlii.11).
50. This is, of course, what Rousseau stresses in reinterpreting Hobbes' picture of our unsociability under the category of amour propre in A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Since Rousseau's picture of self-sufficient natural man is a secular (to the point of offence) reinterpretation of man before the Fall, in this much there is little between the two thinkers.
51. Human, All too Human, R.J. Hollingdale, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) §82; cf. ibid. "The Wanderer and his Shadow", §60.
52. L. xvii.11. Of course, Hobbes persistently asks us to accept that our condition is inevitably one of inconvenience and woe.
53. B. 153; cf. 154, 203.
54. B. 158. D.C. xii.12 further suggests that sincerity is crucial for a rabble-rouser's effectiveness, while E.L.(II) xxvii.12ff. sarcastically clarifies how eloquence and lack of wisdom may coexist in a man.
55. Cf. e.g. E.L.(I) xvii.1, D.Cor. i.1.
56. Naturally, political philosophy has had more to say about conflicting notions of the right and the good, much of liberalism being concerned to guide agents who so disagree. Without doubting the urgency of this line of thought, I would note that its main inspiration has been Locke, whose view of the problem is - with one notable exception - rather more sanguine than Hobbes'. I thank Jamie Mayerfeld for pointing out to me that Locke's view is in one sense much more worrying than Hobbes'. For Hobbesian premises prevent the question of punishment from arising outside of civil society ("a right of every man to every thing, whereby one man invadeth with right, and another with right resisteth" - E.L.(I) xiv.11; likewise D.C. i.12.). Lockean agents in the state of nature continually face the problem of mutually punishing one another for breaches of the law of nature, a problem which, according to the analysis pursued here, is clearly much more serious than Locke's ambivalent "inconvenience" (on Locke's "executive power of the law of nature" see Ch. II of The Second Treatise of Government). Nonetheless, while punishment is theoretically prohibited in the Hobbesian natural condition, one could hardly believe that men will see their practice as so constrained, so that punishment or revenge will not lend justification - however subjectively - to many heinous acts.
57. Hobbes himself gives us at least one reason for this: "if it had been a thing contrary to any man's right of dominion ... that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry, suppressed ...". For my argument, of course, it would be more convenient if he had simply said "disputed": L. xi.21; cf. E.L.(I) "Epistle dedicatory".
58. Thus Hobbes and following contractarian approaches; thus Kant and following dialogical or communicative accounts.
59. Especially insofar as some may find that the term itself implies a 'sovereign self that might be (held) fully answerable for its deeds - an idea that can hardly withstand the reality of fragmentary agency alluded to here.