Why we can't all just get along: Human variety and game theory in Hobbes's state of nature

Southern Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 40, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 345-374

  Dodds, Graham G ^a   Shoemaker, David W ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

^b CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33745991070     PISSN: 00384283     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.2041-6962.2002.tb01906.x     Document Type: Review

References (39)

1. A partial list of those who have made use of one or the other of these approaches includes (but is not limited to), in alphabetical order, Andrew Alexandra, "Should Hobbes's State of Nature Be Represented as a Prisoner's Dilemma?" Southern Journal of Philosophy 30, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 1-16;
2. Brian Barry, Political Arguments (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), 253-4;
3. David Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969);
4. Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986);
5. Gregory S. Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986);
6. Iain McLean, "The Social Contract in Leviathan and the Prisoner's Dilemma Supergame," Political Studies 29, no. 3 (September 1981): 339-51;
7. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 269;
8. Gabriella Slomp and Manfredi La Manna, "Hobbes, Harsanyi and the Edge of the Abyss," Canadian Journal of Political Science 29, no. 1 (March 1996): 47-70;
9. Edna Ullmann-Margalit, The Emergence of Norms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 62-73;
10. and John W. N. Watkins, "Imperfect Rationality," in Explanation in the Behavioral Sciences, ed. R. Borger and F. Cioffi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
11. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994), 13: 74-5.
12. Hobbes, Leviathan, 11: 57-8.
13. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. J. B. Schneewind (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company,
14. Hobbes, Leviathan, 13: 75-6.
15. Despite the claims of some that Bernard Gert and F. S. McNeilly have decisively shown that Hobbes was not a psychological egoist, Kavka and others have argued that the issue is not nearly so clear-cut. See Bernard Gert, "Hobbes, Mechanism, and Egoism," Philosophical Quarterly 15 (October 1965): 341-9;
16. Bernard Gert, "Hobbes and Psychological Egoism," in Hobbes's Leviathan: Interpretation and Criticism, ed. Bernard Baumrin (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1969), 107-26;
17. F. S. McNeilly, "Egoism in Hobbes," Philosophical Quarterly 16 (July 1966): 193-206;
18. F. S. McNeilly, The Anatomy of Leviathan (London: MacMillan, 1968), ch. 5;
19. and Kavka, HMPT, 44-80.
20. Slomp and La Manna, "Hobbes, Harsanyi and the Edge of the Abyss";
21. Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, 67;
22. Amartya Sen, "Isolation, Assurance and the-Social Rate of Discount," Quarterly Journal of Economics 80 (1967): 112-24;
23. Amartya Sen, On Economic Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973);
24. and Amartya Sen, "Choice, Orderings and Morality," in Practical Reason, ed. S. Korner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 54-67.
25. See, e.g., Alexandra, "Should Hobbes's State of Nature Be Represented as a Prisoner's Dilemma?," 10-11,
26. Again, see Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 11.
27. Hobbes, Leviathan, Introduction, 4;
28. Gert, "Hobbes's Psychology," 164.
29. Gert, "Hobbes's Psychology," 165,167.
30. Hobbes, Leviathan, 15: 93.
31. Hobbes defines "reason" as "nothing but reckoning (that is, adding and subtracting) of the consequences of general names agreed upon for the marking and signifying of our thoughts. . . ." Since reasoning is essentially just arithmetic, and nearly everyone at least occasionally makes mistakes in doing arithmetic, "so also in any other subject of reasoning, the ablest, most attentive, and most practised men may deceive themselves and infer false conclusions" (Hobbes, Leviathan 5: 22-3).
32. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 154.
33. Don Hubin argues in "Minimizing Maximin," Philosophical Studies 37 (1980): 363-72, that maximin actually requires absolute ignorance of probabilities, which is not a condition the parties in the state of nature are likely to be in. But this is to misread Rawls, we believe, who requires only "some reason for sharply discounting estimates of these probabilities" (164, our emphasis). Because the parties lack the crucial information about what their opponents are likely to do-even when there is mutual recognition of the dispositions of those parties (for reasons cited in the text)-they are surely sorely lacking in information about the likelihoods of various possible outcomes, so this condition for maximin seems clearly to be satisfied. /
34. th ed. (Belmont, GA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1999), 639.
35. See also Kavka's HMPT, 142-4
36. Hobbes, Leviathan, 14: 87.
37. Eric M. Cave, Preferring Justice: Rationality, Self-Transformation, and the Sense of Justice (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 113, emphasis ours. Cave's illuminating account of the maximin, disaster avoidance, and expected utility principles of rational choice has been extremely helpful to us here.
38. On the general point about retrospective vs. prospective justifications of government, see Gregory S. Kavka, "Nuclear Weapons and World Government," The Monist 70 (July 1987): 300.
39. Hobbes, Leviathan, 30: 219, emphasis in original.