Normativity and projection in Hobbes's Leviathan

Philosophical Review

Volumn 109, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 313-347

  Darwall, Stephen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

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EID: 59849122560     PISSN: 00318108     EISSN: 15581470     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00318108-109-3-313     Document Type: Article

References (77)

1. References will be to chapter and paragraph number in Edwin Curley's edition (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994).
2. I discuss this further in The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought': 1640-1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4-6.
3. Thomas Hobbes, English Works, 5.1, 132.
4. For the former, see A. E. Taylor, "The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes," in Keith Brown, Hobbes Studies, ed. Keith Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965).
5. For the latter, see, somewhat problematically, Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1957)
6. and, more straightforwardly, A. P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
7. See, for example, David Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan: The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1967).
8. "Thomas Hobbes: Moral Theorist," Journal of Philosophy 76 (1979): 547-59;
9. Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986);
10. and Gregory S. Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
11. See the references to Gauthier, Hampton, and Kavka in notes 25-27 below.
12. For criticism of the idea that desire provides a normative reason for action (as opposed, say, to being a condition in which the desirer takes something about her desire's object as a normative reason), see E.J. Bond, Reason and Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1-41;
13. Stephen Darwall, Impartial Reason (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 25-82;
14. Philip Pettit and Michael Smith, "Backgrounding Desire," Philosophical Review 99 (1990): 565-92;
15. and T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 33-55.
16. For a critique of the idea that the fact that something is a (necessary) means to the agent's end is a normative reason for the agent to take it, as opposed, say, to making it irrational for the agent to both maintain the end and fail to take the means, see R. M. Hare, "Wanting: Some Pitfalls," in Agent, Action, and Reason, ed. Robert Binkley, Richard Bronaugh, and Ausonio Marras (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971);
17. Patricia Greenspan, "Conditional Oughts and Hypothetical Imperatives," Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975): 259-76;
18. Stephen Darwall, Impartial Reason, 43-50;
19. and John Broome, "Normative Requirements," Ratio 12 (1999): 398-419.
20. In chapter 3 of The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought'.
21. With some caveats for Hume and Hutcheson.
22. Again, with caveats, this time for Locke.
23. Although one might wish to distinguish the evaluative from the normative for various purposes, I will take it that the evaluative propositions with which Hobbes is here concerned are normative, if only implicitly, since they are neither good-of-a-kind judgments nor hedged in some other way. On my interpretation, Hobbes holds that the (evaluative) thought that something is good implies the (normative) thought that there is some (normative) reason for the agent whose thought it is to bring it about and, thus, that she ought to, other things being equal. (For the distinction between normative and motivating reasons (earlier termed justifying and explaining or "agents'" reasons, respectively)), see, for example, Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 94-98;
24. Stephen Darwall, Impartial Reason, 28-32;
25. Kurt Baier, The Moral Point of View (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958), 148-56.
26. Strictly speaking, this does not simply extend the story I told about Hobbes in The British Moralists and the Internalist. It amends it. I there placed Hobbes at the head of a naturalist tradition in early modern British metaethics. I now think, however, that while Hobbes is a methodological and metaphysical naturalist, the most plausible metaethical category to place him in is not naturalism but projectivism. But note the next paragraph but one in the text.
27. For a discussion of these distinctions, see Stephen Darwall, Peter Rail- ton, and Allan Gibbard, "Toward Fin de Siècle Ethics," Philosophical Review 101 (1992): 115-89.
28. J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977) and Hume's Moral Theory (London: Routledge and Regan Paul, 1980).
29. It should be noted that Mackie usually discusses objecti - fication in relation to Hume, he does cite Hobbes as an example of the view that value is a projection of desire (Hume's Moral Theory, 43). However, Mackie does not work this out in any detail, nor does he relate it to what Hobbes says about color.
30. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2d ed., ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2d. ed., with text revised and variant readings by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 469.
31. Treatise, 167.
32. David Hume, Enquiries Concrning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3d ed., ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, with text revised and notes by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1985), 294.
33. Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).
34. David Lewis, "Dispositional Theories of Value," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. 63 (1989): 113-37;
35. Peter Railton, "Moral Realism," Philosophical Review 95 (1986): 163-207.
36. John McDowell, "Values and Secondary Qualities," in Morality and Objectivity, ed. T. Honderich (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985);
37. David Wiggins, "A Sensible Subjectivism?" in Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).
38. Recent scholarly discoveries have revealed how Hobbes's thinking underwent a fundamental shift in the 1630s from Renaissance humanism to modern natural philosophy (Quentin Skinner, "Bringing Back a New Hobbes," New York Review of Books (April 4, 1996)).
39. New evidence of the former has come in the republication of Three Discourses. This was initially published anonymously in 1620, but computer analysis has recently suggested that it was written by Hobbes (Thomas Hobbes, Three Discourses, ed. Noel B. Reynolds and Arlene W. Saxonhouse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)).
40. One of the Discourses, the Discourse on Law, is particularly interesting for our purposes, since it is replete with the rhetoric of classical Thomist natural law that Hobbes would come later to scorn. The last two years have also seen the publication of Hobbes's correspondence, which shows the emergence during the 1630s of a very different Hobbes, someone intensively engaged in experiments with light and optics and fascinated by Galileo's theory of color (Thomas Hobbes, The Correspondence, 2 vols., ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1994)). As we know, Hobbes pursued scientific and geometrical research for the rest of life, and his philosophical writings from then on bear the marks, not least, of course, Leviathan.
41. From The Assayer (II Saggitore, 1623). This passage, translated by Arthur Danto, is quoted in Danto and Sidney Morgenbesser, eds. Philosophy of Science (Cleveland and New York: Meridien Books, 1960).
42. So far as I know, the only interpreter to notice this is Richard Tuck (see his Hobbes (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 52-57). However, Tuck apparently does not see the difference between interpreting Hobbes as a projectivist and seeing him as a subjectivist (relativist), nor the way in which Hobbes's projectivist treatment of value and normativity fits into his account of deliberation and the will.
43. David Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan, 7. In "Thomas Hobbes: Moral Theorist," 548, Gauthier again takes this passage as evidence that Hobbes is a value subjectivist, albeit one who differs from contemporary subjectivists in taking desire rather than preference as a measure of value.
44. Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, 29.
45. Gregory S. Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory, 47.
46. G. E. Moore, "A Reply to My Critics," in The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (La Salle, I11.: Open Court, 1942), 561;
47. H. P. Grice, "The Causal Theory of Perception," in Perceiving, Sensing, and Knowing, ed. Robert Swartz (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1965), 444-51.
48. Along the first line, J. L. Mackie argues that it is possible to hold a projectivist "error theory" at the level of "second-order" metaethics and nonetheless engage sincerely in substantive, "first- order" normative ethical thought and discourse (Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, 15-49).
49. For a projectivist view that has greater affinities to traditional noncognitivism, see Simon Blackburn, "How to Be an Ethical Antirealist," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 12 (1988): 361-75.
50. Not least, by the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, in his manuscripts on freedom of the will and autonomy. I discuss this aspect of Cud- worth's views in The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought', 130-48.
51. This was a central objection of Cudworth's. We should note, however, that although Hobbes makes no place for critical reflection in his account of deliberation, his political philosophy relies on this capacity in various ways. Consider, for example: "For all men are by nature provided of notable multiplying glasses, (that is their passions and self-love,) through which, every little payment appeareth a great grievance; but are destitute of those prospective glasses, (namely moral and civil science,) to see afar off the miseries that hang over them, and cannot without such payments be avoided" (18.20).
52. For Leviathan to beneficially affect deliberation, Hobbes here says, agents must be able to put on the critically corrected "prospective glasses" of Hobbesian moral science and revise the appearances that momentary passions produce. I discuss in the next paragraph but one how such remarks can be fit within a projectivist framework. I am indebted here to a reader for the Philosophical Review.
53. Note, this means that Hobbes must hold that we can acquire new desires by practical reasoning, that is, by reasoning from the thoughts of apparent good and evil we have when we have desires and aversions, respectively.
54. By "practical" here, I mean the standpoint of agency and deliberation, in contrast with the (theoretical) standpoint we take up when we consider what to believe concerning how things are. We can distinguish a second sense of "practical" within this broadly theoretical standpoint, namely, one involved in ordinary, everyday judgments (color judgments, for example) as opposed to propositions of theory (say, projectivism about color).
55. More precisely, that part of "moral" science that consists, not in the "apt imposing of names," but in proceeding from these "to assertions made by connexion of one of them to another," must be inherently practical in this way (5.17).
56. 'Superstition' is usually code for Roman Catholicism in Hobbes.
57. Necessary here is a distinction between desires, like thirst (or, as Hobbes views it, the desire for self-preservation), that are relatively impervious to changes in belief, and desires that are not, either because they are based on belief, or because they are conditioned by causal processes (for example, religious rituals) that are sensitive themselves to changes in belief.
58. De cive, the English Version, Entitled in the First Edition, Philosophicall Rudiments Concerning Government and Society, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1983), 1.7.
59. Hobbes's scruples about law relate to his definition of law, which relates it analytically to authoritative command. As with his definition of 'obligation' (the result of transferring a right), however, showing that something is a law in this sense is logically independent of establishing its normative force, that is, its power to dictate. On this point see note 45. The point here is that Hobbes does think that the "laws of nature" are properly seen as providing normative reasons for acting, even if they are improperly called "laws."
60. In desiring heroin, she will see it as good in the sense that that is how heroin will seem to her under the influence of her desire. She may, however, not just reject that the fact that she desires heroin is a reason for her to seek it, but also that the appearance that it is good is a reason.
61. Of course, a heroin addict would similarly (unavoidably) see the means to satisfying her desire for heroin as something she ought to do also. Does a projectivist interpretation of Hobbes's thought give him any way of distinguishing these cases? As we noted above in considering how Hobbes could respond to the objection that projectivism undermines substantive ethical thought, Hobbes might say here that, for practical purposes, we normalize our ethical judgments in various ways. He certainly does say this for the case of judgments in the commonwealth, as we shall consider in the final section. Whether this reply would be satisfactory would, of course, be another matter. It is worth noting, however, that a version of the same problem is faced by a subjectivist interpretation.
62. But only, based on anything said so far, as holding "other things being equal." For laws of nature to have the sort of "all things considered" force that moral norms are frequently supposed to have, Hobbes would need to show that they counsel necessary means, not just to what (the agent unavoidably judges) is good, but to what (the agent unavoidably judges) is best. We should regard Hobbes as taking steps in this direction when he argues that we must keep covenant, not just to avoid death, but to avoid "the danger of violent death," "continual fear," and the lack of all of the following: "industry," "culture of the earth," "navigation," "use of commodities that may be imported by sea," "commodious building," "arts," "letters," "society," and so on. I am indebted here to Sharon Lloyd.
63. Here I am indebted to Greg Kavka. See his Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory, 137-56
64. and "The Rationality of Rule-Following: Hobbes' Dispute with the Foole," Law and Philosophy 14 (1995): 5-34.
65. Hobbes urges, of course, that the costs of being known to have broken covenant are severe. In the state of nature, no one can expect to survive without the help of confederates who are bound by covenant, and covenant is also the only way out of this nasty and brutish state. Anyone known to violate covenant can therefore expect "no other means of safety, than what can be had from his own single power" (15.5). But these substantial risks notwithstanding, can Hobbes really think that circumstances never arise in which a person may reasonably think he is likeliest to do best by breaching covenant?
66. Kavka, "The Rationality of Rule-Following."
67. See also, David Gauthier, "Thomas Hobbes: Moral Theorist," Journal of Philosophy 76 (1979): 547-59;
68. "Taming Leviathan," Philosophy and Public Affairs 76 (1987): 280-98;
69. Morals By Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1986), 157-89. We should note, of course, that Hobbes also believes that threats to life cancel the obligation to keep covenant. I have been assuming, and will continue to assume, that the cases of keeping covenant we are considering are not life-threatening.
70. Note how the account of the normativity of the laws of nature I have sketched fits with Hobbes's official view of obligation. Hobbes defines obligation as the state one comes to be in by renouncing or transferring a right (14.7), the relevant ones deriving from the "right of nature," which everyone has in the state of nature, of doing whatever "in his own judgment and reason" will promote self-preservation (14.1). A covenant, for Hobbes, is a special form of contract, where a contract is a "mutual transferring of right" (14.9). Covenant is a contract in which one person performs his part first, trusting that the other will later perform, as per the contract (14.11).
71. It simply follows from these definitions that a person is obligated to keep covenant, since 'obligation' just refers to the state resulting from the transference of right in which covenant consists. But, of course, nothing with genuine normative force can follow from definitions alone. So what makes it the case that people ought to keep their covenants, that is, act as they are obligated? Obviously, Hobbes recognizes this as a genuine question. Otherwise, there would be no need for the third law of nature, "that men perform their covenants made," or for him to bother with the fool.
72. There is a neat solution to this problem that is available to Hobbes. Suppose that Hobbes's reply to the fool works. It will then be true that an agent should keep covenant, even if "in his own judgment and reason," he believes, even reasonably, that he would do better by breaking it. It follows that the law of nature now requires that, for this case, he not do what "in his own judgment and reason," would most advance his "conservation and contentment." But what that means is that the right of nature is effectively suspended for this case. And so, by covenanting, the agent will indeed have laid down his right of nature not to violate covenant should he think in his own "judgment and reason" it would benefit him to do so. And since obligation just is the state a person comes to be in by renouncing or transferring a right, he will, by covenanting, have undertaken an obligation to keep his covenant. For an extended discussion of these points, see The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought', 60-79.
73. It is worth noting that Hobbes could remain a projectivist and avoid this particular problem if he held that the agents' views of normative reasons for acting express, not the agent's desires, but her acceptance of norms. For a view of this sort, see Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
74. I am indebted to an anonymous reader for the Philosophical Review for pressing this issue.
75. See the section "Projecting Value," above.
76. Things are more complicated if the sovereign rules that X is good. If subjects are obligated to be ruled by this ruling, then, presumably, they are bound to accept that X is good. But from the fact that they ought to accept that X is good, it doesn't follow that X is, indeed, good. In other words, the desire that will be "raised" by the instrumental reasoning that underlies the judgment that we should be ruled by the sovereign in this instance is not the first-order desire for X, but the second-order desire to desire X.
77. See note 8 above.