Evaluating social reasons: Hobbes versus Hegel

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 102, Issue 7, 2005, Pages 327-356

  Laden, Anthony Simon ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO   (United States)

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EID: 60950002772     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/jphil2005102713     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (40)

1. The importance of such reasons has been stressed by a number of philosophers in recent years. See, for instance, Samuel Freeman, "Reason and Agreement in Social Contract Views," Philosophy and Public Affairs, XIX, 2 (Spring 1990): 122-57, who calls such reasons "public," and uses them to distinguish Hobbesian from Rousseauvian social contract theories;
2. Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (New York: Cambridge, 1996)
3. and "The Reasons We Can Share," reprinted in Creating the Kingdom of Ends (New York: Cambridge, 1996), pp. 275-310, where she refers to reasons as intersubjective and finds their original articulation in Kant;
4. Charles Taylor, "Explanation and Practical Reason," "Irreducibly Social Goods," and "To Follow a Rule," all reprinted in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge: Harvard, 1995), pp. 34-60, 127-45, 165-80, where he talks of "common understandings" and traces their importance in practical reasoning to Hegel and Wittgenstein;
5. and Onora O'Neill, "Four Models of Practical Reasoning," reprinted in Bounds of Justice (New York: Cambridge, 2000), pp. 11-28, where she contrasts "action-based" accounts of practical reason with "teleological" ones, tracing the former back to Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Kant, and the latter to Plato and Hume.
6. I have described such reasons elsewhere as "we"-reasons. See my "Outline of a Theory of Reasonable Deliberation," Canadian Journal of Philosophy, XXX (December 2000): 551-80.
7. I borrow the term "plural subject" from Margaret Gilbert, who uses it in her analysis of collective action and intention. See, for instance, her On Social Facts (Princeton: University Press, 1989). I use it in a somewhat looser fashion, though in the same spirit: roughly, a plural subject exists any time it is appropriate for its members to refer to it using the first person plural.
8. See, for instance, Freeman, "Reason and Agreement in Social Contract Views";
9. Taylor, "Explanation and Practical Reasons," and "Irreducibly Social Goods";
10. O'Neill, "Four Models of Practical Reason";
11. and Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, Joel Anderson, trans. (Cambridge: MIT, 1996). Note also that while the Hegelian approach draws on some resources to be found in the work of Hegel, it does not exhaust them. My reason for drawing on some but not all of the resources in Hegel is that those I draw on are less intricately connected to Hegel's full metaphysical system and thus are more accessible to those of a Hobbesian persuasion.
12. It thus also has affinities with the contractualist view of T.M. Scanlon. See his What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge: Harvard, 1999). In particular, I think the Hegelian approach discussed below provides a helpful framework for thinking about the appropriate criteria for reasonable rejection within Scanlon's theory. On the difference between theories of rational choice and theories of reasonable deliberation, see my "Outline of a Theory of Reasonable Deliberation."
13. See, for instance, Rawls, "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," reprinted in Collected Papers, Freeman, ed. (Cambridge: Harvard, 1999), pp. 573-615.
14. See Sugden, "Team Preferences," Economics and Philosophy, XVI (2000): 175-204;
15. and Bacharach, "Interactive Team Reasoning: A Contribution to the Theory of Cooperation," Research in Economics, LII (1999): 117-47. In team reasoning, each member of a team figures out what to do by figuring out what set of moves would jointly produce the best result for the team, and then doing her part.
16. There is another question which lies in these waters and from which it is important to distinguish the question that concerns me here: To what degree must the interests that ultimately ground reasons be subjective? According to some formulations of rational choice theory, reasons must find support in the satisfaction of preferences or a change in utility. Such theories will have to account for George's concern for Alice with something akin to sympathy. Amartya Sen accuses such theories of describing "rational fools" and suggests that an adequate account of rationality will have to take account of more objective sources of reasons, such as what he calls commitments. See his "Rational Fools," reprinted in Choice, Welfare, and Measurement (Cambridge: MIT, 1982), chapter 4. Sen's concern is with how broadly we conceive of individual interests, and thus with what can inform the individual evaluative standpoint. Mine, in contrast, is with how to evaluate reasons that do not appeal to that standpoint, however broadly construed. Clearly there is some overlap between the questions, as the more broadly we construe the individual standpoint, the wider the terrain of reasons it can support. Nevertheless, the sub-Hobbesian could accept objective sources of individual interest without thereby abandoning his claim that all reasons must be evaluated from the individual standpoint.
17. Hobbes, Leviathan, Edwin Curley, ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994);
18. Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (New York: Oxford, 1986).
19. There is a deep question of Hobbes interpretation here that I want to bracket. Hobbes's belief in the kind of indirect reduction that lies at the heart of Gauthier's work is displayed most prominently in the argument against the Fool in Leviathan. His more orthodox tendencies appear most clearly in his claims that the laws of nature do not bind in the absence of an enforcer. In calling the approach outlined in this section Hobbesian, I mean to invoke the Hobbes who argues against the Fool. The more orthodox game-theoretic work of someone like Ken Binmore also claims to be Hobbesian, but allies itself with the other aspect of Hobbes's view. See his Game Theory and the Social Contract, Volume I: Playing Fair and Volume II: Just Playing (Cambridge: MIT, 1994).
20. It will help some readers at this point to draw a connection between this approach and Rawls's discussion of practices in "Two Concepts of Rules," The Philosophical Review, LXIV, 1 (1955): 3-32
21. reprinted in Collected Papers, pp. 20-46. Social reasons are reasons internal to a practice. Their immediate authority stems from the constitutive features of the practice. The Hobbesian claims, however, that only practices that I can support from my individual evaluative standpoint can generate reasons with normative force. Thus, while the reasons within a practice need not appeal to our individual interests, the reasons that support the practice as a whole do.
22. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 110 (chapter 18, pars. 1-2);
23. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, C.B. MacPherson, ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), p. 111 (§222).
24. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, H.B. Nisbet, trans., Allen Wood, ed. (New York: Cambridge, 1991), §158.
25. This, of course, raises the question of what to say about cases where a social reason is presented to me on grounds that I belong to a plural subject, where I would reject such membership, or where despite the accuracy of the ascription, it is not one I happily assent to. Clearly, this possibility and its apparent structural similarity to the kinds of cases I have been discussing raises serious problems for any broadly Hegelian account. Nevertheless, I bracket them here, as I think a full description of the Hegelian picture even in the ideal situation where all membership in plural subjects are endorsed and affirmed, is sufficiently difficult and controversial without adding in this further wrinkle. I do, however, think that the model I develop below has the resources to address this problem. For further discussion of this point, see my Reasonably Radical (Ithaca: Cornell, 2001), especially chapter 6.
26. See Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §32.
27. This harmony is one of the things that makes the modern social world worthy of what Hegel calls "reconciliation." For a discussion of the importance of reconciliation to Hegel's work, and the argument that the modern social world is worthy of reconciliation, see Michael Hardimon, Hegel's Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation (New York: Cambridge, 1994). Note that the project of reconciliation involves showing each member of modern society that they can comfortably occupy their various plural subjects, that these practical identities fit together, rather than showing, as the Hobbesian would aim to do, that they are each mutually advantageous.
28. Hegel makes precisely this point about contracts; see Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §77. It forms one of the grounds of his criticism of social contract theory; see §75.
29. Taylor would, I think, deny this point. He claims that the goodness of an irreducibly social good requires not only our common understanding of the good, but our common valuation of it as good. See "Irreducibly Social Goods," p. 139. The Hegelian position described above differs from Taylor on this point. According to the view I am articulating here, whether the evaluation of social reasons can devolve back to individual members of the plural subject depends on the particular content and constitution of the plural subject, not merely on its being plural. This view is thus vulnerable to the sophisticated Hobbesian objection in a way that Taylor's view might not be. On the other hand, it is also thereby a position a Hobbesian might be more likely to find attractive.
30. This also marks a difference with Taylor's view, as I understand it. For Taylor, practical reason involves a kind of interpretational discovery rather than a kind of mutual (re)-construction. See, for instance, "Explanation and Practical Reason," p. 36. The claim that there is a fact of the matter about what practical reasons there are that is prior to the act of reasoning together, then, is a point on which Taylor agrees with the Hobbesian and not the Hegelian.
31. Much philosophical discussion that distinguishes Hobbesian from Kantian or Rousseauvian approaches to practical reason has focused on this substantive difference. See, for instance, O'Neill, "Four Models of Practical Reasoning"; Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge: Harvard, 1993).
32. The core of this idea in Rousseau is described in Gauthier, "The Politics of Redemption," Revue de l'Université d'Ottawa, XLIX (1979): 329-56
33. reprinted in Moral Dealing: Contract, Ethics, and Reason (Idiaca: Cornell, 1990), pp. 77-109, especially pp. 92-94.
34. The general approach, as well as its connection to Hegel, forms the backdrop of Gauthier, "Social Contract as Ideology," Philosophy and Public Affairs, VI, 1 (Winter 1977): 130-64
35. reprinted in Moral Dealing, pp. 325-54.
36. Inconsistency with a deep fact of human nature seems to be what sinks Rousseau in "The Politics of Redemption." Inconsistency with our "everyday awareness of ourselves" prevents this theory from providing a reconciliation between rationality and Rawls's theory of justice in Gauthier, "Justice and Natural Endowment," Social Theory and Practice, III (1974): 3-26
37. One exemplary exception to this, whose argument I follow below, is Elijah Millgram, Practical Induction (Cambridge: Harvard, 1997), especially chapter 2.
38. I discuss the place of such reasons in political deliberation in my Reasonably Radical, chapter 7.
39. For an illuminating discussion of how this point plays out in Hegel's work, see Terry Pinkard, Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (New York: Cambridge, 1994).
40. It seems to me that there might be quite interesting constraints beyond the obvious "can't be in two places at once" variety, and that thinking about the relationship between practical reasoning and the individual self from this perspective might shed light on both practical reasoning and the self. For a taste of the kind of reflection and constraints I have in mind, see Marya Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves (Ithaca: Cornell, 1996), especially part II, where she develops what she calls a narrative view of the self.