Baruch and Hobbesy, freedom of speech, etc.

[Ken Hanly]

Well I thought he was both an ethical egoist and a psychological egoist. Of
course being the former does not entail being the latter. Bentham was a
psychological egoist but not an ethical egoist. He was utilitarian.
If people must act on self-interested reasons--and this seems to follow from
his hard determinism plus his psychological egoism- then there is no obligation
to obey the sovereign and no such thing as justice except as what is in a
person's interest. Justice could not be as Hobbes claims the will of the
sovereign. And the distinction between the state of nature without justice and
the state with justice being the will of the sovereign makes no sense. For it
is surely bizarre to hold that what is in the sovereign's interest is always in
each individuals interest  It is also just not empirically true that people are
equal in power in  a state of nature as Hobbes holds, or that disobeying the
sovereign will cause a return to the state of nature. Hobbes of course says
nothing about prisoner's dilemmas and the contract is not a classic pd anyway.
Some people defect all the bloody time and make a mint or even a literal
killing without being punished and the social order still survives. So Hobbes
refuses to be a free rider. This is a wimpy response for a supposedly robust
egoist. Lets face it Hobbes is, as I said earlier, scared shitless of power.
What he imagines is the bogey man will get him. That is why he fled Cromwell
when Cromwell didn't give two hoots about him. Well maybe he wanted to party
with monarchists in France :)

    Cheers, Ken Hanly

Sam Pawlett wrote:


> Ken Hanly wrote:
>
> >     Hobbes never made any sense to me except perhaps as some type of rule
> > ethical egoist or inconsistent deontologist.
>
> Hobbes was a psychological egoist i.e he thought people always and only
> act for self-interested reasons. In R.Dawkins' terms everyone is a
> cheater(egoist) rather than a grudger(reciprocal altruists) or a
> sucker(altruist). It's a descriptive and not a normative claim. It's not
> that people should be egoists its that they cannot act otherwise. His
> central problem is "how is social order possible?" He demonstrates that
> the invisible hand is false, everyone collectively is worse off if
> everyone acts always and only from self-interest. Further, the desire to
> act from self-interest is so strong that one will _always_ defect in a
> prisoner's dilemma (the PD is Hobbes' model of society.) To solve the
> prisoners dilemma and hence construct social  order, an absolute
> sovereign is needed to enforce the conract. A contract because it is the
> only way to get people to obey social norms and respect each other.
> Absolute sovereign, because people will defect if not. And once one
> person defects... I think Hobbes was an early socio-biologist. A great
> writer too with a great imagination.
>
> Sam Pawlett