Ken Hanly wrote:
>
> 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.
Hobbes thinks that every person -more or less- is rational and a rational person would submit to the laws of the sovereign, if only to get out of the state of nature which is less attractive than society with a sovereign. As contemporary Hobbesian David Gauthier puts it :
"Since the unlimited right of nature gives rise to war, renouncing some part of this right is necessary for peace.The renunciation must of course be mutual; each person expects to benefit, not from his own act of renunciation, but from that of his fellows, and so no one has reason to renounce his rights unilaterally. What Hobbes envisions is a rational bargain in which each accepts certain constraints on his freedom of actionso that all may avoid the costs of the natural condition of war." *Morals By Agreement p158-9.*
It is also just not empirically true that people are
> equal in power in a state of nature as Hobbes holds
I think what Hobbes has in mind is that everyone is equal in power before the laws of the market.
, or that disobeying the
> sovereign will cause a return to the state of nature.
Disobeying the sovereign will land you jail because it is disobeying a contract you have signed. If enough people disobey at any one time, a state of nature is possible.
Hobbes of course says
> nothing about prisoner's dilemmas and the contract is not a classic pd anyway.
That's arguable.
> 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.
Hobbes point is that it is rational for everyone to defect in which case competition between individuals for scarce goods leads to a state of nature.
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.
Hobbes is scared shitless but of social disorder.
JKSCHW at aol.com wrote:
>
Otherwise you can't figure out why H wrote about 2/3 of Leviathan, unless you think he was just putting in that stuff on the Kingdom of Darknesse to confuse the faithful.
I was always told, by David Gauthier among others, that Hobbes feared being persecuted by the church for being an atheist, so tried to show he believed in God in the last 2/3. Sort of like Hume refusing to publish his dialogues on religion while he was still alive.
> To be perfectly fair I used to teach Hobbes as a proto decision theorist,w hen I was a prof, because it's easier that way and it gets across some useful rational choice equipment, but I think Don is right and he was not.
The rat choice reading is not the only one but it is defensible and a lot of interesting philosophers, like Kavka and Gauthier, who've spent much time thinking about Hobbes read him that way.
> Hobbes' motto is: better the Stalinist terror than the Liberian civil war. And is he wrong, if those are the choices.
>
Yep.
Sam Pawlett