Baruch and Hobbesy, freedom of speech, etc.

[Ken Hanly]

Hobbes would not be wrong to accept what he did not have the power to change and to accept some ruler rather than none, but as an ethical egoist he should certainly have cheated every time he had the opportunity and could get away with it. You address few of my substantive criticisms. Instead you use ad hominem. Do you really believe that an ethical egoist has an obligation to obey the sovereign on those occasions when it is not in the egoist's interest to do so. And what sense can it make to
say that justice is the will of the sovereign from an ethical egoist or psychological egoist perspective? This could be so only so long as the sovereign's will and the egoist's perceived interest were identical, otherwise there is a contradiction. That is why I cannot but see him as some sort of rule ethical egoist or deontologist who defines the just as the will of the sovereign, a definition that has bugger-all to do with egoism and can contradict it. There is no prisoner's dilemma in Hobbes as far as I can see. In a prisoner's dilemma it is reasonable from an individualist standpoint  for both to defect and the result is not in either's interest so
there is a paradox.. However in the Hobbesian compact numerous people can and do defect and gain by doing so. The situation is more like that described by Thrasymachus in the Republic. The ruler again defines justice as what he or she regards as in her interest. The aim of a rational egoist is to gain power and certainly would only do what is "right" when it was in the egoists interest. That makes more sense to me than Hobbes. The ultimate triumph of an egoist would be to become sovereign.

    Granted that the view that some sovereign is better than none is not unreasonable given Hobbes' experiences, it does not follow that he should obey the sovereign always or that he should not free ride as an ethical egoist. Those are some of my points but they are like water off a duck's back. Might as well argue with Nathan about NATO's intervention in Yugoslavia :)

   Cheers, Ken Hanly

JKSCHW at aol.com wrote:


> Ken says:
>
>  > Lets face it Hobbes is, as I said earlier, scared shitless of power.
>  What he imagines is the bogey man will get him.
>
> How unreasonable of him, at a time when monarchs wwere absolute, political rights were nonexistence, and revolution was rampant. And how brave of you to say so from your pleasant liberal democracy where you can bitch and moan about the sovereign as much as you want and no one will chop off your head, thanks to those free speech rights that don't exist and are just abstract bourgeois mythology anyway.
>
> Actually, I think that Hobbes was rather keen on power. What he was scared of, and with good reason, was disorder. He'd seen armies marching all over his country, fighting battles and stomping all over the crops, looting and raping and generally carrying on, and he thought it was pretty scary. So would you. His idea was that any order is better than none, and to get that you need some power to overawe all the crumby little egoists--doesn't really matter who, Cromwell, the King, even Parliament, just so's someine gets a lid on things and enforces some set of predictable rules. "Sovreign power not so hurtful as the want of it," he writes (L, ch. 18).
>
> You make fun of Hobbes for not seeing the problem with the formation of the original compact. Well, there is that problem, if you want to see Hobbes as a proto-decision theorist. Of course if you do see him that way then you can honor him for setting up the problematic and discovering the prisoner's dilemma, rather thank thinking that he's a fool because he didn't see what anyone who has read von Neumann and Morgenstern can see.
>
> Or you might think that it is anachronistic to read v-N & M back into the 17th century, and give H credit for a different set of preoccupations. 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. The non-decision theoretic Hobbes is the line I learned from Don Herzog, who explains it in Without Foundations, among other places.
>
> 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. However either way I think that you have to read H as someone with a completely rational fear of narchic violence.
>
> I also note that H is no idiot and knows perfectly well that all actual states are formed by conquest. See L., ch 20, distinguishing a commonwealth by acquisition from  one by institution. The thing about the social contract  myth is to bring out the point that what legitimates a despotical dominion by acquisition is the rational consent of the subjects to the power of the sovereign--rational individually, because it's perfectly sensible to fear what the sov can do to you, and also collectively because it's even more sensible to fear what it would be like without him.
>
> Hobbes' motto is: better the Stalinist terror than the Liberian civil war. And is he wrong, if those are the choices.
>
> --jks
>
> --jks