JKSCHW at aol.com wrote:
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> Sam and I, and our respective authorities, disagree about whether we should ignore everything in Hobbes a modern decision theorist would find uninteresting, such as Hobbes' discussion of religion, the passions, sociology, methodology, etc.
I haven't read enough of this Hobbes to comment, but his economics is interesting as he was writing during the mercantilist period who were all an interesting and far sighted group. The decision theory stuff is one of the many things one can get out of Hobbes. Then there is C.B. Macpherson who takes a very historical view. Phillip Kitcher has a paper on Hobbes' phil of math, if that's what turns your crank (it doesn't mine.)
> I got the decision theoretic Hobbes from Tim Scanlon, Peter Railtoin, and Allen Gibbard, who know no history,
Scanlon is an interesting liberal philosopher. Don't know about Gibbard. Is Railton still a Marxist? He has written some interesting things around p of science and ideology.
> Clearly not. There are no markets in Hobbes state of Warre because there is no property and no contract. The equality of which Hobbes speaks is, as he plainly says, the roughly equal ability of the dumbest and weakest to kill the (unaided) smartest and strongest. That's why he says girls are equal to boys, btw.
Hobbes does not discuss markets explicitly in Leviathan though his argument i.e. his deduction of society from purely asocial motivations, depends on concepts derived from markets. He says, infamously "the value of a man[sic] is his price." He believes the value of _anything_ is fixed by the market. Markets play a key role in Macpherson's exposition of H.
on distributional justice:
"To speak properly, Commutative Justice, is the Justice of a Contractor; that is a Performance of Covenant, in Buying and Selling; Hiring, and Letting to Hire; Lending and Borrowing; Exchanging, Bartering and other acts of Contract." L ch15
And as Gauthier puts it
"Hobbes offers the most unified and compelling psychological portrayal of economic man...Economic man is a radical contractarian in that all of his free or non-coercive interpersonal relationships are contractual. For him, voluntary social relationships require a rationale; contract provides it. The idea underlying contract, that persons who take no interest in one another's interests may nevertheless be able to interact in a mutually advantageous manner,is,as we have noted,one of the great liberating ideas in human history, freeing persons from the requirement that they be affectively dependent on their fellows. But economic man carries this liberation to the full extreme; his exclusively asocial motivation precludes voluntary non-contractual interpersonal relationships. He is not only freed from compulsory affective dependence; he is incapable of voluntary affection." MBA,p310.
> No, it is not. the classic 2 person PD involves two self interested persons (only) who will never again interact, who are seperated and unable to communicate on strategy, and whose options are ranked in a certain way that generates the puzzle. Hobbes has the selfish motivations and the ranking, but that is all. the rest of the structure is lacking.
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In Hobbes case, it need not be a two person game. The problem of social order is a collective action problem requiring more than two players. But as Gauthier says, an iterated pd is too easy solve.
Sam Pawlett