Hobbes and the Rationality of Self-Preservation: Grounding Morality on the Desires We Should Have

Abstract

In deriving his moral code, Hobbes does not appeal to any mind-independent good, natural human telos, or innate human sympathies. Instead he assumes a subjectivist theory of value and an egoistic theory of human motivation. Some critics, however, doubt that his laws of nature can be constructed from such scant material. Hobbes ultimately justifies the acceptance of moral laws by the fact that they promote self-preservation. But, as Hobbes himself acknowledges, not everyone prefers survival over natural liberty. In this essay I show that Hobbes can argue that the desire for self-preservation is rationally required by modifying his subjectivist theory of the good to equate what is good for an agent only with the satisfaction of desires (for her own life) that she has at the time that they are satisfied. It is thus irrational to prefer postmortem glory over survival since an agent must be alive for glory to have any value for her.

Notes

1. Jean Hampton, “Hobbes and Ethical Naturalism,” Philosophical Perspectives: Ethics 6 (1992): 334.

2. John Deigh, “Reason and Ethics in Hobbes’s Leviathan,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 31 (1996): 44–45.

3. Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan (1651), chap. 14, par. 3; subsequent references to Leviathan are cited in the text.

4. A. E. Taylor, “The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes,” Philosophy 13 (1938): 406–24; and Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957).

5. Hampton, “Hobbes and Ethical Naturalism,” 344–45.

6. Bernard Gert, “Hobbes on Reason,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 82 (2001): 253.

7. Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes’s Leviathan,” Historical Journal 7 (I976): 333.

8. For a detailed criticism and replies, see Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

9. I take this to be a standard definition of psychological egoism. This formulation closely resembles that of Elliot Sober and David Sloan Wilson, “Summary of Unto Others,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 7 (2000): 196.

10. David Gauthier, “Thomas Hobbes: Moral Theorist,” The Journal of Philosophy 76 (1979): 549; Thomas Nagel, “Hobbes’s Concept of Obligation,” The Philosophical Review 68 (1959): 69.

11. Gert, “Hobbes: The Laws of Nature,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 82 (2001); George Scheldler, “Hobbes on the Basis of Political Obligation,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 15 (1977).

12. Gert, “Hobbes on Reason,” 243; he cites Hobbes’s De Cive, Preface, par. 2.

13. Gert, “Hobbes and Psychological Egoism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 28 (1967): 507.

14. For an overview of these theories of well-being, see Derek Parfit, “What Makes Someone’s Life Go Best?” in Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), appendix 1, 493–502.

15. “War Is the H-Word,” Futurama episode 17, originally aired on 26 November 2000.

16. Gert, “Hobbes: The Laws of Nature,” 509. Gert cites Leviathan, chap. 6, para. 22 and 46.

17. Gert, “Hobbes and Psychological Egoism,” 517.

18. Stuart M. Brown, “The Taylor Thesis: Some Objections,” in Hobbes Studies, ed. Keith Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), chap.3, 68.

19. For a survey of psychological evidence against egoism, see C. Daniel Batson and Laura Shaw, “Evidence for Altruism: Toward a Pluralism of Prosocial Motives,” Psychological Inquiry 2 (1991): 107–22.

20. George Schedler, “Hobbes on the Basis of Political Obligation,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 15 (1977): 170.

21. Nagel, “Hobbes’s Concept of Obligation,” 69.

22. John Rawls makes a similar argument in “Two Conceptions of Rules,” The Philosophical Review 64 (1955); 16. “The point of the practice is to abdicate one’s title to act according to utilitarian and prudential considerations in order that the future may be tied down and plans coordinated in advance. There are obvious utilitarian advantages in having a practice which denies . . . any general appeal to the utilitarian principle in accordance with which the practice itself may be justified.”

23. Gregory S. Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 358–59. See also David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 162.

24. Nagel, “Hobbes’s Concept of Obligation,” 70–71.

25. Gauthier, “Thomas Hobbes: Moral Theorist,” 549; Mark Murphy, “Desires and Ethics in Hobbes’s Leviathan: A Response to Professor Deigh,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 38 (2000): 261. In “Reason and Ethics in Hobbes’s Leviathan,” Deigh says the laws are derived from both deductive reason and instrumental reason, and that seems correct (52–53).

26. Nagel, “Hobbes’s Concept of Obligation,” 69; J. N. W. Watkins, Hobbes’s System of Ideas: A Study in the Political Significance of Philosophical Theories (London: Hutchison, 1965), 83.

27. “As Prudence is a Praesumtion of the Future, contracted from the Experience of time Past; So there is a Praesumtion of things Past taken from other things (not future but) past also” (par. 9).

28. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this objection.

29. For example, Taylor, “The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes,” 418–19, and 422, where Taylor says, “My own belief, for whatever it may be worth, is that Hobbes simply meant what he said about the natural law as a command of God, and that he was led to this conviction not so much by the Scriptural testimonies which he produces in such profusion, as by the unusual depth of his own sense of moral obligation.”

30. See, for example, Leo Strauss, “On the Basis of Hobbes‘s Political Philosophy,” in What is Political Philosophy? (New York: Free Press, 1959).

31. J. W. N. Watkins, “The Posthumous Career of Thomas Hobbes,” Review of Politics 19 (1957): 356.

32. Hobbes, De Corpore, chap. 1 sec. 8; Leviathan, chap. 11, par. 25; and chap. 12, para. 6–8.

33. This argument is made by John Palmerantz in “Mr. Warrender’s Hobbes,” in Hobbes Studies, chap. 4, 85.

34. Hampton, “Hobbes and Ethical Naturalism,” 339, 341; Gert, “Hobbes on Reason,” 244.

35. Gert, “Hobbes on Reason,” 253.

36. Here I contradict a claim made by Richard Brandt in “Rational Action,” Social Theory and Practice 9 (1983): 156–57.

37. Hobbes acknowledges at times the possibility of an afterlife, but claims that we will no longer have any of the concerns that we had in our mortal life, since they will be “either swallowed up in the unspeakable joyes of Heaven, or extinguished in the extreme torments of Hell” (chap. 11, par. 6).

38. Hobbes continues: “yet is not such fame vain; because men have a present delight in therein, from the foresight of it.”

39. This objection was raised by an anonymous reviewer.