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Abstract
Thomas Hobbes and John Rawls are usually portrayed in antagonistic terms. While Hobbes, one of the first scholars to translate Thucydides, is often held to be an archetypal realist, Rawls, a self-proclaimed follower of Kant, is frequently said to argue from an explicit normative position. In this paper, I try to demonstrate that the two philosophers have more in common than is generally thought. Drawing on Hobbes's answer to the fool and Rawls's analogy of the franchiser, I suggest that there is a powerful link between the two philosophers that can tell us something valuable about their theories of formal justice. Against Brian Barry's characterization of Hobbes as an advocate of justice as mutual advantage and Rawls as a proponent of both justice as mutual advantage and justice as impartiality, I argue that the two philosophers adhere to one and the same tradition of justice, justice as reciprocity, which bases obligations of reciprocity not only on explicit express, but also on tacit acceptance of benefits.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Nathan Widder, Royal Holloway University of London, for his help and advice.
Notes
1 Chris Brown, ‘The Construction of a “Realistic Utopia”: John Rawls and International Political Theory’, Review of International Studies 28, no. 1 (2002): 5–21, 9.
2 Rosamond Rhodes, ‘Reading Rawls and Hearing Hobbes’, The Philosophical Forum 33, no. 4 (2002): 393–412.
3 Joseph Grcic, ‘Hobbes and Rawls on Political Power’, Ethics & Politics 9, no. 2 (2007): 371–92.
4 There are, needless to say, several volumes on political theory, and social contract theory in particular, that feature essays on Hobbes and Rawls, among many other thinkers. Most of these volumes have a brief introductory chapter that tries to put these thinkers into conversation. See, for example, David Boucher and Paul Kelly, The Social Contract from Hobbes to Rawls (London: Routledge, 1994); Andrew Levine, Engaging Political Philosophy from Hobbes to Rawls (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); and Mark E. Button, Contract, Culture, and Citizenship: Transformative Liberalism from Hobbes to Rawls (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008).
5 Grcic, ‘Hobbes and Rawls on Political Power’, 379.
6 Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 206.
7 Regarding the former, consider Grcic's finding that both Hobbes and Rawls make use of the concept of the state of nature (Grcic, ‘Hobbes and Rawls on Political Power’, 379), or Rhodes's discovery that in both cases the state of nature is a hypothetical construct (Rhodes, ‘Reading Rawls and Hearing Hobbes’, 397–402). With regard to the latter, consider Rhodes's argument that Rawls's ‘spirit of compromise’ and ‘readiness to meet others halfway’ resemble Hobbes's sixth law of nature, stating ‘that upon caution of the Future time, a man ought to pardon the offenses past of them that repenting, desire it’, and the spirit of his seventh law, prescribing ‘that in Revenges, Men look not at the greatness of the evill past, but the greatnesse of the good to follow’ (ibid., 403).
8 Ibid., 395.
9 Ibid., 394, my emphasis.
10 Ibid., 395–6.
11 Terry Nardin, Law, Morality and the Relations of States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 259.
12 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 99–100; and John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 108–9.
13 Nardin, Law, Morality and the Relations of States, 259.
14 Hobbes, Leviathan, 99–100; and Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 108–9.
15 Nardin, Law, Morality and the Relations of States, 266–9.
16 Ibid., 259.
17 Brian Barry, Theories of Justice (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989).
18 Allan Gibbard, ‘Constructing Justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 20, no. 3 (1991): 264–97.
19 Brian Barry, Justice as Impartiality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002).
20 The three traditions roughly parallel David Gauthier's account of the prudent, the trustworthy, and the prudent but trustworthy man (David Gauthier, ‘Morality and Advantage’. The Philosophical Review 76, no. 4 (1967): 460–75).
21 Barry, Theories of Justice, 7.
22 Ibid., 51.
23 Ibid., 363.
24 Ibid., 361.
25 Ibid., 363.
26 Barry, Justice as Impartiality, 31.
27 Hobbes, Leviathan, 89.
28 Ibid., 89.
29 Ibid., 105, italics in original.
30 Ibid., 91.
31 Ibid., 105.
32 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 269, figuring most prominently among those, holds Hobbes's state of nature to be the ‘classical example’ of the prisoner's dilemma. Others arguing in this vein include Brian Barry, Political Argument (London: Routledge, 1965); Michael Taylor, Anarchy and Cooperation (London: Wiley, 1976); and Levine, Engaging Political Philosophy from Hobbes to Rawls.
33 Hobbes, Leviathan, 96.
34 Aloysius P. Martinich, Hobbes (London: Routledge, 2005), 103.
35 Hobbes, Leviathan, 97.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 See Gregory Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 137–56, 387, 405; Edwin Curley, ‘Introduction to Hobbes’ Leviathan’, in Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Cambridge: Hackett, 1994), xxvi–xxvii; Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 64–5; and Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 438. For Hobbes, it is a matter of accident that a person violating his or her covenant is not discovered. He consequently cannot deny that there are situations in which a person can achieve great gain by violating his or her covenant. What he can deny, though, is that a person can with right reason expect that violation of covenant will conduce to his or her gain (David Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 84–5). As Hobbes, Leviathan, 97, puts it: ‘[W]hen a man doth a thing, which notwithstanding anything can be foreseen and reckoned on tendeth to his own destruction, howsoever some accident, which he could not expect, arriving may turn it to his benefit; yet such events do not make it reasonably or wisely done’.
39 Curley, ‘Introduction’, xxiv–xxviii.
40 Hobbes, Leviathan, 87.
41 Ibid., 95. It is also implicit in the first law—the fundamental law of nature from which the second law is derived—holding ‘that every man, ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek, and use, all helps, and advantages of war’ (Hobbes, Leviathan, 95), and in the negative form of the golden rule, which summarizes all nineteen laws of nature: ‘Do not that to another, which thou wouldest not have done to thyself’ (Ibid.).
42 Ibid., 95.
43 Ibid., 100.
44 Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 159.
45 Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 235. Or, in the words of Barry, Theories of Justice, 465, Hobbes is moving from justice as fidelity, that is, carrying out one's side of a bargain voluntarily entered into, to justice as requital, that is, making a fair return for benefits received.
46 Hobbes, Leviathan, 90.
47 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 347.
48 Barry, Justice as Impartiality, 51.
49 Barry (ibid., 45–6) answers in the affirmative but shows that justice as mutual advantage suffers from several drawbacks.
50 John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 118–19.
51 John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: British Columbia Press, 1993), 48; and Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 82.
52 John Rawls, ‘Justice as Fairness’, in John Rawls: Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 47–72.
53 Ibid., 54, my emphasis.
54 Ibid., 54, my emphasis.
55 Catherine Audard, John Rawls (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2007), 77.
56 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 49.
57 Ibid., 49, my emphasis.
58 Ibid., 50.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid., 54.
61 Ibid., 77.
62 Ibid., 17. After being criticized by Gibbard and Rawls for not having identified justice as reciprocity as a distinctive alternative, Barry, in Justice as Impartiality, tries to show that what he meant by justice as mutual advantage and justice as impartiality in Theories of Justice is in line with justice as reciprocity: ‘[M]y account in Theories of Justice … of the aspect of Rawls's theory that I claimed to fall under the theory of justice as mutual advantage was intended to fit in with the idea that the motive for compliance would be a sense of justice as ‘fair play,’ i.e. a duty to do one's part to sustain a mutually advantageous institution. I regret not making this more explicit’ (Barry, Justice as Impartiality, 48). This claim is quite astonishing, as it is only in the conclusion of Theories of Justice that Barry sketches a ‘sophisticated version’ of justice as mutual advantage under which justice ‘consists in playing one's part in mutually advantageous cooperative arrangements’ (Barry, Theories of Justice, 361). On the other hand, justice as impartiality, Barry now argues, ‘has the structure of an assurance game. If I am motivated by a desire to behave fairly, I will want to do what the rules mandated by justice as impartiality require so long as enough other people are doing the same’ (Barry, Justice as Impartiality, 51). Note the two fundamental changes Barry makes to his prior statement of justice as impartiality: firstly, he no longer speaks of a desire to act justly, as in Theories of Justice, but of a desire to behave fairly—a term that Rawls uses to describe his theory of justice as reciprocity—and secondly, this desire now exists only as long as enough other people have the same desire—a condition not to be found in Theories of Justice. But when both justice as mutual advantage and justice as impartiality articulate an idea of fair play and reciprocity, one is left to wonder why Barry, in Theories of Justice, defines justice as impartiality ‘more or less as the obverse’ of justice as mutual advantage (Barry, Theories of Justice, 361).
63 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 111–12.
64 Ibid., 113.
65 Ibid., 60.
66 Ibid.
67 This, in fact, is a point that Rawls, ‘Justice as Fairness’, 61, criticizes: ‘Hobbes, … when invoking the notion of a ‘tacit covenant,’ appeals not to the natural law that promises should be kept [the third law of nature] but to his fourth law of nature, that of gratitude.… While it is not a serious criticism of Hobbes, it would have improved his argument had he appealed to the duty of fair play [the third law of nature]. On his premises he is perfectly entitled to do so’.
68 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 112.
69 Rawls's argument against defection can be illustrated by David Hume's famous example of two people rowing a boat that neither can row alone: if only one person fails to do his or her part, the cooperative venture collapses with both persons worse off. As a result, each person has an incentive to row when the other person rows (David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 490). Hobbes's argument against defection, on the other hand, can be exemplified by slightly modifying Hume's example: in this case it is possible to row the boat with one manpower alone. When there are two people in the boat, both rowing, the boat goes faster than if there was only one person in the boat. Meanwhile, when there are two people in the boat, one rowing and the other not rowing, the boat, because of the additional burden, goes slower than if there was only one person in the boat. The person rowing then has an incentive to throw the person not rowing overboard.
70 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 4.
71 Hobbes, Leviathan, 87, my emphasis.
72 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 53–54, my emphasis.
73 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 54, my emphasis.
74 Hobbes, Leviathan, 87, my emphasis.
75 Hobbes, Leviathan, 105, italics in original.
76 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 54, italics in original.
77 Barry, Theories of Justice, 363.
78 Jodi S. Kraus, The Limits of Hobbesian Contractarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 30–1.
79 David Gauthier, Morality and Rational Self-Interest (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 111.