Introduction

The previous lectures have looked at some of the more important attempts in the classical and mediaeval worlds to make sense of ethical beliefs and moral norms that come either from traditional sources – as was the case with the Classical world and the Germanic tribes that entered that world – or from the imported and novel ideology of Christianity. Beginning with the classical world we saw that the fundamental approach, most perfectly represented by Aristotle, was to suppose that there is an end at which all men aim – that’s taken as uncontroversial by almost everyone – and to accept that the virtues are the appropriate means to achieve that aim, and to try to make that case. We saw that there was a difficulty in ensuring that the virtues were not emphasized to the point of making them valuable in themselves and making them independent of the end which actually justifies them; and on the other hand, choosing an end that made it impossible to justify the desirable virtues.

In our brief survey of the ethics of the Stoics, Augustine, and Aquinas, we have seen a change in emphasis, so that Final Ends and the virtues that make them possible are no longer taken to be the driving force of ethical thought. Instead, the fact that ethical statements look like commands, and commands come from laws, has led to an identification of the source of moral truths in their agreement or harmony with some sort of Normative Law, whether that be Natural or Eternal or something else. The Christian contribution to this included the idea that certain truths about what was right or wrong were given by God rather than reason; either because the Christians had revealed knowledge about what Man’s Final End really was, or because Christians had access to God’s revealed laws.

Because of the power of the Christian Church in the Middle Ages, this idea took firm hold on the imagination of Western Man for about a millennium and a half. It has not, however, lasted into the Modern Age. Its decline is correlated with the decline in the temporal power of the church, and may in fact be seen as an aspect of the struggle by European man to free his mind of shackles that had come to chafe. In this lecture we’re going to be looking at the ideas of Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes who represent two important early attempts to break away from the style of ethical philosophy that Aquinas represents. You will see that the significance of Faith and revelation is much diminished in these new thinkers, and the significance of reason as a source of ethical obligations is again emphasized, but now in such a way that the Ends of man that are invoked are supposed to justify types of law rather than virtues.

Machiavelli

We’ll begin with Machiavelli (1469-1527). He was a lawyer and aspiring adviser to princes in the Italian Renaissance. He was not really a philosopher, and we have to read his works pretty carefully to understand what the underlying ethical basis of his advice was. The most important of the books that he wrote, The Prince, is just a short thing and it was written to give a sample of the advice that he would give to princes if they would only employ him. In particular he wished to be employed by Lorezo de’Medici, at that time ruler of Florence , where Machiavelli spent most of his life. The book was not successful in this, and when it was finally published after his death the Catholic Church found it so offensive that it was promptly prohibited. His name has since become a byword for immorality. Much of the book consists of examples from history to demonstrate his political points, and in those examples the hero is often Cesare Borgia. Cesare Borgia’s name is also associated with ruthlessness and princely immorality. He also wrote a book called the Discourses on Liberty which takes the form of a long commentary on an old Roman historian, but is really a study of how a state can become powerful and remain so. We’ll mostly look at the first book.

Renaissance Background

Machiavelli lived a couple of centuries after Aquinas. By this time we’ve moved out of the Middle Ages and are in the Modern world. More specifically we’re in the Renaissance; a period which is self-consciously inspired by the rediscovery of the classical heritage. There was a rebirth (that’s what ‘renaissance’ means in French) of the classical leaning and a renewed appreciation of the art and literature and the ideas of the Greeks and Romans. This involved, most significantly, a refocusing of interest in the life on Earth rather than Heaven, and a concern with Man’s interests rather than God’s. The Greeks and Romans you’ll recall – and contrary to the Christians of the Middle Ages – had those interests and concerns. In this respect the Renaissance was actually a rejection of much of the cultural emphasis of the Middle Ages in favour of what they imagined was the cultural emphasis of the Classical World.

This all began in the advanced city-states of Italy and spread north. Exactly why the emergence from the Middle Ages took the form it did and occurred in the places it did is a matter of dispute. (Those states have often been compared to the Greek city states, and some of the social and moral characteristics are quite similar.) Perhaps the Italian towns were more socially advanced – they’d never been dominated by the manorial system in the same way that most of Western Europe had been. Perhaps it had to do with the arrival of Greek scholars fleeing the long-protracted collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire (which was finally destroyed by the Ottoman Turks in 1453.) Perhaps it was just that a certain threshold of unrelated developments had been reached. In any case, Machiavelli’s city of Florence was at the forefront of this new cultural development.

His Principles

The Good for a Prince

In the Middle Ages the book of advice for rulers was an established genre, but they all tended to make the same assumption: that to be a successful ruler it was necessary to be a conventionally good man who possesses the sort of virtues that we’ve talked about elsewhere. This was to take the platitude that ‘honesty is the best policy’ as a universal truth. Machiavelli’s approach was somewhat different. It was his opinion that the requirements of power and the requirements of morality were two entirely different things. Part of the reason for this has to be that Machiavelli identified a Good for the ruler that was quite distinct from the Good that was typically identified as the proper goal of a man. You’ll recall that the classical, and even the Christian philosophers to some degree, claimed to derive the virtues which they defended from considerations of how best to achieve the Good that they’d declared. For Machiavelli the Good that would play this role for the ruler was to “maintain his state” and “achieve great things.” I suppose we could just about claim that that could be harmonized with the Aristotelian concept of Happiness – I’ll be happy if I achieve great things – but it’s very much harder to integrate it into the Christian version of man’s final end.

Naturally, the characteristics of a man that would be most likely to lead to achieving the Good identified by Machiavelli are going to be different from the characteristics that would lead to achieving some quite different Good. These characteristics Machiavelli referred to as the virtù of a Prince, which is a bit provocative, since virtù is the word that would typically mean the traditional ‘virtue.’

Fortuna and Princes

Machiavelli’s view of the world that the Prince operated in was also rather different from that which the previous philosophers had allowed to be the case. He had a pretty low opinion of people in general, for example, and thought that they were easily moved to actions against there real interest by emotions, and that they could barely be trusted to distinguish true from false, or good from bad for that matter. But the most important new element in his political thought was the role that he thought was played by mere chance or accident or luck. It had long been a popular belief that this force played a great role in the way that the world actually worked. Under the name of Fortuna, who was imagined to be some sort of goddess, she had been discussed by many people in the classical past – such as the historian Livy, for example. And she had continued to be the subject of discussion in the Christian age – though, of course, it could no longer be admitted that she was an actual Goddess.

What Fortuna was most noted for was the rapid change in circumstances in which people operated, and Machiavelli saw this as overwhelmingly a force for anarchy and disorder:

I compare this to a swollen river, which in its fury overflows the plains, tears up the trees and buildings, and sweeps the earth from one place and deposits it in another.

And, of course, this could affect the ability of the Prince to maintain his state and achieve great things.

We see a prince fortunate one day and ruined the next, without his nature or any of his qualities being changed

The Virtù of a Prince

Now, given that the analysis of the virtues was supposed to show how they could lead in the actual world to the achievement of some Final End, and given the widespread belief that Fortune was important in the world, one would have thought that the argument for the virtues would have taken account of Fortune’s role. Although it was typically believed by the ancients that Fortune approved of those who possessed the virtues and would work in their favour, in none of the analyses that we’ve looked at has this been taken seriously. Machiavelli, however, does take Fortune seriously, but his attitude is not one of trying to please her, but of attempting to master her. He says things like:

On the whole, I judge impetuosity to be better than caution; for Fortune is a woman, and if you wish to master her, you must strike and beat her, and you will see that she allows herself to be more easily vanquished by the rash and the violent than by those who proceed more slowly and coldly.[1]

Apparently Fortuna likes the bad boys. But his sort of thing is really just Machiavelli speaking metaphorically. When he speaks more literally he builds on the idea of Fortune being like a dangerous and unpredictable river that I mentioned before. In that case he observes that the proper thing to do is to prepare for these sorts of events rather than simply accepting it as unalterable fate. He observes that this fatalistic attitude does seem to characterize how people in general do face these possibilities:

Every one flies before the flood, and yields to its fury, unable to resist it; and notwithstanding this state of things, men do not, when the river is in its ordinary condition provide against its overflow by dikes and walls.

And even more literally, he observes that the effective ruler must be prepared to shape his behaviour according to the changing circumstances that Fortune presents.

For if one man, acting with caution and patience, is also favored by time and circumstances, he will be successful; but if these change, then he will be ruined, unless, indeed, he changes his conduct accordingly.

For such reasons as these flexibility is recommended. In the upshot, Machiavelli accepts that it is necessary to behave in an immoral fashion in some circumstances, and in a moral fashion in other circumstances.

I know that every one will confess that it would be most praiseworthy in a prince to exhibit all the above qualities that are considered good; but because they can neither be entirely possessed nor observed, for human conditions do not permit it, it is necessary for him to be sufficiently prudent that he may know how to avoid the reproach of those vices which would lose him his state; and also to keep himself, if it be possible, from those which would not lose him it; but this not being possible, he may with less hesitation abandon himself to them. And again, he need not make himself uneasy at incurring a reproach for those vices without which the state can only be saved with difficulty, for if everything is considered carefully, it will be found that something which looks like virtue, if followed, would be his ruin; whilst something else, which looks like vice, yet followed brings him security and prosperity.[2]

His Empiricism

One of the most important aspects of Machiavelli’s thought is to be found in the method that he adopts as distinct from the results that he gets. Previous philosophers had taken the attitude that it was possible to determine the right thing to do in any situation by reasoning from first principles. Just think how Plato and Aristotle derived their moral systems and the same for Augustine and Aquinas with only the proviso that revealed Truth be taken into account. Machiavelli took a different attitude. He believed that the way to find out what worked to achieve a particular result was to look back into history and to find similar situations and to see what happened then. Thus:

He who diligently examines past events can easily foresee future ones [and] can apply to them the remedies used by the ancients [or] devise new ones because of the similarity of the events[3]

The sorts of particular policy conclusions that Machiavelli drew from his studies should be mentioned. He thought, for example, that

A prince, so long as he keeps his subjects united and loyal, ought not to mind the reproach of cruelty; because with a few examples he will be more merciful than those who, through too much mercy, allow disorders to arise, from which follow murders or robberies; for these are wont to injure the whole people, whilst those executions which originate with a prince offend the individual only.[4]

So a few displays of brutality, which have the effect of quelling incipient uprisings are acceptable, as they will prevent much greater evils that would occur if the uprising occurs. I think we would recognise the reasoning here as being that which the Chinese rulers would have applied in Tiananmen Square . Better to run over a few harmless students now and frighten the people, than to allow their movement to grow to a point that it would challenge the state and begin a revolution or civil war.

Or consider this advice:

A wise lord cannot, nor ought he to, keep faith when such observance may be turned against him, and when the reasons that caused him to pledge it exist no longer.[5]

I think we only need to consider politicians’ attitude towards campaign pledges to see this advice being applied. Machiavelli would clearly think that this is OK; and, given the nature of modern election campaigns in which politicians compete with each other to bribe the electorate, perhaps it is just as well that we really expect them to behave more responsibly in office than on the hustings. But perhaps I’m too ‘cynical’ in that judgement.

What seemed to be most alarming to people at the time is that Machiavelli felt no need to address the standard objection that a person who behaved in this way would get their comeuppance in the afterlife. This indicated a lack of the appropriate fear of God – and perhaps, even, a lack of belief in God. Reactions to this sometimes verged on the crazed. For example, Machiavelli has been blamed personally for all the wickedness of the Modern Age, as if no one had been a hypocrite or economical with the truth before Machiavelli had taught them how. Or, again, it has been seriously argued that the entire work is a satire, since no sane man could say such things. It’s beyond me to understand such reactions, but if you’re interested I’ve included a link to a good essay on the reactions to Machiavelli by Isaiah Berlin . The strength of the reactions at least indicates that Machiavelli has said something that seriously threatens the worldview of many people, and the suspicion must be that they recognise some fragment of truth in his position.)

A somewhat more sane reaction, in my view sees Machiavelli as a founding father of empirical political science.In the words of Isaiah Berlin :

Machiavelli is a cold technician, ethically and politically uncommitted, an objective analyst of politics, a morally neutral scientist, who … anticipated Galileo in applying inductive methods to social and historical material, and had no moral interest in the use made of his technical discoveries,[6]

Whether or not you think that that’s the case, it should be very clear that this concentration on humans and human interests as opposed to the interests of the divine marks Machiavelli as a very Modern man.

His Justification of Power

There are a couple of final points that need to be made which make Machiavelli particularly important from our point of view. In the first place, Machiavelli appears to have a pretty uncompromisingly bleak opinion about the legitimacy of authority, or how it is that a prince can morally justify his rule. This question is going to be a central concern for some of the other philosophers that we’re going to look at, and we’re going to pay more attention to it from now on than we have done. Previously it has been looked at only in passing, if at all. Plato, for example, thought that the rulers of the state were justified in possessing authority because only they could create justice in the state, because they could know what justice was, and so on. On the other hand, these days we in the West tend to simply assume that legitimate power can only be exercised on behalf of the sovereign people through some mechanism that allows their wishes to be known and their will to be done – i.e. some sort of democracy. We’re going to see how that idea arose again in the West, but that will come later. Machiavelli’s political theory so far as it’s explicitly stated, and so far as it’s been presented here to this point, seems to take for granted the idea that the authority of the prince is justified by the ability of the prince to exercise that authority. It’s the sort of idea that would have appealed to Thrasymachus – you may remember that he was the fellow in Plato’s Republic who was claiming that ‘good was what was in the interest of the strong.’ Not quite the same thing, but the same general idea.

In fact, however, there is some evidence that Machiavelli did have a more acceptable criterion by which he could judge the authority or lack of it for the exercise of power. That criterion seems to have been the ability of the people in the state to live freely (vivere libero.) The state that works so as best to secure liberty for the population is the best state, and the authority of the prince is justified in so far as his exercise of that authority works to allow the people to live freely. Machiavelli justified taking this as the proper end of political action on pragmatic grounds: he was of the opinion that the people, given the opportunity to make their opinions known and to discuss matters freely, will generally make wiser decisions than a prince, who has no check against the effect of his prejudices. And though we might think that this is extraordinarily optimistic, we should bear in mind that liberty for Machiavelli would have included a good deal of ability to act in the political realm, so that the crowd could not be asumed to be utterly ignorant of affairs of state and irresponsible. In this respect Machiavelli – had he chosen to be more explicit about all this – might have been taken as one of the early theorists of democratic sovereignty.

Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is one of the two principal founding figures of modern philosophy. The other is the other is the 17^th century French philosopher, Rene Descartes. Hobbes, like Epicurus, is a materialist. He argued that all things, including thoughts and emotions, are physical phenomena. Descartes, on the other hand, was a dualist, believing in the distinct existence of body and mind. While Descartes’s view dominated philosophy in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, Hobbes’ materialist view has come to dominate philosophy since the late 20^th century. However, we are concerned with Hobbes’ ethics and political theory and it is these topics we will discuss in the second half of today’s lecture.

Reformation and Civil War Background

First a bit of background. The last we saw, the Middle Ages had ended and the Renaissance had produced in Northern Italy a great new age of Western Civilisation. The Renaissance had characteristic features that included a rebirth (that’s what ‘renaissance’ means in French) of the classical leaning and a renewed appreciation of the art and literature and the ideas of the Greeks and Romans. This involved, most significantly, a refocusing of interest in the life on Earth rather than Heaven, and a concern with Man’s interests rather than God’s. One of the effects of the increase in learning and the availability of books and the renewed faith in the individual and the general loss of faith in the institutions of the Catholic Church, was the movement of spiritual renewal that we call the Reformation. This was a movement that was motivated by a desire to repair the corruption of the Church, but wound up nearly wrecking it. It really got kicked off in 1517, when Martin Luther nailed a sheet of paper with his 95 Theses on it onto the door of the church in Wittenberg . The theses challenged Church teaching on indulgences, which were pardons for earthly sins that the Church had taken to selling for ready cash. Luther thought this was simple simony, but a challenge to any part of the Church’s authority had to be treated as a threat to all of it.

The Catholic Church tried to meet the challenges posed by its critics but the unity of Western Christendom was ended. From now on there would be a distinction made between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Protestantism you can think of as being the general label for the ideologies of the churches who split off from the Church of Rome (in protest against its badness.) There are lots of these and they disagree about many things, but they all agree that the Pope isn’t in charge any more. The Pope didn’t like this, and, given the general belief that everyone (including the government) should care about the souls of everyone else, it’s not surprising that the division also had political consequences. Each state demanded that all its subjects should adhere to the same faith, and the subjects of the states equally believed that the state had to be an agent of their faith. The contest between Protestantism and Catholicism was a contributing factor in many very nasty episodes about this time: for example, the Wars of Religion in France (1562-1598), the Thirty Years War in Germany (1618-1648), and other incidental unpleasantnesses.

In England , the switch to Protestantism was relatively (only relatively) orderly. For various reasons, not all to do with serial marriage and murder, Henry VIII was prepared to accept in 1538 that an independent Church of England could exist that he would be in charge of. But, of course, once you’ve established the principle that the faith of a nation can be in need of reformation or replacement, there’s no reason to stop with the first change that gets made. One of the motivations for the English Civil War of 1642 to 1651 was a conflict between more extremist protestants, known collectively as Puritans, and the established Church of England . Another more central motivation was the contest between the King and the Parliament. Charles I was under the impression that, as king, he would get to rule the country pretty much according to his whim. Parliament thought he wouldn’t. After some complicated and brutal to-ing and fro-ing that needn’t concern us, Charles got himself executed and England was ruled for a while by Oliver Cromwell (sort of a Puritan version of Mullah Omar) as a republic. More anarchy looked likely to follow after Cromwell’s death until in 1660 Charles II (son of the executed Charles I) agreed to return. This Restoration of the monarchy involved a political settlement that accepted the role of parliament as a curb on the King’s power. We’ll see that Hobbes was very much concerned to establish the legitimate limits on the power of the sovereign and the rights, if any, of the people to resist that power.

The Contractarian View

Hobbes is the first really modern philosopher we have encountered and his views are strikingly different from the views of those that we’ve looked at so far. All of these earlier philosophers thought of ethics as arising from human nature in one way or another. For each of them, to be moral is to be fully and non-defectively human. Hobbes, by contrast, did not have such an optimistic view of human nature. He thought of morality as an imposition upon us. According to Hobbes, morality restricts our freedom; it constrains our choices; it limits our pursuit of things we really desire; it is a burden upon us. Morality is not something that comes naturally to us and is not something that is good in itself. The value of morality resides entirely in what it can do for us. Roughly, Hobbes thinks that it is better to live in a properly ordered moral community than it would be to live in an environment without morality and once we agree to live in a moral community, we inherit moral obligations. One way to put this (not Hobbes’s) would be to say that living by the strictures of morality is the lesser of two evils.

The view that Hobbes develops has come to be called “contractarianism”. This is not Hobbes’s term, but a contemporary term for the kind of philosophical position Hobbes develops. Hobbes gives us the first really powerful development of this position, though you will find echoes of it in Socrates and in Epicurus. According to contractarianism, morality is a set of obligations that we enter into by a kind of contract or agreement. Morality is based on agreement between self-interested and rational parties. Although we don’t explicitly form this contract, or explicitly agree to abide by the strictures of morality, we are bound by it anyway. The contract on which morality is based is hypothetical – it is the contract we would agree to if we were in the position of making contract with other members of our community as to what kind of society we wish to live in. The kind of contract Hobbes has in mind, and which is taken up by subsequent philosophers, is called a “social contract”. The basic idea then, is that morality and politics is grounded in the social contract.

The State of Nature

Let us investigate this view by starting at the beginning. What would life be like if there were no system of morality and no system of social control, i.e. if there were no civil society? Imagine that you recognize no moral restrictions on how to behave towards your neighbours, no laws or principles constraining what you may and may not do to them or to their property. Also, imagine that there is no system that polices how you behave towards your neighbour and no system to enforce appropriate standards of behaviour; imagine there is no authority that you can appeal to to resolve disputes between yourself and your neighbour. Without any thoughts about what you conventionally ought to do (e.g. respect their life, their liberty and their property), without any moral constraints on your desires or on your actions, what are you likely to do? This is hard thing to imagine in the first person, because we come already loaded up with highly developed moral sensibilities. So to imagine what life would be like without any sort of moral system, we have to propose an account of human nature, i.e. human nature without civil society and without the culture that civil society supports and enables. According to Hobbes, without any system of morality to constrain what we will do, humans will tend to behave in predictable ways, driven by their self-interest, their appetites, their passions and their calculating rationality.

Hobbes calls this situation – a world without civil and moral constraint of any kind – “the state of nature”. He is running what is called a philosophical thought experiment. That is, he is trying to imagine what life would be like without a civil society to support and enforce moral behaviour. So what would life be like in the state of nature? Hobbes sums up his reasons for believing that human nature is self-destructive without a civil society like this:

So that in the nature of man we find three principal causes of quarrel: first, competition; secondly, diffidence [i.e. mistrust]; thirdly, glory. The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety, and the third, for reputation.[1]

In the first place, humans are creatures of desire, so we would all be after goods, and many goods are inevitably scarce; so the state of nature is marked by incessant competition. Secondly, competition without regulation breeds mistrust. I will be aware, not only that I want my neighbour’s goods, but that I would take them without conscience if I could be sure of getting away with it. I’m rational, so I can anticipate that my neighbour is thinks the same. She or he would take my goods without a moment’s thought, if she could be sure of getting away with it. Thirdly, I am aware that some men simply have a desire to dominate, because that is one way in which their interests can be advanced or their reputation enhanced.

I need a strategy for dealing with this situation. Defensive strategies won’t work. Recall, that my neighbour has absolutely no scruples at all (nor do I). They would and could do anything they like to secure my goods, including killing and robbing me. Building a high fence and hiding away is just a formula for impoverishment – and probably easily breached in any case. I might try to become stronger than my neighbour and frighten them out of any attempt to rob or kill me. But this won’t work. Hobbes points out that it is too easy to kill a person. A much stronger man can be easily killed by a physically weaker man with a crossbow, for example, so all men in the state of nature are more or less equally vulnerable. And then there is the possibility that my neighbour isn’t just in competition with me for scarce goods, but desires to increase his power and dominance. My neighbour might be ambitious and want to subject me for the sake of his ambition. Again, there is the possibility that my neighbour is vainglorious, because human beings are naturally vain and likely to seek revenge upon anyone who doesn’t accord them the respect they think they deserve. Finally, it is unlikely that a defensive strategy will afford me enough opportunities to acquire what I need to exist contentedly and comfortably. Even if my desires are relatively modest (I’m not dominating and vainglorious), it is unlikely that I will be able to satisfy them from behind a high walls. Purely defensive strategies thus probably won’t work against hostile, motivated, ambitious dominating, vain and unscrupulous enemies.

How am I supposed to defend myself against my neighbour – whether unscrupulous and competitive, vain and vengeful, or aggressively dominating – if purely defensive strategies are full of holes? Hobbes’ answer is pre-emptive action, or as he calls it “anticipation.” How else can I really secure the peace for myself except by doing away with my neighbour or dominating him to such an extent that he becomes no threat to me? So, rationally, the wisest thing for me to do is probably to kill off my neighbour at the first opportunity. (Remember, I am in a state of nature, without civil society and without conscience.)

The rub is that my neighbour will be thinking the same thing: the very same thing. So, by being rational and self-interested in the state of nature, I find myself inevitably drawn into war with my neighbour. The case generalizes. The state of nature will collapse into a war of all against all. Here is Hobbes’ famous description of just how bad the state of nature would be:

In such condition there is no place of industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, no culture of the earth, no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.[2]

Escape from the State of Nature

The state of nature is so bad that we should rationally accept just about any deal guaranteed to get us out of it. How could we extract ourselves from the state of nature? Even in the state of nature we are rational. According to Hobbes, this means that we will accept the following principles. (Hobbes calls these Laws of Nature, but he doesn’t mean anything like Aquinas’s Natural Law – he is really talking about what it is basically reasonable and prudent to hold.) The first law of nature is to seek peace wherever there is hope of peace. The Second Law is to be prepared to give up certain freedoms for the sake of peace. The Third Law is that we abide by our agreements.

To extract ourselves from the state of nature we would have to surrender up many of the liberties “enjoyed” in the state of nature. This is a commitment we enter into, it is a kind of promise. And here is where the force of morality comes from. Once we commit ourselves to give up liberties, it would be wrong and unjust of us to go back on our word. (This is why the Third Law is crucial for Hobbes’s theory.) For Hobbes, morality arises out of the free agreement of people searching for peace in a violent and dangerous world.

For the trick to work, everyone has to surrender basic liberties and hold good to their agreement. This basic commitment of all members of a community is usually called a social contract, though Hobbes reserves the special title of “covenant” for it. It is a common agreement to form what Hobbes calls a “commonwealth.” By this Hobbes means a social group in which the peace of all is secured. Clearly, a commonwealth will not survive long if all it has to go on is common agreement, backed up by the fact that all members of the community have promised to abide by laws. If the arrangement is to work there must be an effective system of enforcement. As Hobbes puts it:

…there must be some coercive power to compel men equally to the performance of their covenants, by the terror of some punishment greater than the benefit they expect by the breach of the covenant.[3]

This is the basic ethical position articulated by Hobbes. Our basic requirement is to escape the state of nature, and to do so we must make a commitment to give up a wide range of liberties that we had in the state of nature. This commitment brings us into the world of morality or ethics. Having committed ourselves to respect our neighbour’s life, it becomes morally wrong of us to take it without lawful reason. The commitment creates the moral obligation. The next point to observe is a practical one. Moral commitment by itself is pointless without the means of enforcing commitments. Having entered into a commitment to be morally decent, it won’t strictly be in my rational self-interest to stand by my commitment unless the consequences of my not doing so are extreme. The consequences of my acting immorally should be so extreme as to undermine any temptation I might feel to act wrongly. Civil society, and the legal and police systems which enforce its rules, are designed to effectively deter.

No Escape from the Sovereign

There is one element of Hobbes’s philosophy which we should take a brief look at before leaving him, namely the political philosophy that Hobbes builds on this foundation. Hobbes is famous for proposing that the only way to effectively secure the commonwealth is for all its members to hand over absolute power to a sovereign. In setting up the commonwealth, we say to each other, in effect:

I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to him, and authorize all his actions in like manner[4]

The sovereign cannot be justly deposed or overthrown, thinks Hobbes. Nor can the Sovereign breach the social contract which created him (or it). The social contract, on Hobbes’s story, was not made with the Sovereign, but between the members of the community. The contract creates the Sovereign, so can’t be made with the Sovereign. On the face of it, Hobbes’s political philosophy appears to recommend a highly authoritarian political organization. The justification of it resides in the necessity of our escape from the state of nature. But is this the only kind of escape possible? Is the state of nature as bad as Hobbes portrays? And can we really be said to be under the obligation of promises we never really made? The social contract is a kind of myth; its status is hypothetical; it is the contract that, rationally and prudently, we ought to have signed to get us out of the state of nature, were we in the state of nature. But we are not in the state of nature. So what is the social contract to us? We are going to take up these questions next week, when we examine the political philosophy of John Locke.