Who's Afraid of the State of Nature?
Why Hobbes' political absolutism doesn't work
It’s currently exam-season for me, meaning I should really be studying for my exams right about now. This of course means taking time off from writing this blog, leaving all my readers starved for the high-quality content you’ve all become so accustomed to. But fear not! Being the amazing genius you all know and love, I had the brilliant idea of combining these seemingly incompatible tasks by simply writing about some of the stuff I’m supposed to be studying. Seeing as I’m but a filthy 1st year undergrad, the primary thing I’m supposed to be studying is the history of philosophy. This means that it’ll be a lot regurgitating stuff you’ve probably learned already, but I’ll try to make it worth your while anyways *wink wink*.
This week we’ll be looking at English philosopher and imaginary tiger Thomas Hobbes, specifically his political philosophy (gasp!!).1 Before getting into the juicy stuff of actually discussing the merits of his views, we should probably dust up on what he actually says (or hear it for the first time, as the case may be).
The State of Nature
The bedrock of Hobbes’ political philosophy is his idea of the state of nature—a state where there’s no government, and which is a war of all against all. This idea was probably inspired by the extremely bloody English Civil War, which ended just after Leviathan was released, and which he also later wrote about in the equally epically named Behemoth. It also then makes sense that Hobbes considered the state of nature just about the worst thing imaginable, and thus something that must be avoided at all costs—a bit like your mom.
In the state of nature, everyone is roughly equal. Some are of course a little more equal than others, with differences in, wit, wisdom, etc., but no more than that “the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself” (Leviathan XIII). This equality is the first important ingredient in the horrible cocktail that is the state of nature; if some were much stronger than others, they’d simply assume control over others very quickly, ending any conflicts.
And these conflicts are exactly the second ingredient we were missing. There are three reasons for conflicts according to Hobbes: competition, which makes people invade each other for gain; fear, which makes people invade for safety; and glory, making people invade over being butthurt. Because such conflicts will inevitably arise, and because there’ll never be one party that will always dominate, everyone will live in constant war and fear of death, with no opportunity for building a prosperous life. Or as the man himself so beautifully puts it:
“In such condition there is no place for 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” (ibid.).
Right of Nature and Laws of Nature
In this state, Hobbes thinks that everyone has a right of nature—a right to do whatever lets them preserve themselves. Not only this, but everyone has a right to do what they judge to preserve themselves. This means that if you look at me a little funny, or if you don’t subscribe, and I take this to be a threat to my life, I’m in my full right to kill you over it. Just saying:
This right in part stems from Hobbes’ more fundamental views about human nature. He is a sort of proto-empiricist, and holds to a form of mechanical materialism, such that everything simply consists in bodies and their movements. Humans are part of “everything,” meaning we are also just bodies in motion, and the human machine has the one goal of staying running—i.e. to survive. Those things that help us survive produce desire in us and a love for that thing, such that we call it “good.” Vice versa with aversion, hate, and “evil.” For this reason Hobbes has a pluralist view of morality. Now, when a conflict arises in the state of nature, this means that there’s no common evaluative standard on which we can resolve the conflict. Likewise, there’s no third party who can adjudicate the conflict for us. This means that we are simply left to fulfill our purpose, and do what we judge to be in the interest of our self-preservation—and we have a natural right to do this.
Luckily for us, the story doesn’t end here. Being rational creatures, we notice that we might actually all be better off if we cooperate, leading us to grasp eternal natural laws—that are obviously given to us by The Lord Almighty. The first two of these are:
Every man ought to endeavor 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. (Leviathan XIV)
That a man be willing, when others are so too, as far-forth as for peace and defense of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things, and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself. (ibid.)
Hobbes spends a grueling amount of time detailing a bunch of these laws, but the gist of them all is suspiciously close to the golden rule: “doing to others as we would be done to” (Leviathan XVII). This means that people, being rational, have a way out of the state of nature: by making a conditional promise to each other to give up their right of nature, if all others do so, so that they no longer need to live in constant fear. Since simply giving up your right makes you vulnerable to being taken advantage of, everyone should transfer their rights to a third party, letting this third party be the authority that adjudicates disputes, and tells us who is right and who is wrong. As Hobbes puts it: “every man should say to every man: I authorise 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 authorise all his actions in like manner” (ibid.)
The Sovereign
This third party is called the sovereign, and is the head of the “artificial person” that is the state, which Hobbes calls the Leviathan.
So what can we say about this sovereign-fella? Well, it can both be a single person, or an assembly of people, or something, as long as it can express a will (though, spoiler alert: Hobbes thinks it’s best if it’s a single monarch). Since everyone has agreed to its legitimacy, no one can have any objection to anything it does. Furthermore, if someone can legitimately object to the decision of the sovereign, that risks creating an unsolvable conflict (as there’ll be no further authority to adjudicate), dumping us right back in the state of nature. Yes, you heard that right: the sovereign is allowed to do literally anything. More precisely, no subject can ever legitimately object to anything the sovereign decides to do. What’s illegal, what the property rights are, whether you drive in the left side of the road like madmen or not, is completely up to the whim of the sovereign, and you can’t do anything about it. Hobbes does say that the sovereign has a duty to do what’s in the subjects’ interests, though the subjects can’t complain if it doesn’t, and aren’t allowed to enforce this duty.
Or well, there are a couple of exceptions. For one, the sovereign cannot force you to kill yourself; since the whole point of this state-thing was to protect you, the social contract is absolved between you and the sovereign when it tries to kill you. That doesn’t mean that the sovereign isn’t allowed to kill you, it’s simply that you are allowed to do whatever you can to avoid this—concerning you and the sovereign, you’re back in the state of nature, and so you can exercise your right of nature.
Likewise, the sovereign cannot limit its own power. It can’t, for example, create a judicial branch and a legislative branch, where they aren’t under complete control of the sovereign. This is because, as I said above, when different powers conflict, there’s nothing to decide the conflict, and so we revert back to the state of nature—a big no no. This also means that international politics is in a state of nature, since there’s no mega-sovereign to decide international disputes.
Lastly, the sovereign loses it’s legitimacy if it can no longer protect its subjects, since people always have a right to defend their own lives, and so return to a state of nature. Likewise, the sovereign must decide its heir by itself, and if it doesn’t decide a new heir in time, its legitimacy ceases, and the subjects return to a state of nature. This is because the people cannot remove a sovereign from power after it has assumed power, since that would limit its power; and so likewise, the sovereign must have complete control over who is its successor. And finally, a sovereign can become a subject of another sovereign after losing a war, subsuming the losing state under the winning, and making all its subjects subjects of the victor.
The Problems
I think most people will agree that having a completely omnipotent ruler with absolute authority is a bit of an extreme measure for avoiding the state of nature. One plausible interpretation for Hobbes’ reason for doing so is a consequentialist one: the state of nature is just so darn bad that we should be minimaxing with regards to the state of nature, doing our best to avoid it.
The Consequentialist Reading
I have two lines for critiquing this interpretation of the argument. Firstly, it's not clear that the state of nature really is that bad. We can imagine many conditions where there isn’t a state, but where life isn’t “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” This is because it is often in everyone’s interests if people cooperate, even if there’s no one telling them to. Generally, being uncooperative will hurt other people more than it benefits you, and so everyone being uncooperative will generally be worse for everyone. This means that we should expect cooperation to naturally evolve between individuals in the state of nature. You might recognize a certain similarity to the prisoner’s dilemma here. In the standard prisoner’s dilemma, defecting is always the dominant strategy, and so it seems like cooperation would never arise. The problem is that the standard prisoner’s dilemma assumes that parties only interact once, and that they can’t communicate. But this is not how people interact in the actual world—we often interact several times, and can tell each other what we’ll do.
Looking at several interactions first, the iterated prisoners dilemma involves players facing each other several times. In 1980 Robert Axelrod held a tournament of iterated prisoner’s dilemmas in which different game theorists came up with strategies that computers would carry out in the tournament. Here uncooperative strategies did quite poorly and altruistic strategies generally did better. The winning strategy was a tit-for-tat strategy submitted by Anatol Rapoport, which came down to:
In the first match-up, cooperate.
In every match-up after that, do what the opponent did in the preceding match-up.
Though adding some degree of forgiveness can improve the strategy. There isn’t any strategy that’ll always dominate, and different strategies will naturally oscillate in populations, though we can at least see that defecting strategies won’t always be dominant.
On top of this, though, people in the real world can communicate. This allows for even more strategies. I can tell you that I’m going to be uncooperative towards you if you don’t cooperate with me, and so that creates an incentive for you cooperating. More importantly, we can create communities where we implicitly or explicitly agree that we sanction anyone who acts uncooperatively. This also works around the problem of single interactions. For example I could pay you for a service you never deliver on, or kill me and steal my money or something, in which cases I cannot pay you back for your uncooperative behavior. But in a community as described, people will find out that you are the sort of person who is uncooperative, and so they will be uncooperative towards you. This creates incentives for being cooperative, even if you can get away with it in single instances.
Notice here that there’s no need for a governmental institution to ensure that people don’t go around looting and killing each other, and so we can have a state of nature that’s at least not very clearly much worse than a civilized society—one in which you don’t need to live in constant fear of being robbed and killed. I don’t think you’re ever going to be completely safe from people wanting to exploit and kill you in the state of nature, even if there’s cooperation—maybe someone really just hates your guts and doesn’t care about the social sanctions for killing you, and there’s always a chance that a dispute over, say, who wronged who in a fender bender will be decided the wrong way. But this is just also the case under a sovereign. Even if everyone has transferred their rights to a sovereign, that doesn’t prevent someone from not caring about that at all, and just murdering you anyways.
I think this is a very important point, actually. All you’re doing when transferring your rights to a sovereign is that you agree that you no longer have a right to kill and exploit others to get your way. But this doesn’t change whether someone can actually do those things. Even if you have a sovereign who everyone agrees has unlimited authority, that doesn’t stop anyone from just disobeying at any moment, and trying to get away with a crime. The only role the sovereign plays in deciding outcomes is by presenting a threat of punishment for wrongdoing. But if everyone makes a collective agreement that they’ll only cooperate if others do so too, and that they’ll reciprocate uncooperative behavior with sanctions etc., then that also creates incentives for being cooperative. No matter what, some interactions in the state of nature will require some degree of trust. But exactly the same is true under a sovereign. It might be that an absolute sovereign is more effective at disincentivizing uncooperative behavior, but this has to be weighed up against the costs of having a very strong state. If what I’ve argued here is correct, then Hobbes is wrong in treating the state of nature as some horrible war of all against all to be avoided at all costs—it could very well be about as peaceful as life under a sovereign would be, though perhaps with somewhat more widespread crime. If we now consider the potential harm of a powerful sovereign in drastically limiting freedom, censoring information, heavily taxing citizens while spending the money on whatever it likes, etc., it seems like remaining in the state of nature would be preferable.
Perhaps Hobbes would just say that this isn’t the state of nature anymore, since there is an organized community. That’s really just a semantic dispute, and we can call it what we will; the point is that it’s a far cry from the powerful sovereign Hobbes imagines, but it seems far preferable on consequentialist grounds.
This leads nicely into the second point, which is that it looks like there are much less extreme ways of escaping the state of nature than what Hobbes proposes. For example, you may follow the libertarian idea of a minimal state. Perhaps it’s necessary that a government will arise to protect rights, as Nozick argues, and so we’d end up with something like an army and a police force, to which all citizens pay protection money, and which in return protects them from threats. It seems completely unmotivated to think that it would also be necessary for this state to be able to control every other aspect of its subjects’ lives in order to protect them.
As I understand it, Hobbes would say something like this: The state doesn’t need to actually control the subjects’ lives, but if the subjects had the power to stop the state from doing that, we would have a conflict in powers, which can lead to a return to the state of nature.
To my mind, there are two problems with this. Firstly, the sense of power which Hobbes uses seems to be a sort of “normative” power or authority. It’s not that the sovereign is omnipotent, so that it’s physically impossible for the subjects to disobey—rather the subjects aren’t allowed to disobey. But this just doesn’t have any bearing on whether or not the subjects actually decide to oppose the sovereign. Everyone might have said “I authorise 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 authorise all his actions in like manner”—all solemnly and everything—and then a few years later a lot of the subjects become dissatisfied and decide to rebel and overthrow the sovereign. Whether or not there was some idea that the sovereign had absolute authority has no influence on what actually happens here, and so no influence on whether or not we actually avoid going back to the state of nature.
In fact I believe there’s an argument to be made that a stronger state would do a worse job of avoiding the state of nature. Again, it’s not that it’d be impossible for the subjects to rebel against an absolutist sovereign. But then if that sovereign has arbitrary power over the subjects, there is a much greater chance that the subjects will become dissatisfied than if the sovereign has only limited power. This means that avoiding the state of nature might be better done with a non-absolutist sovereign.
Secondly, the idea that opposing powers destroy each other, throwing us back in the state of nature, just seems very poorly motivated. Furthermore, just as a matter of empirical fact, we can see that many countries have a separation of powers and checks and balances, and yet don’t descend into bloody anarchy. So it just looks like you don’t need an absolute sovereign to have a very good shot at avoiding the state of nature. Hobbes would perhaps object that such a system can be pretty stable, but that an absolute sovereign would have an even smaller chance at falling back into the state of nature, which we have to remember is incredibly bad. But it’s hard to take seriously the idea that it would be worth giving one entity a complete monopoly on power, just to slightly decrease the already low risk of a descent into the state of nature—especially under this consequentialist interpretation of the argument. This would again require that the state of nature is incomprehensibly bad, which I argued above just isn’t the case.
Some Sort of Categorical Reading
Another options, of course, is that it's not a consequentialist argument, but more of a categorical one (though I take it that the consequentialist interpretation of Hobbes is favored). For example it might be that we have a God-given duty to avoid the state of nature. Seeing as Hobbes seems to think that the laws of nature are ontologically grounded by God, this is potentially a plausible reading (though I’m no Hobbes-scholar). Here the problem just is that it’s super implausible that there are categorical natural laws that morally or rationally compel us to live under a sovereign. Hobbes after all claims that we learn about the laws of nature through reason, and so reason must be the best guide we have to judge what these laws say. But I just think that reason tells us that we don’t have a categorical duty to avoid the state of nature and obey a sovereign at all costs.
We can for example imagine Mega-Torture-Hitler being the sovereign. What this guy does is that he makes a small percentage of the population soldiers and cops, who defend the country, suppress rebels, etc. The rest are made slaves who do all the tasks necessary for keeping the country, all while being painfully tortured every waking moment. According to Hobbes’ theory, it seems like as long as Mega-Torture-Hitler doesn’t arrange for anyone to be killed, we would have a duty to obey him. But this is just obviously not right!
But if it’s reason that tells us to accept such a categorical law of nature, which commands us to obey Hitler, then reason surely gives us even stronger reason to reject it. If Hobbes wants to stomp his feet and say that the laws of nature really do give us these categorical imperatives, then I would just question how he knows this except through the same faculty that tells us they don’t.
If there are any inaccuracies in this, or obvious bad things, make sure to point them out to me, so I can get a better grade. And also let me know how you feel about this sort of post! If it’s too boring, I’ll just skip it, though it might hurt my output for a little while; but if it’s enjoyable enough then tell me, as that’ll be a win-win.
Even more specifically, the question I’m supposed to answer is: “explain Hobbes’ concepts of ‘right of nature,’ ‘law of nature,’ and ‘sovereignty,’ and explain which roles the concepts play in his thinking. Discuss whether his defense of the strong state is sound.”