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Science and Moral Skepticism in Hobbes1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Sam Black
Sam Black*
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, CanadaVSA 156
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Extract

Here lyes that mighty Man of Sense

Who, full of years, departed hence,

To teach the other world Intelligence,

This was the prodigious Man,

who vanquish’ d Pope and Puritan,

By the Magic of Leviathan.

Had he not Controversy wanted,

His deeper Thoughts had not been scanted;

Therefore good Spirits him transplant:

Wise as he was, he could not tell

Whether he went to Heaven or Hell.

Beyond the Tenth Sphere, if there be a wide place,

He'll prove by his Art there's no infinite space:

And all good Angels may thank him, for that

He has prov’ d they are something, tho men know not what.

Hobbes's Epitaph (Anon 1680)

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , June 1997 , pp. 173 - 207
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1997

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References

2 Manuscript. Cambridge, MA: Houghton Library, Harvard University

3 For the latter view, see Kavka, Gregory Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1986), ch. 1.Google Scholar

4 See Taylor, A. E. ‘The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes,’ in Brown, K.C. ed., Hobbes Studies (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1965) 35–56Google Scholar, and Warrender, Howard The Philosophy of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1957)Google Scholar. I am indebted to David Fate Norton for conversation on this point. It is tempting to view the deontological interpretation as a manifestation of the ethical intuitionism popular in Britain three generations ago. British intuitionism provided a ready-made excuse for neglecting any connection between the philosophy of nature and moral theory, and may have encouraged the mistaken impression that Hobbes was equally indifferent to reconciling moral experience with naturalism.

5 See Strauss, Leo The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, Sinclair, E. trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1952), 29, 129, 137.Google Scholar

6 This thesis is defended by Sorell, Tom ‘The Science in Hobbes's Politics’, in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, Rogers, G.A.J. and Ryan, Alan eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1988) 67–80Google Scholar; and Johnston, David The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1986).Google Scholar

7 Some have wished to deny any classical skeptical influence on Hobbes. See Popkin, Richard ‘Hobbes and Skepticism,’ in Thro, L.J. ed., History of Philosophy in the Making: A Symposium of Essays to Honor Professor James D. Collins on his 65th Birthday (Washington, DC: University Press of America 1982) 133–49Google Scholar; and Zagorin, Perez ‘Hobbes on Our Mind,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 51, 2 (1990) 317–35, at 321CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In contrast to Popkin's essay, which is explicitly concerned to deny the influence of Pyrrhonian skepticism on Hobbes, Zagorin seems to be claiming that no form of classical skepticism influenced Hobbes. He does not, at any rate, differentiate between the forms of traditional skepticism which had been revived during the early modem period.

8 Leviathan, 483. Unless otherwise indicated, all citations to works other than Leviathan refer to the Molesworth edition of The English Works of Thomas Hobbes (Scientia Aalen reprint 1962).

9 The Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi, Brush, Craig B. ed. and trans. (New York and London: Johnson Reprint 1972), 312Google Scholar. For Sextus’ formulation of the Tenth Mode, see Sextus Empiricus: Scepticism, Man, & God, Hallie, P.P. ed., Etheridge, S.G. trans. (Indiana: Hackett 1985) 69–72Google Scholar. A variation is presented by Michel de Montaigne, whose writings exerted an early influence on Gassendi, as Brundel, Barry relates in Pierre Gassendi: From Aristotelianism to a New Natural Philosophy (Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel 1987), 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Compare Montaigne, Michel de An Apology for Raymond Sebond, Screech, M.A. trans. (London: Penguin 1987), 161.Google Scholar

10 Sextus Empiricus, in Hallie, P.P. ed., Etheridge, S.G. trans., Sextus Empiricus: Scepticism, Man, & God (Indianapolis: Hackett 1985), 42-3, 69, 72, 143–6Google Scholar

11 Pyrrhonism was not the only form of epistemological skepticism that worried Hobbes. Quentin Skinner provides a masterful account of a form of skepticism that is derived from purely rhetorical sources. He convincingly argues that Hobbes was concerned to address this skepticism. See his ‘Thomas Hobbes: Rhetoric and the Construction of Morality,’ Proceedings of the British Academy 76 1-61. See, further, his Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996). Hobbes was also acquainted with Carneades’ refutation of natural law, and sprinkles his text with numerous references to Cicero, who may have been Hobbes's source for the doctrines of the New Academy. In Leviathan, he alludes to the famous incident wherein Carneades defended the law of nature before a Roman audience, only to publicly refute those same arguments the following day. See Leviathan, Tuck, R. ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991), 460Google Scholar. The incident is described in Cicero's On The Commonwealth, Book 3. On the general importance of Pyrrhonian skepticism for Hobbes's philosophy, I am very much indebted to Richard Tuck's incisive discussion. See his ‘The “Modern” Theory of Natural Law,’ in Pagden, Anthony ed., The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987) 99–119CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1989); and Philosophy and Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993).

12 On reforming definitions see Brandt, R.B. A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1979), ch. 1Google Scholar, and Railton, Peter ‘Naturalism and Prescriptivity,’ Social Philosophy and Policy 7 (1989) 151–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 I borrow the term from Railton, 159-60.

14 I shall assume for current purposes that metaphysical naturalism and materialism are connected. But in other contexts, if for example we were considering the status of mathematical entities, this assumption would merit serious scrutiny.

15 Moore, G.E. Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992 [1922]), 40–1Google Scholar

16 This mistaken criticism of Hobbes is made by David Gauthier who charges that ‘Hobbes is wrong to suppose that such words as “good” are used in relation to the user; [and that] indeed, our typical evaluative terms presuppose a common standpoint which may or may not be shared by the evaluator.’ See his Morals By Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1986), 53.

17 De Corpore Politico, 211. Compare ‘Want of Science … disposeth, or rather constraineth a man to rely on the advise, and authority of others …. Ignorance of the causes, and originall constitution of Right, Equity, Law, and Justice, disposeth a man to make Custome and Example the rule of his actions’ (Leviathan, 73).

18 Man and Citizen, Gert, Bernard ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett 1991), 47Google Scholar. I refer henceforth to the first of these selections as De Homine.

19 Those who have interpreted Hobbes as an extreme form of subjectivist — one who holds that all appraisals of people's desires are inappropriate — include Railton, Peter. See his ‘Facts and Values,’ Philosophical Topics 14, 2 (1986) 5–31, at 11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 The fact that Hobbes does not incorporate a full-information criterion, and additionally considers the impact of intervening affective states lends, in my view, credibility to his account the good. I consider some of the problems arising from full-information theories of value in greater detail in ‘Reason Within the Limits of Value,’ forthcoming.

21 This is a view he attributes to Cicero. See Leviathan, 34, 461.

22 For good recent accounts of the transition from Aristotelian to seventeenth-century metaphysics, see Alexander, Peter Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985), ch. 2Google Scholar, and Woolhouse, Roger The Concept of Substance in The Seventeenth Century: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz (London: Routledge 1993), ch. 1.Google Scholar

23 The example is Boyle's, Robert. See ‘The Origins of Forms and Qualities According to Corpuscular Philosophy,’ in Selected Philosophical Papers of Robert Boyle, Stewart, M.A. ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1979), 15–16.Google Scholar

24 For Hobbes's critique of substantial forms, see Leviathan, 14, and ch. 46.

25 Human Nature, 7. Hobbes later settles on the notion that the simple bodies, which feature in adequate explanations, possess the properties of rest or motion, magnitude, and figure (The Elements of Philosophy, 404).

26 Hobbes's adversary Robert Boyle offers a clear statement of this new standard for an explanation: ‘I do not remember that either Aristotle himself … or any of his followers, has given a solid and intelligible solution of any one phenomenon of nature by the help of substantial forms … [since] to explicate a phenomenon being to deduce it from something else in nature more known to us than the thing to be explained by it, [then] how can the employing of incomprehensible (or at least uncomprehended) substantial forms help us to explain intelligibly this or that particular phenomenon?’ (‘The Origins of Forms and Qualities According to Corpuscular Philosophy,’ 67).

27 Gassendi appears to hold a theory according to which perceptible qualities have an existence which is not exclusively phenomenal. They exist in the world, but are composites of more basic atomic configurations. But on this point there seems to be some deliberate fudging on Gassendi's part. On the one hand, the notion that colors exist in the world as real accidents, and not simply as dispositions, conforms to the Epicurean account, which Gassendi did much to revive. On the other hand, he lumps Epicurus and Democritus together on the crucial question of whether colors really exist in the world as something more than phenomenal entities, thus overlooking the fact that the ancient atomists were actually at odds on precisely this matter. See The Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi, 431. For more on the differences between the ancient atomists, see Long, A.A. and Sedley, D.N. The Hellenistic Philosophers, Vol. 1, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987), 34–7Google Scholar. (For the reference to the ancients’ debate I am indebted to Marie McGinn.) Similarly, the analogies Gassendi supplies- for example, comparing a single object's changing qualitative attributes with a human whose identity persists despite the fact that he has adopted different positions — tend to support the idea that perceptible qualities are a real, and not simply a dispositional feature of the world (432). They are real in the same way that being seated or standing is a genuine quality of a person. But this must be offset against Gassendi's description of the way that ‘the barbs of the corpuscles turn outward and when they strike the senses, they smart and produce in them the sensation, or quality, that we call heat,’ which suggests the dispositional view (429). This confusion may be deliberate, if Brundel is correct in holding that Gassendi systematically attempted to efface the differences between Aristotelianism and the Atomists. See Brundel, Pierre Gassendi: From Aristotelianism to a New Natural Philosophy, 57.

28 See Leviathan, 13-14. This particular explanation may have originated with Hobbes, if William Lucy, Bishop of St. Davids is to be trusted. Lucy writes, ‘Why he should so insist upon this strange, and, until by him, unheard of rebound, I cannot imagine; he gives no reason for it, nor doe I think the subject is capable of any…’ (Lucy, William Observations, Censures and Confutation of the Notorious Errors in Mr Hobbes His Leviathan [London: 1663], 22).Google Scholar

29 One problem with the scholastics is that they do not acknowledge the fact that the language of desire is in principle reducible to states of local motion within a person. See Leviathan, 38.

30 He writes, ‘that which helpeth and furthereth vital constitution in one, and is therefore delightful, hindereth it and croseth it in another, and therefore causeth grief. The difference therefore of wits hath its original from the different passions, and from the ends to which the appetite leadeth them’ (Human Nature, 54).

31 Leviathan, 110-11. See also Philosophical Rudiments, 47, and De Corpore Politico, 110. Compare this to a representative passage from Sextus: ‘Old men, for example, may think the air is cold, but the same air seems mild to those who are in the prime of life. The same colour appears dim to older persons but full to those in their prime …. From this it follows that differences of age also can cause the sense-impressions to be different where the external objects are the same’ (Sextus Empiricus: Scepticism, Man, & God, 60).

32 The queer entities formulation is Mackie's, J.L. and is one of the five grounds he presents in arguing for an error theory of value. See his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Middlesex: Penguin 1977), ch. 1Google Scholar. The second formulation is Dancy's, Jonathan. See his ‘Intuitionism,’ in Singer, Peter ed., A Companion to Ethics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1991) 411-19, at 413Google Scholar. Unlike Mackie, Dancy does not believe that finding room for these moral facts poses an insurmountable obstacle.

33 Earl, Edward of Clarendon, A Brief View and Survey of the Leviathan 2nd ed. (London: 1676), 12Google Scholar. Clarendon's remark is significant. He had been acquainted with Hobbes since the 1620s when the two were part of the circle meeting at Lord Falkland's residence at Great Tew. Clarendon would be in an authoritative position to determine the extent to which Hobbes's views on natural philosophy contributed to his normative ideas. I therefore side with those commentators who reject the thesis that Hobbes was an atheist. See Martinich, A.P. The Two Gods of Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992), 1, 33, 189CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sommerville, Johann Thomas Hobbes (New York: St. Martin's 1992), 137–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar. If Hobbes was indeed an atheist it seems unlikely that he should have been driven to that position on the basis of any particular metaphysical assumptions. For Hobbes himself points out (in reply to John Wallis) that Tertullian's rejection of incorporeal substance did nothing to compromise his belief in God. See Tracts of Thomas Hobbes Printed for William Crooke (London: 1681), 37.

34 See, for instance, Jones, W.T. A History of Western Philosophy: Hobbes To Hume (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich 1962), 134.Google Scholar

35 See, for instance, Leviathan, 30, and ch. 46.

36 Hobbes is sometimes misinterpreted here in ways that distort his views. J.W.N. Watkins, for instance, claims that for Hobbes's politics is grounded on motions that are ‘localized in the individual parts of civil society; and while outsiders cannot observe them, each individual can observe them in himself.’ On this basis, Watkins concludes that Hobbes's method of civil science is indebted to ‘Harvey's notion of biological principles’ rather than ‘Galileo's notion of mechanical principles.’ Watkins does not spell out exactly what that contrast might amount to. But the very idea, that Hobbes envisages a choice between the two methods, is misguided. When Hobbes discusses the acquisition of knowledge through introspection (what ‘each individual can observe in himself’), he clearly intends this procedure to parallel the derivation of knowledge from the mechanical interaction of bodies in motion. As the tone of the passage makes clear — ‘not only by ratiocination, but also by the experience of every man’ — the aim of the argument is to defend the legitimacy of appealing to observational commonplaces or induction in support of his conclusions. For Watkin's, views see Hobbes's System of Ideas (London: Hutchinson University Press 1965), 64f.Google Scholar

37 Leviathan, 36-7. In Leviathan, Hobbes seems to suggest that prudence does not constitute knowledge, while in Human Nature, prudence is described as a different kind of knowledge, while still being separate from mere opinion and rhetoric (28-9).

38 Although Hobbes associates uncertain science with the use of inductive procedures, he does not advocate arriving at these psychological hypotheses through the conducting of experiments. Rather, like Descartes, he regards observation as a possible way of confirming hypotheses that have been arrived at through a priori methods. Observation or experimentation need not be used, in Hobbes's view, to generate hypotheses. At most, observation helps to confirm the assumptions that reason discovers on its own. See the discussion of these issues as they pertain to Hobbes's contemporaries in Shapiro, Barbara J. Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1983), 27-8, 44–5Google Scholar. For more on Locke, see my ‘Toleration and the Skeptical Inquirer in Locke,’ forthcoming.

39 Leviathan, 46. Compare Human Nature, 33; and De Homine, 48-9: ‘The greatest of goods for each is his own preservation. For nature is so arranged that all desire good for themselves. Insofar as it is within their capacities, it is necessary to desire life, health, and further, insofar as it can be done, security of future time. On the other hand, though death is the greatest of all evils (especially when accompanied by torture), the pains of life can be so great that, unless their quick end is foreseen, they may lead men to number death among goods.’

40 The crucial passage for rejecting the Kantian interpretation is De Homine, 55£., where it is clear that the pertubations which make certain aims unreasonable do so only in the sense of tempting us away from our considered desires. That is to say, we have reason to follow our actual desires, except when those desires are corrupted by pertubations. There is no independent categorical imperative which competes with these hypothetical imperatives. For the contrary view, see Gert's, Bernard introduction to Bernard Gert, ed., Man and Citizen (Indianapolis: Hackett 1991).Google Scholar

41 As Tom Sorell maintains in ‘The Science in Hobbes's Politics,’ 76. As I understand Sorell, this is not merely a de facto appraisal of the epistemic status of Hobbes's theory, but also a characterization of Hobbes's intentions. See, by the same author, ‘Hobbes's Persuasive Civil Science,’ The Philosophical Quarterly 40, 3 (1990) 342-51.

42 The impact of metaphysical naturalism on ethics is what Hilary Putnam mistakenly refers to as the classical or traditional source of moral skepticism. See his Realism With A Human Face (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1990), ch. 9; and The Many Faces of Realism (La Salle, IL: Open Court 1987), ch. 1. Compare: ‘The [current] model for all explanation and understanding is the natural science that emerges out of the seventeenth-century revolution. But this offers us a neutral universe; it has no place for intrinsic worth or goals that make a claim on us … [this naturalism induces] a quasi-despairing acquiescence in subjectivism. The link between naturalism and subjectivism is even clearer from another angle. The seventeenth-century scientific revolution destroyed the Platonic-Aristotelian conception of the universe as the instantiation of Forms, which defined the standards by which things were to be judged. The only plausible alternative construal of such standards in naturalistic thought was as projections of subjects’ (Taylor, Charles Philosophical Arguments [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1995], 38Google Scholar. See also Taylor's, The Sources of the Sel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1989), 56–8Google Scholar; and McDowell, John ‘Virtue and Reason,’ The Monist 62, 3 (1979) 331–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar (see 346 for more on the impact of ‘philistine science’ on ethics). See further his ‘Values and Secondary Qualities’ in Morality and Objectivity, and Honderich, Ted (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1985), 110–29Google Scholar.

43 The following passages contain communitarian overtones: ‘[Liberal advocates of equality) should drop the distinction between rational judgment and cultural bias … we are going to have to work out the limits [of our ethical precepts] case by case, by hunch or by conversational compromise … liberals should take with full seriousness the fact that the ideals of procedural justice and human equality are parochial, recent, eccentric cultural developments, and then recognize that this does not mean they are any less worth fighting for’ (Rorty, Richard Objectivism, Relativism, and Truth [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press], 207–8Google Scholar, with slight emendations). For another view which explicitly defends relativism in the test for values, see Wiggins, David Needs, Values, and Truth (Oxford: Blackwell 1987)Google Scholar, essay V. Compare Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, 178; see also 139. Compare Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, 64-73, where he maintains that we are entitled to believe in the obectivity of whatever moral goods (or hypergoods as he calls them) allow us to make sense of our particular attitudes as a moral community. We are furthermore entitled to construe these goods as being objective in an absolute, rather than culturally relative sense. A view that is similar to Taylor's has been put forward recently by Anderson, Elizabeth in her Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1993)Google Scholar, ch. 5. Compare McDowell, John Truth and Projection in Ethics (Kansas: University of Kansas Press 1987), 9.Google Scholar