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The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

A. E. Taylor
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The moral doctrine of Hobbes, in many ways the most interesting of our major British philosophers, is, I think, commonly seen in a false perspective which has seriously obscured its real affinities. This is, no doubt, largely due to the fact that most modern readers begin and end their study of Hobbes's ethics with the Leviathan, a rhetorical and, in many ways, a popular Streitschrift published in the very culmination of what looked at the time to be a permanent revolution, and do not pay such attention to the more calmly argued statements of the same doctrine contained in the Elements of Law, circulated before the outbreak of the Civil War, or the De Cive,

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Philosophy , Volume 13 , Issue 52 , October 1938 , pp. 406 - 424
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Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1938

References

page 406 note 1 In the original Latin text of the sentence Hobbes says, as we should expect him to say in the course of an attempt to prove that the supreme power, both spiritual and temporal, was possessed, in the days of the Israelite and Jewish monarchies, by the kings, that the priests could only do rightfully what God commanded them, whereas the king had rightfully all the power over every man which that man had over himself (sacerdos id tantum iure poterat quod Deus iuberet, rex autem iure poterat quidquid poterat iure unusquisque in se). In Molesworth's edition this is represented by the sensedestroying statement that “the priest could do rightly whatsoever every man could rightly do himself.”

page 407 note 1 Thus (De Cive, V, I): “It is of itself manifest that the actions of men proceed from the will, and the will from hope and fear, in so much as when they shall see a greater good or less evil likely to happen to them by the breach than observation of the laws, they will wittingly violate them.” Hence Hobbes goes on to maintain that the moral guilt of offences into which subjects are led by the insufficiency of the penalties provided for them falls not in the subject but on the sovereign. “If, therefore, the legislator doth set a less penalty on a crime, than will make our fear more considerable with us than our lust, that excess of lust above the fear of punishment, whereby sin is committed, is to be attributed to the legislator, that is to say, to the supreme” (De Cive, XIII, 16).

page 408 note 1 When he is speaking strictly, Hobbes makes a distinction between injustice and iniquity, though the distinction is not always carefully kept up (less carefully, I think, in De Cive than in Leviathan). Injustice, in the strictest sense of the word, is possible only in the “civil” state, since it is by definition disregard of the commands of the lawful sovereign. Iniquity, which can exist in “the state of nature,” or in the conduct of the sovereign, who, since he is not subject to his own commands, cannot be guilty of injustice proper, is violation of the “natural law,” which is also, according to Hobbes's repeated explanations, the moral law. But since my obligation to obey the sovereign is based on the assumption that by living under his protection I have expressly or tacitly “covenanted” with all my neighbours to accept his commands as the rule of life, and the obligation to observe a “covenant” is thus antecedent to the institution of civil society, the moral guilt of “injustice” arises from the fact that all injustice is also iniquity, and therefore breach of the moral law, though not all iniquity is “injustice.” Even in the “state of nature” to which, according to the Leviathan, it is “consequent” that no act can be just or unjust, wanton violation of a promise could be iniquitous. (It is true that since, according to Hobbes's psychology, a man inevitably acts to secure what he believes to be his own greatest good, really wanton promise-breaking could never occur. The promise-breaker would always be acting from the “reasonable” motive that he hoped to secure more good by breaking his word than by keeping it.)

page 409 note 1 Cf. De Cive, IV, 21. “Although a man should order all his actions so much as belongs to external obedience just as the law commands, but not for the law's sake, but by reason of some punishment annexed to it, or out of vain glory; yet he is unjust.”

page 413 note 1 E.g. De Cive, XIV, io. “For though the law of nature forbid theft, adultery, etc.; yet if the civil law command us to invade anything, that invasion is not theft, adultery, etc. For when the Lacedaemonians of old permitted their youths, by a certain law, to take away other men's goods, they commanded that these goods should not be accounted other men's, but their own who took them; and therefore such surreptions were no thefts. In like manner, copulations of heathen sexes, according to their laws, were lawful marriages.”

page 414 note 1 De Cive, XII, 3. “Whatsoever any man doeth against his conscience, is a sin; for he who doth so, contemns the law. But we must distinguish. That is my sin indeed, which committing I do believe to be my sin; but what I believe to be another man's sin, I may sometimes do without any sin of mine. For if I be commanded to do that which is a sin in him who commands me, if I do it, and he that commands me be by right lord over me, I sin not.… They who observe not this distinction, will fall into a necessity of sinning, as oft as anything is commanded them which either is, or seems to be unlawful to them; for if they obey, they sin against their conscience; and if they obey not, against right.… For by our taking upon us to judge of good and evil, we are the occasion that as well our obedience, as our disobedience, becomes sin unto us.” Clearly Hobbes would have been on the side of those who have regarded Sophocles's Antigone as simply criminal in her defiance of Creon. The doctrine, in its unqualified form, may have its dangers, but in the middle of the seventeenth century many “subjects” needed the warning that the commands of a lawful authority are not to be disobeyed whenever they do not approve themselves to the private judgment of a subordinate.

page 419 note 1 I confess here to finding a real difficulty in understanding how Hobbes could hold that mere irresistible power can be the foundation of a moral obligation. In strict consistency, should he not have held that the moral obligation to obey the natural, which is also the divine, law only covers the case of Israelites in the past, and Christians in the present, who are subjects of God in virtue of a “covenant,” by which they are pledged to “faith and obedience” (or, when they have erred through frailty, repentance)? As the omnipotent Lord of all things, God is only king over “infidels” in the same sense in which He is king over the beasts whose subjection to his “irresistible power” is not supposed to give rise to any obligations.

page 421 note 1 The relevant facts are these:—(1) Hobbes expressly says, here agreeing completely with St. Thomas that no good reasons can be given why the world should have had a beginning (De Corpore, IV, 26, 1) (I quote from the text of 1668). Illos igitur qui mundi originem aliquam fuisse rationibus suis a rebus naturalibus demonstrasse se iactitant laudare non possum.… Nonne qui reternitatem mundi sictollunt, eadem opera etiam mundi conditori aeternitatem tollunt.(2) According to the definitions of cause and effect given in the same work (II, 9, 3), a causa integra (entire cause) is the “aggregate of all the accidents both of the agents how many soever they be, and of the patient put together; which when they are all supposed to be present (omnibus suppositis) it cannot be understood but that the effect is produced at the same instant (quin effectus una sit productus) and if any one of them be wanting, it cannot be understood but that the effect is not produced,” and we are consequently told “quo instante causa sit integra, eodem quoque effectum esse productem.” Thus the “entire cause,” including the requisite conditions “is the patient,” and the effect are simultaneous. But Hobbes infers from this very proposition the “causation and the production of effects consist in a certain continual progress” (ibid., II, 9, 6), and this seems to imply that the “agent,” if not the “patient,” also has an existence which is temporally prior to the “effect.” If this principle can be extended to the causation of the universe, it would follow that the universe is not eternal. I suppose, however, that Hobbes, who held that philosophy is only concerned with those things of which there are “generations,” could quite consistently have said that the principle, being a philosophical one, must not be applied to God, nor yet to the “world” if the world is “eternal,” and that the question therefore remains open for us as philosophers, though as good subjects we must acquiesce in the sentence of the sovereign, if he thinks fit to pronounce on the matter.

page 423 note 1 I certainly do not myself think that the feats of Biblical interpretation in the Leviathan are, in the main, a mere game. Hobbes's exegeses, where they are opposed to those generally current in his time, are often manifestly sound, and even where, to our better informed age they axe not sound, they may well have seemed so to their seventeenth-century author. It is only in a small minority of cases that he seems to me to be merely “answering a fool according to his folly.” It should always be remembered that Hobbes has an admirable practical purpose in bis endeavour to reduce the articles of belief “necessary to salvation” to a minimum. He wants, in an intolerant age, to put an end to persecution for speculative disagreements without challenging the generally accepted view that it is the sovereign's duty to “cause such a doctrine and worship to be taught and practised” as he believes “necessarily conducive to the eternal salvation” of his subjects (De Cive, XIII, 5). And he held, as we see from his Behemoth, that the ultimate cause of the great rebellion had been the zeal of Presbyterian ministers to enforce all their own personal opinions on points of speculative divinity as “necessary to salvation.” Persecution, he thinks, will cease if the sovereign insists on no article as fundamental beyond the recognition of Jesus as the future Messianic king, and the subject understands that conformity to the established worship does not imply speculative agreement in opinion, except on this single point.