The Classic Text: Hobbes’ Leviathan

Abstract

Where the raison d’être of moral practices is taken to be the maintenance of a tolerable social life among human beings naturally prone to conflict as a result of their conflicting and competing interests, desires and needs, the upshot is what I have wanted to call ‘the politicization of morality’. Glaucon offers such a ‘purposive’ conception of morality. He speaks of ‘justice’ as a means to security and so to satisfaction. He speaks of it as a means of escape from an original condition characterized by the constant threat that one will suffer ‘injustice’ at the hands of others without the power of retaliation. The move from Glaucon’s ‘popular account’ of the origin and nature of justice to Hobbes’ Leviathan might be said to be the move from rather crude historical speculation to quite sophisticated metaphysics. But in both cases one meets the same conception of morality or justice. For Hobbes, the introduction of right, wrong, justice and injustice into relations among men comes with the erection of the commonwealth — ‘Where there is no common power, there is no law: where no law, no injustice’ (I, 13, 83).1 And of the erection of the commonwealth he writes: The final cause, end, or design of men, who naturally love liberty, and dominion over others, in the introduction of that restraint upon themselves, in which we see them live in commonwealth, is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby; that is to say, of getting themselves out of that miserable condition of war, which is necessarily consequent, as hath been shown, to the natural passions of men, when there is no visible power to keep them in awe… (II, 17, 109) KeywordsMoral PhilosophyMoral VirtueCoercive PowerMoral PracticeSovereign PowerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.