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Thomas Hobbes: The Morality of Natural Reason
| Article
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16317 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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3 / 1989 |
2,896 Words |
| Author
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Gary Herbert
Gary Herbert is professor of philosophy at Loyola University
in New Orleans and is finishing a book on Hobbes' science. |
The roots of Western political democracy are often seen as embedded in the seventeenth century, specifically, in the writings of the English philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Both Hobbes and Locke speak about the inalienable rights to life and liberty and about government's legitimacy residing in its capacity to protect those rights. It is they who argued that authority of sovereigns is grounded upon a contractual agreement among citizens. It is also to them that one may turn to understand the beginnings of the inevitable accompaniments to the modern problems of chaotic individualism, irreconcilability of rights, a maldistribution of goods and property, and an almost unending litany of violations of the public trust. It is natural enough, then, that any effort to reform the structure of Western political democracy and to legitimize a more developed sense of social obligation will include a return to its philosophical roots with a thought to making salutary corrections. One does not improve a plant without giving sufficient attention to its soil.
The recognition of Thomas Hobbes' place in our philosophical heritage has been much less widespread than that of John Locke. Unlike Locke, Hobbes had a bleak view of human nature. Hobbes was faulted, even in his own times, for grounding political existence in an account of man's nature wherein natural man is so violent. Indeed natural man is so malevolent that he cannot be neutralized without an appeal to political absolutism. Men in the Hobbesian natural condition are driven by fear for their own security, and compensate for that fear with an unrelenting desire for power. What results is an irreconcilable hostility that every man shows to every other. "Nature … dissociates," Hobbes says, "and renders men apt to invade and destroy one another." This, he said, is "an inference made from the passions." Men, Hobbes agrees, are controlled by passions to avoid pain and to gratify their appetites. He believes this tendency can be seen "even in the embryo." The human being "in the womb, moveth its limbs with voluntary motion, for the avoiding of whatsoever troubleth it, or for the pursuing of what pleaseth it." To the extent that this passion is found even in the womb, it is not, according to Hobbes, a passion that is acquired and, therefore, is not one that can be removed by simple moral education.
The Morality Of Natural Reason
Hobbes' view of morality was consistent with his image of man's natural condition. He believed that all morality has its roots in natural reason, that is, in reason guided exclusively by selfish passions and self-interest. Hobbes held that
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