 We all have the right by nature to use our natural powers, the powers of our body that we're born with, but a fundamental law of nature is that in order to actually continue to make use of those powers and not be threatened with extermination or domination by other people, we need to pursue peace. That is the fundamental law of nature. In order to pursue peace and so pull ourselves up from this condition of the war of all against all, in which life is poor, solitary, nasty, British and short, we have to divest ourselves of our natural right to do whatever we want, whenever we want, to act however we see fit. So for example, we have to perform agreements and covenants that are made. According to natural right, I can make an agreement with you and then I can immediately break it if I see fit to do that. Because in the state of nature, I can do whatever I want, but that is to create a condition of war between us for me to break those agreements. So if I am to embody the fundamental law of nature of pursuing peace, then I ought to perform agreements. And all of these natural laws, all the natural laws that fall under these groups, these words in such a way that one ought to do such and such because the failure to do that creates a condition of war and thus violates the pursuit of peace, the fundamental law of nature. So besides just performing agreements and covenants made, there is also these points about mutual aid. We should try to help other people about equal treatment. We should recognize other people as being equal to us, as being humans, as having the equivalent faculty of reason that we have. And equal treatment also, he says, involves fair and equal distribution of scarce resources. So we need to avoid a situation of inequality where some people have a lot more than other people. Of course, we don't know anything about those issues and we live in a completely fair and equal society now. But in the distant past, in the 17th century, they had rich people and poor people and so forth. And the rich people tend to not give equal treatment and not distribute equally land and food and so forth. But then not doing that is to not treat people as equal. To not treat people as equal is to not perform agreements and covenants which are prescribed by nature and so is essentially to revert to a state of war. Now, distribution of goods is a difficult matter. We have a whole discipline called distributive justice where we try to figure out how this should actually work. Some goods can't be divided, so money we might be able to divide, food we might be able to divide. But we can't divide, and even land we might be able to divide, but we can't divide the use of a certain building, for example. Because it's no use for us each to take a brick away from a building. If we want common use of a building, we have to work something out. Like that I get to use it on Tuesdays and you get to use it on Wednesdays. Or that we rotate who has the power to use it. Or that we have a lottery where we all have a fair chance of being able to use it. Something like that. Lots of complications arise in that, was I really treated fair? Monty Johnson gets to use that office on Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays, but I only get it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So we need to avoid that becoming a condition of war between us and a cause of conflict. So how are we going to do that? You have your position, I have mine. We need an arbitrator. We need to agree that we have some person other than us. Disinterested in the outcome of this that will fairly and in an even-handed way resolve this dispute so that we don't need to be each other up with blunt instruments to resolve conflicts like this, but we can resolve them in courtrooms and so forth. And so we need arbitration and we need to submit to arbitration. We need to submit to impartial judges making decisions about these things. Well, once we agree that we need to submit to some other power, we realize that we basically need to submit to what Hobbes thinks is a kind of singular power. We can't submit to multiple powers because what if they are in disagreement about how things should be distributed? Then they will be at war, but at all costs we need to avoid war and promote peace. So we unify together and invest this power in some either one person or one council that has the authority to resolve it. And once we do that we have what he calls a commonwealth and it has what he calls sovereignty. You said at all costs? Well, I'm not sure how that relates to consequentialism. At all costs might be an exaggeration because one always retains natural right. So if you're in a sovereign commonwealth you should submit to that, but if that goes into a state of war like there's disagreement between who actually is the king or something like that, then you have to protect yourself. And so you don't pursue peace at all costs, literally. You pursue it as much as possible, but remember exactly how that was formulated. Pursue peace as much as possible, but in cases where it's not available, do whatever it takes to wage war in order to protect and preserve yourself. By the way, that question that somebody asked, that good question about self-destructiveness and suicide and so forth, did some more research on that and I've posted a paper on that, or I'll be posting a paper on that that I recently read and can give you some more detailed answers about that later, to the Canvas website. Now, sorry that was a bit of an aside, but let's go back to your point. Now, consequentialism, I understand to be the thesis that the goodness of some decision has to do with its consequences, not the means that are undertaken in it. Do you have a different understanding? No, but it was also my understanding that in consequentialism, it's more conducive towards the means justified by the ends, that if the consequences are, this is maybe more of a utilitarian than a consequentialist, but maybe that wasn't a good, good choice. My question is also how much use it at all possible? First of all, Hobbes has had an enormous influence on these people we call consequentialists and directly on utilitarians. For example, his hedonism and his thesis that pleasure is the good is assumed by consequentialists and is assumed by utilitarians. A lot of other things he says are assumed by them. There is a connection and there is an influence and he's important to the history of what we call consequentialism. But I don't think it's exactly a matter of what the consequence of this is. These laws stem from using our reason. We realize that we have these different passions and that we have scarce resources and so we're necessarily going to come into conflict with each other. But it turns out that we can use our reason to construct a way out of this mess so that we don't have to be constantly beating each other up and be in a war of all against all. And we can reason through that. We can say, okay, let's pursue peace. Let's keep agreements not to destroy each other. Let's aid each other. Let's treat each other equally. If we can't resolve, let's distribute resources equally. If we can't figure out how to do that, or in those cases where there's a problem with that, then we can have some neutral arbitrator resolve it so we don't have to devolve into conflict. And we need some single, all-powerful arbiter for this, who's where the buck stops in making these decisions. And that we can just reason through and figure out that this is the only way to avoid perpetual war. So I guess it is all for the purpose, for the consequence of avoiding perpetual war. So maybe in that sense it is consequentialist. My concern was that at all possible costs you're trying to maintain peace that can potentially include infringing on people's individual rights and their individual natural rights to maintain peace. So that was kind of my concern is that at all possible costs, the possible cost is... Yeah, so I guess I shouldn't have said that. It's not at all possible costs because if somebody is threatening my life or limbs, then that's a cost that's too high for me to support your ideal commonwealth. That's a good point because as in we're the case, you can both equal treatment everyone and have everything arbitrated properly. It doesn't seem like it has ever... This is so idealistic as to be impossible is what it seems to me. Okay, so far from thinking it's impossible, this seems to be the best explanation for how we got into the situation we're actually at. So what's your theory about how it is that we're all living under a government here and not like we were for tens of thousands of years just beating each other up with blunt instruments? How are we in an organized civil society? Hobb says it goes like this, it goes with this reasoning. I don't want to keep being threatened with violence so I'll agree with these other people and try to get a big enough group together that we can provide our own security and that means we can't be having conflicts with each other so we need to give somebody the authority to decide how this works even in the cases where we don't agree with the outcome of what it is and multiply that on larger and larger scales of space and amounts of people and time and you arrive at where we are at present. If there's a better theory about how we're in the real political situation we're in, I'd like to hear about it. So I think that it's not at all idealistic, it's the opposite of idealistic. Idealistic says we can easily create a utopian thing. All we need to do is educate guardians who don't have any interest in private property or in their own families and all they care about is the good of the state and then we'll put power in their hands and everybody can just obey them. That's an idealist theory. This is a realist theory. This is a theory about why is it that we have the government that we have. The more I read this stuff the more salient it seems. So I hope when you were reading the first parts of Day Corporate Politico you were thinking about the situation we're in if you've been paying attention to what's happening with this impeachment. So we have a president who says that he could stand on Fifth Avenue in New York and shoot someone and there's nothing that anybody could do about it. How is he saying that? Doesn't that just seem like a completely ridiculous thing to say? Well here's an explanation of how he can say that. There's a Hobbesian theory about how we got to that situation because in order to avoid us all being at war with each other we have to invest this power into someone person and then we can't have any supremacy over that person. We can't allow that person to be subjected to laws. Now that seems like a crazy thing. How do we get into a situation where we let somebody who is not constrained by laws govern us all? Not an ideal situation in anyone's view. But how did we get there? Here's a theory. And a theory that is grounded in an account of human nature that goes back to our most basic powers like sense, sensation, pleasure and pain and that explains all of those motivations. So which part of it is idealistic and unrealistic? We get to a very long end of a chain of consequences by the time we're talking about equal treatment and mutual aid and so forth so just to disagree with it at this point and say, oh well equality that's an overly idealistic notion but he's deriving it from these basic things about human nature. So I think that would be his answer. Now I think it's a really good point in a way and I was just talking with Phoenix before class because she wants to write a paper about his concept of ideal and utopian political theory and how he stands with respect to that and in fact she was saying some of the same kinds of things you're saying. This seems like an idealistic utopian theory to me. In comparison to someone like Plato maybe not. These are high ideals, peace, justice, equality. Those are ideal things that we should want to pursue but what Hobbes seems to do is have a way of attaching that to our actual nature which not only makes it possible that we could live in this Platonic Republic or we could live in this utopian civilization but it explains why we're living in the political situation that we're living in and that's really what he wants to do. He's not really into theorizing about how great it would be if we all had mathematically trained guardians running everything or something. It's not even clear that he's saying it would be better if everybody invited by this. What he's saying is this is how it goes, this is how it is and this is why things are how they are. So I mean in a sense that is diametrically opposed to an idealistic theory which says the way things are isn't how they should be and they should correspond to some other fictional way that I can invent. So you think that his main approach to writing this piece was a purely descriptive, empirical one? Is this kind of ideology going into this project? Methodologically he is an empiricist. His express view is that that's the only kind of theory that would be worthwhile because that's the only basis that we have for saying anything is true or having any kind of scientific knowledge. So that's definitely something he would say. But empirical knowledge meaning did you go out and study hundreds of different civilizations and look at how things are going in Papua and New Guinea and so forth and how people are establishing proto-states there and so forth. I mean there's other ways you could go out and empirically examine this. And relative to that this seems rather like an armchair almost a prioristic theory of just analyzing what human beings are down to their most basic powers and then recombining those powers up to a theory of how they reason and how they should think about things. Analogically psychologically based one. Yes. So you raise an interesting question because are we dealing here and I think this will also relate to the question which again I like a lot. Are we dealing, what are the standards for evaluating this theory? So let me give you two broad ways that we evaluate moral theories. One is descriptive adequacy. Does this describe how things actually are? Does it say of what is how it is and of what is not that it is not? And so can we relate to this? Is this really how humans function? Is this really how agreements are made? Is this really how arbitration is carried out? Is this really what equal distribution is? That's one way and if he's unrealistic on those points we can say this theory isn't adequate. This doesn't describe how things really are. And so he would be the first one to have to admit if that's true then forget this. Now I think this is a depressing conclusion but there aren't a lot of greater theories about how we got here. And so in a way we remain in thrall of Hobbesian political theory but there's another way of criticizing moral theories and that is to ask about their normative adequacy. Not do they say of what is that it is and of what is not that it is not but do they say of what should be that it should be and do they say of what should not be that it should not be. And if you disagree with the conclusions and you think we shouldn't treat each other equally like you're an Anne Rand fan and you think oh that's just horrible the virtue of selfishness that's the great thing that holds society together is when we all only care about money and so forth. If you disagree with those things then you're probably disagreeing with the normative part of it and saying no we should have a different way of looking at it. So it's possible to criticize this theory and say I don't like where we end up with Hobbes. I don't want to live under a king who has absolute power and who can stand on Fifth Avenue and shoot anyone and nobody can do anything about it. I don't want to live in that society. And so dystopia everybody talks about utopia the whole point of utopia is to actually show us the dystopia we're living in. And so we can normatively criticize that and say that's not how it should be but that would still concede a lot to Hobbes if you say this explains how we got here and this explains a lot about why we're in this situation and why people have the rights they do and why people have the power that they have. That might be all he's trying to do. And then the criticism that things ought to be different and we ought to be living in Plato's callipolis instead of in the United States of America or something that might very well be true but then you need a theory about how we get this Hobbesian commonwealth to that. And then he comes up to the laws of nature. As I was reading through I didn't find it terribly like naturalistically prescriptive. I think it's much more coming from a descriptive kind of trying to work our way up to okay what would be... You mean it seems more prescriptive like he's saying you ought to pursue peace you ought to mutually aid. No, I think that it is much more descriptive and it's trying to say trying to explain how we got here how do we end up in an England with the king and the old parliament. I think it is much more approaching approaching it from okay trying to describe how we got here and not... I think he very much like he wouldn't... if you don't agree with him he's okay with that he's not trying to prescribe it's much more kind of... It's like yeah sorry I think we could have a better society but what we do about that is we have to change our laws and so forth. Right? But yeah this isn't like wouldn't this be wonderful if we only followed what Hobbes was saying we could have equality and mutual aid and arbitration and peace and everything would be great and he's this... like I was saying he's this peacenik hippie and if we just followed along with his ideals but no that isn't really what's going on it's not about try to live up to this it's like this process of reasoning is how these structures of sovereign political authority exist and notice they exist everywhere okay so this is a theory about human nature right it's not like in India or in China they don't have this they have some other way of getting along okay they also have sovereign power there they have sovereign power structures and they're pyramidal power structures like Hobbes describes them ultimately with a few exceptions that are very problematic and will get to like the mixed constitution and this idea of separation of powers and checks and balances this crazy idealistic utopian thing we have in the US constitution which is you know we'll see if it works out if it survives past next week actually it doesn't look good but there's a utopian political scheme that we could actually have our sovereignty and put that person in check and have some branches of government that are making sure that this one doesn't get out of hand and isn't too powerful I'm talking about a utopian scheme yeah it's old so it doesn't seem like science fiction utopia at the time it seemed who are these crazy hippies suggesting that we could have this this political arrangement okay that's a utopian scheme it remains to be seen whether that works but as for kings that have the who wield the sword of justice and the sword of war and control that completely that's exactly what we have and that we've had since he's been talking about and I don't know if we have a better theory to explain how we got to that situation remember you know anarchists wonder about this stuff why are we here why do we have this these structures don't look don't look valid they don't look just let's dismantle these and start over and do something else well Hobbes answer is that which part of this you want to give up and you give up too much of it and you're back into war of all against all okay so I think that human nature 19 is critical because he almost tries to put it all together into one continuous argument and I tried to sort of outline it here um everyone's will follows from his own opinion of the consequences okay so in the state of nature we definitely are consequentialists you know if you ever meet a contien in the state of nature I don't think so okay they get they're the first ones people bludgeon with the one instruments don't tell any of my colleagues I said that but there aren't deontologists in the state of nature they're all worried about is this action going to produce pleasure or pain okay now in the state of nature when everyone's at war with everyone else safety and security consists of mutual aid for one another where we form small groups that also causes fear of those groups if you're not in one or you're in one that's smaller and so forth mutual aid therefore requires very large numbers of people to agree to help each other in order to be effective and it requires directing actions of several or multiple people towards one in the same end what he calls consent consent means two or more people agreeing about the end of some action but consent to aiding each other against a common enemy is impossible to obtain for a sufficiently large number the sufficiently large number that mutual aids effective unless you have some mutual or common fear or power which compels people to keep peace among themselves and to join against external enemies so what we need is not mere consent yes I agree it would be great to have a peaceful condition instead of a war but we need actual union and what he calls union and he carefully defines in chapter 12 and then reiterates his definition in chapter 19 including the wills of many in the will of one man or one council and this will he points out is not voluntary so he is not a libertarian about free will he doesn't even he thinks free will is a contradiction in terms you wouldn't want your will to be free if you could have it that way and when somebody covenants to subject his will to the command of other people he therefore obliges himself to resign his strength and his means and he transfers that power to whoever he covenants to obey and the resulting union ok and so this is a crucial step because also what constitutes continual agreement to go along with it is just the fact of not resisting that power so you might have you might have at some point you start asking when you're reading this hey wait I never actually signed up for this though like did I did I miss something where they passed around this do you want to get out of the state of nature you know call this number thing and then you sign on a dotted line that says yes I'll transfer my natural right and over to somebody else everybody everybody seems to have done this but I don't remember that happening at at the point where this common world's established he says that consent is given by non resistance to it so by the fact that you're not out there organizing to overthrow the government you are in effect consenting to this because that is a natural outcome of your reasoning that you you also agree to that and that's how we get a body politic or what he calls a civil society or in Greek a polis and the individual man or the council to whom these particular members have given that common power he says is called the sovereign now that is basically how human nature ends once we've got sovereign power and once this comes about as a result of natural law then the question is civil law and how do we what kinds of what kinds of laws and what kinds of political structures do we agree to have in order to maintain this state of peace