 OK, I want to wrap something up from last time and then move on to what the editor of our textbook calls the central chapters of the whole work and really of Todd's political philosophy. But first of all, kind of a trick question. What is the overall title for the entirety of this work? All 29 chapters of this work. You're reading a book and you don't know what the title is? I thought it was Two Sections in the Nature. Well, it is. Those are the two sections of it. What's the name of the overall work? You've almost given the complete title the elements of law that there's more to it than not. So that was smart to look at the blurb on the back that explains this, but you're not there yet. Yeah? OK, where did you get that? On this page. Oh, the title page. Yeah. A smart guy. On this page, Thomas Hobbes, the elements of law, natural and politic, meaning the elements of natural and political law. OK, so what the overall work is about is a theory of law. And today, having spent weeks discussing what human nature is, today we will be talking about natural law. And then in the second half of the book, the corporate political, we'll be talking about political law, which establishes what political law should be on the basis of natural law. And he has established natural law on the basis of human nature. OK, so that's the overall program. Now, up to chapter 13, he has been discussing human beings in isolation from one another. What happens within an individual human being? Beginning with sense, building up to memory, experience, conceptions, pleasure, pain, pursuit, avoidance, the passions, OK? And he's also talked about language. But notice that when he was talking about language or what he calls awkwardly here, discretion, and in levite and mental discourse, his discussion of language is, in the first case, primarily about internal mental discourse. So we have this tendency to think that the whole point of language and the whole reason it must have evolved and so forth, so that we communicate with one another. That's actually impossible, because it has to have something to do with some mutation that happened to our ape-like ancestors. And that had to happen in an individual. So some individual became capable of language. And when other people weren't capable of language, so there was one person who had something of language. And this means somebody had a capability for cognitive thought. And that person presumably had an enormous reproductive advantage for having that ability when these other apes did not and thus had some kind of reproductive benefit from it. And so produced other human beings and also had the language gene. And then managed to adapt, turning this mental discretion or mental discourse into something that could be communicated. And then it's even more powerful. And then presumably those groups of apes that were able to use this language to actually communicate with one another had an even greater survival benefit from it. So great that they eventually displaced, meaning killed all of those ones that didn't have such capabilities. And that's how human nature got to the state that it's in now. And it hasn't changed much since then, maybe not at all. But so it's only a couple of chapters after he's already talked about language that he talks about how we use language to affect other people and communicate with other people. So communication is not fundamental to language. Language is really about thought, about this internal discourse that's continually going through you. Now he says, what's the first use of language in this external way is the expressions of our conception. It's rather nice. He says it's teaching. The first reason we want to communicate with other people is to teach them, to beget or birth, to produce in another person the same conceptions that I have in myself. If he says the conceptions of the teacher or person A communicating with person B, if these conceptions continually accompany his words, remember words have this kind of conventional or arbitrary relationship to conceptions. But if these conceptions really are tied to the words and they ultimately trace back to experience, something that really happened in sense, then it begets the same conception in the hearers and then makes that hearer know something. And so that person is said to learn. So on this model, what's happening? If anyone's teaching here, it must mean that somehow words that are actually tied to conceptions that have their origin in sense are being communicated, you're receiving that communication and presuming that the words that correspond to those conceptions are really tied to sense, then it produces some kind of understanding that I originally had that was tied to sense. Now it is produced within you, and so you're said to learn. If that doesn't happen, it doesn't just mean that you don't learn, but it also means that I don't teach. Teaching is not standing in front of a room. Teaching is not grading. It's not having the authority to say whether people get degrees or not. All of that is totally irrelevant to teaching. Teaching is producing in other people conceptions that somebody else has and that are actually tied to something that's really going on. So it's possible to listen to people standing up in the front of room saying a bunch of bullshit that isn't actually tied to conceptions and even regurgitating this on final exams and so forth. And none of it is teaching and none of it's learning. Even though it happens in a classroom and it's at a university and so on. So then if there isn't such evidence and these conceptions aren't tied to sense and so forth, then this teaching is called persuasion. Or Hobbes calls it persuasion. And what it produces in the here is not knowledge. So don't say that it's actually learning. But what it produces is belief or bare opinion. Opinion that might be true or it might be false. Now, in a sense, the only teaching that's really possible is of mathematical subjects. Because only mathematical subjects aren't necessarily true and aren't objects of opinion. Matters of fact, can the conceptions and the representations we give of them can be true or they can be false? So would even science then not be truly learning? Well, mathematics is science. But physics might not be true learning if it's necessarily tied to matters of fact and not merely consequences of how terms and language are used. It may, however, be possible to put physics on a footing equivalent to mathematics where it has the same uncertainty. In theory, that could be possible, in which case there really could be such a thing as teaching and learning physics. And by the same token, although this is much more remote, it might be possible to put political theory on such a strong footing. Such that we have axioms and definitions that are of the same strength as those in mathematics, in which case it would be possible to both teach and therefore to learn about politics. And that is the goal, that is the methodological goal of what he's trying to do, is put political science onto a basis of actual science. As it stands, all the writings that exist about the faculty's passions, manners, and so forth of people, moral, philosophy, or policy, government, and laws, what he calls, in general, dogmatism as opposed to mathematics. Dogmatism means belief-mongering, basically, trafficking in opinions. Everything that has been written up until the birth of Hobbes, or the writing of Hobbes, is mere dogmatism and is not tied to these kind of definitions. And therefore, there can't be talk and can't be learned. Is that to say, is he trying to say that his theory, like Malth's, is not open to interpretation? Like, that his concept of law can't be fixed? Well, that's what he's aiming at, that it wouldn't admit of controversy, that he could produce something that just as there's no controversy about triangles, how many sides they have. Like, if you understand the definition of a triangle, you know how many sides they have. But there are interpretations of triangles, like one is a nice fossilism, one is an equal lateral. OK, but those are truths. Those are things that follow from the definitions of those. So he's trying to say that law can't be massed. So yes, and his object is to put it on that kind of basis. So there are different interpretations of triangles in the sense that, well, for some people, the interior angles actually add up to the sum of less than two right angles. Because they consider sort of lopsided things to be. Yeah, like other philosophers of law, like H. L. Hart, will say that law can always be interpreted in even the most seemingly obvious law can have different interpretations. Now, he may be making a point about how people relate to the laws. So I don't know, not having read this, I can't interpret what he's saying. But for Hobbes, that would just result in the possibility of controversy about what the laws are, disagreements, and thus, you could only be offering opinions. Or if that was true, if the strong version of what you were saying is true, then politics couldn't ever be a science. All it could ever be is probabilities about my opinions about things. Okay, and that may very well be the case. You might think that's really how it is. There is no science in politics, there's nothing like mathematics at all. Okay, but Hobbes' ambition is to put it on that and leave no room for ambiguity, and not leave it up to different people at different times, or people in different cultures, or different genders or whatever, having different interpretations about what's going on. He wants to agree, because all of those are the seeds of disagreement, and in fact, war and strife and conflict. Okay, the only way to eliminate those would be if we could get everybody to agree on what the laws should be, and thus how we should actually behave. So we'll have to see whether we think he actually accomplishes that or not. But no, in his view, there are totally unambiguous laws of nature, as we'll see, that don't admit of other interpretations and cannot reasonably be denied. Okay, so if you're interpretation of what Hart is saying is true, it's very anti-Hobbesian, as it were. Or he's recognizing this point that Hobbes saying that it's all confusions of war that nobody has risen above that, okay? Now, I'll pass very quickly over other kinds of speech acts that he says are possible, because we can use language not just to teach or learn, but also to counsel each other, to promise things to each other, to threaten each other, instigate or appease each other, and so forth. The most important thing for our purposes is that we can use language to command each other. Okay, now what is a command? A speech by which we signify to another person our appetite or desire to have anything done, or left undone, for a reason that's contained in the will itself. By the way, what is the will? We talked about this last time. It's a very reductive account of what will is. Yeah. Will is the last appetite, the one that kind of rules out over your, and rules out, and ultimately, it's directed to make the decision you make. Yeah, to take the action, that's right. Will is just the last conception you have, either, and which basically could be represented as either a desire or a fear and aversion, and it's the last one that you have. So, the command is when we signify to somebody else we have this appetite or desire to happen, and that comes from the last stage of our will. Now, a law is just defined as a special kind of command. A law is when the command is a sufficient reason to move us to the action. Okay, now that is a very unconventional definition of law. Okay, so we have some people who aspire to go on to law school here. They should take note of this because this is, this is an early and important definition of law, and it has big ramifications, and there are certainly other conceptions of law, but this is the one that we have to deal with. Law is a command that constitutes a sufficient reason for us to act in a certain way. And from this, we will get laws of nature and law and political laws. They will all be, insofar as they are natural or political laws, sufficient reasons to move us to some action. Go ahead. Yeah, I'm curious in his, I believe his definition of honor is, he said honor is just the recognition of power in some other person, or recognition of power, generally. So, I'm curious if, when a command is made, most times, at least in my conception, when a command is made, there's often sort of an unspoken threat or an unspoken power play in a command. So many commands need to do something. They are doing so on the belief that I am sufficiently recognizing they're power enough to take that command and undertake it. And so, in his conception of law, is the power or the threat of another person, if that is a sufficient reason to move me to that action, does that be your fact that they have power over you to make them? It's an interesting point, and you might think of it like that, but it doesn't actually seem to enter into his conception of command or law. So, even if nobody believed this, or only powerless people had this conception, they could still issue a command. That is, they could still, so somebody much less powerful than you, your little brother, who you normally dominate completely, can still order you to stop or order you to give me a piece of that candy or something, making his, now, that doesn't mean you're obligated to follow through, but if they give a sufficient reason, like stop hitting me because it's illegal and you're causing war and this is a crime and so forth and that's sufficient, then it's a law. Now, in Hobbes' view, you can break laws. In fact, that's crucial that laws can be broken and commands can be disobeyed. That's why this notion of natural law, like thinking of gravity as being a law, is completely asinine, because nobody can break the so-called law of gravity, so it's not a law, okay, it's not a command. It's not like, make sure you don't just float away while you're sitting there, right? I'd really prefer if you don't, you know, just go up into the upper atmosphere right now while you're sitting here, but instead stay on the ground. So he does not remember his abhorrence of metaphors and so forth. Laws have to be literally something, okay? And laws don't govern material bodies and they don't, they are commands that contain a sufficient reason for the action. I think one possible way to answer his question, maybe, I think Hobbes will also agree, probably, is he might say, yeah, they're like law, they're people who commands the law, but actually they're also, they play different roles. I mean, they could be the one who stipulates a law, but they should also be the one who obeys a law. Yeah, of course they should be, because if it's a law, then the law contains a sufficient reason to follow it. And so generally those who command others to do things have the same reason to follow it as the people they're commanding, but they need not be, okay? So, and it is, of course, true that generally those who issue commands are people that are more powerful, okay? Issuing, me issuing commands. I mean, I could issue a command to Donald Trump and say, leave office because, and then I could even produce a sufficient reason why that should happen. In fact, I think that's exactly what's happening right now. Okay, but that doesn't, it doesn't follow from commanding someone that they do it or even giving them a sufficient reason that they do it. So for Hobbes, the main qualification to make the law is that it contains sufficient reason and not necessarily that the actions follow it. Correct, correct, absolutely, that's right. And so this is why I'm begging you to see the difference between what he calls, he uses both terms laws of nature and natural law, but do not confuse that with this metaphorical and confusing thing that is based on a medieval conception of the cosmos that says that there are laws that can't be broken as it were, right? Laws that govern the material objects or something like that. Those aren't laws and most people don't think of those as laws. They can be axioms or principles or something like that, but they are not laws. Well, one half of us could think of and the other half could think that it's not but one of those halves would be right and another would be wrong because these would be contradictory statements and those statements would then, we could analyze those into the senses that pertain to the concepts in them and then we would trace that back to sense and it would actually conform to sense in one case and not in the other. Okay, so there is a subjective element because when I hear a law, I wonder should I obey this law or not? You know, the law says you can't smoke a pub and out when you're on the beach. Should I, do I think I want to obey that or not? Do I think that's a sufficient reason not to do it or something like that? So each of us subjectively has to think of that but there's a fact of the matter as to whether there's a sufficient reason for it and it has to do with the meaning of the command and that has to do with it's being tied to conceptions and ultimately tied to senses and sense at the ground level, there will be a sense there that validates that concept or not then of two contradictory sets of laws or interpretations of the law only one can be correct. Very interesting questions. Okay, now that's all stipulated and that's all background. Now let's move to what he actually says about human nature and laws of nature. So in chapter 14, absolutely essential to this whole thing. He says, I've already reviewed human nature and now he has an extremely reductive account. He says it comes down to strength of body, experience, reason and passions. Okay, that's everything we've said about human nature can be grouped into those four claims and he points out that it's easily possible for someone who's weaker in strength or weaker in their reasoning capability, their widths and so forth to destroy the power of somebody who's stronger so little force is needed for the taking of life. Okay, you can always just sneak up on somebody and take their life, kill them or injure them. Okay, and just because you're weaker than them in strength or weaker than them in mind doesn't prevent that from being effective. So he says that we can conclude from that that people that are considered in mere nature ought to admit among themselves equality so that they can claim no more than maybe esteemed moderate. Now, that is not yet a law. That's just a kind of credential recommendation that because somebody, there is some fundamental equality which is that basically anyone can kill anyone. Okay, and it doesn't matter if you're strong or weak, man or a woman, American or Iranian, we can all kill each other. We all have that power. We all have enough strength of body and strength of mind that anyone can kill anyone else. And because we have a diversity of passions, some of us like chocolate ice cream, some of us like vanilla ice cream and then there's all kinds of other things that we like and dislike. And these are diverse between us. Some of us hope for precedence and superiority, for being stronger, for being the one who's always in the position to have their commands obeyed instead of ignored and so forth. And we, some people want this not only when they're equal to other people, like I want my equal power recognized, but also I might be weaker than other people, but I just like to be equal to them or even I'd like to be stronger than them. The passions I have for chocolate ice cream means that I wanna have more money than those people so that I can have chocolate ice cream whenever I want. Okay, so the recognition that there's human differences and so forth doesn't, although it should make us think that we're all essentially on an equal footing, what it in fact does is make us think I'd like to be unequal to all these other people. And so people who are moderate and look for no more but equality end up obnoxious to the force of others who would attempt to subdue them. So all this talk about equality and let's all be equal and let's all get an equal share of everything is annoying to those who would like to have more than their fair share and would like to have more than others. And again, would like to have their, as you said, people who have more power have their commands obeyed and those who have less get them ignored. Well, if you like having your commands obeyed then you think it's really obnoxious when people say, no, let's all treat ourselves as equally and have an equal say here. And hence from that proceeds a general diffidence of mankind. Diffidence means sort of shyness or sort of recoiling from other people out of mutual fear of what they might do. And so to quote him, necessity of nature takes men to will and desire the good for them or in Latin bonum ipsi, that which is good for themselves and to avoid that which is hurtful. But most of all that terrible enemy of nature death from which we expect both loss of all power and also the greatest of bodily pains in the losing of our lives. It's not against reason that a man does all he can to preserve his own body and limbs both from death and pain. Okay, you just think about your own good and you think I don't wanna be in pain and I don't wanna lose all my power. I don't want to die. And that is a will and a desire that rises naturally. Okay, and what is not against reason people say is right or just and that we ought to be able to use our powers and ability if it doesn't conflict with reason. Therefore, it's a right of nature. He says that every man meaning every person every human being preserve their own life and limbs with all the power they have. Okay, and that is a natural law that you can do whatever it takes to survive and nobody can take that natural right away from you if it's being threatened. All of us have the right to use whatever power we have to try to survive, try to live, try to continue on. That just stems from the fact that we have these powers according to nature and we exercise them naturally. Okay, but this becomes more complicated because to quote from section 11 of chapter 14 to the offensiveness of man's nature one to another there is added a right of every person to everything whereby one person invades with right and another with right resists that invasion. And people thereby live in a perpetual diffidence and study how to, he says preoccupate how to bug each other basically, how to bother each other. Okay, so we all in a state of nature have a right to everything that's out there. Nature provides everything it does to everyone. Anyone can go claim anything in it that they want and that they need for their survival. The problem is that there's scarce resources out there and some people want more of things. And so in this natural state of liberty where we all have a right to everything the natural condition is what he calls war. And this is where the memorable expression from the Leviathan comes that the state of nature is a war of all against all. A war of every person against every other person. Okay, so if there's no constraints we're all just trying to exercise our powers then we must necessarily come into conflict over scarce resources like land and food, sexual partners, places to live, means of security and so forth. Then we are all at war with each other. Why, because war is defined as nothing else but that time wherein the will and intention of contending by forces either by words or actions sufficiently declared. By the way, this is why in that old fashioned American constitution that we have we limit the power to conduct or wage war to the legislature and say that that body is the only one that has the ability to wage war. Nobody cares about that anymore and nobody's paid any attention to that for the last 100 years or so. But the idea there is that we ought to contain the will and intention in order to declare that because declaring it by words or action is it. And whether anybody declares it or not if you act, so as to do it, taking up arms against other people whether to defend yourself or attack them you are in a state of war. Now it is supposed from the equality of strength in other natural faculties that no person is of sufficient strength or might power to assure himself for any long time of preserving himself while remaining in a state of hostility and war. So even if you're the strongest human that's ever existed even if you're the smartest human that ever existed that isn't going to protect you for very long in the state of nature. Let's go back to what that exercise we did on day one. Remember the game that we played? So some people tricked others in the first round and they got A's and they were smarter than the other people and they were in a stronger position and so they stood in the front of the room with all that glory and honor that was due to them as having greater powers than the lowly B's not to mention the F's. But none of them were strong enough if other people cooperated and agreed to go against them nobody could maintain that position. No one is stronger than that multitude, okay? And so another famous expression from Leviathan, life in this state of nature, usually only this part's quoted is nasty, brutish, and short, okay? But he says, what he actually says is life in this state of nature is poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short, okay? So before we have any laws and when we're all just exercising our powers as we naturally have a right to, we naturally have a right to anything that we need to exercise our powers when we're all exercising that and we're ever coming into conflict with others and there's no possibility of any one person attaining such supremacy that other people can't attack them, then life is poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short, okay, and that is the natural condition that humans find themselves in. Now, hopefully life has changed a little bit. So hopefully we have risen above this state of nature and it's not so poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short, but in many respects it is still. And that's to the extent that we are still in a state of nature, okay? And there are many respects in which we are still in a state of nature. In fact, it's a good exercise to figure out exactly how far we have risen above that, that state or that condition. Now, I think somebody had a hand that I missed, yeah. I was gonna say that for the bullet above that, the war one is like in a world where we have drones and a lot of warfare isn't conducted in this way, there's a lot of warfare that's conducted in a completely lopsided way. Yes, asymmetric warfare, yes. What would Hobbes say? Would he say that this still applies? It applies even more, it shows that even more, okay? Less powerful people using asymmetric weapons can defeat the empire of the United States is threatened by the ability of an Iranian general to make crude roadside bombs. So much of a threat that we had to go back into the state of nature where you can do whatever you need to protect yourself and launch a drone attack against that one individual from a poor country that is supposedly such an enormous threat to this entire country and this entire empire that we have to destroy immediately. I mean, that's essentially a Hobbesian, essentially the justification given by Trump for that attack on Soleimani was that we are in a Hobbesian state of nature and we have to defend ourselves. So would Hobbes have agreed with that? Or would a Hobbes have said no, you're wrong, that this is a supposition that isn't based and that we are the ones with the... Well, strangely, I think he would agree with it because Hobbes, I think, doesn't take his theory far enough. I think he ends up concluding that ultimately what we're constrained by is sovereign nation states. And that within a nation state, you have to recognize the power of the sovereign and give up the right that you have to do whatever you want to take whatever you want. But the relationship between sovereign nations, he says, is just the state of nature. So if we just take each country, the United States, Iran, Russia, and so forth, the relationship between all of those countries is exactly a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all, where anyone can do anyone anything they want and no one has any power to throw it off. Now, there's attempts to overcome that, to establish international law, an international court of justice, which if countries subordinated themselves to, then that actually would fit a lot of Hobbes' analysis and then we would be constrained by that and forget that. Now, the United States is not willing to do that. We're not party to this international court of justice where if you assassinate foreign leaders, you have to answer for that and we have some kind of civil way that we decide if that's right or wrong. The government of this country rejects that. We do not subject ourselves to that. So we remain exactly in a Hobbesian state of nature relative to these other countries. So what is the justification for assassinating a foreign leader? It can only be that we're allowed to do whatever we want to protect ourselves. We're in a state of nature. Okay, so, but I think the analysis should, we haven't gotten into the positive way he thinks we overcome this and that we get within states that we think they can protect us against and overcome this war of all against all. But I think he should have pressed the analysis and the eventual conclusion is that we must have a world government in order to stop conflicts like this. But absent having a world government and institutions like an international court of justice that actually has justice between these states, there is no justice between these states. So you hear a lot, I hear a lot of stuff about just war theory, for example. There is no such thing. Nobody has a theory of just war. War can't be just. War is exactly what justice isn't. Justice is something designed exactly to overcome war. Okay, but in war, why in war are you allowed to kill and mutilate and torture and so forth in prison these people? Those are very nice things. Why does that happen? Why do we do that? Why can we use uranium tipped weapons against innocent civilians and so forth? Because we're in a state of nature and anyone in a state of nature can do whatever they have to do in order to survive. But if you don't think that, if you think people should be restrained and not able to do that, then they must be submitting to some kind of higher authority and some kind of other set of laws. But you have to do that. You have to be willing to submit to those laws. So why would people submit to laws? Why wouldn't they just go ahead? So yeah, this is probably where you're going to go from here, but even though he says, again, laws don't necessarily, laws are things that we have a right to do, then you'll come from our reasons, but they don't necessarily be followed. So even though Hobbes says, we have a right to defend our bodily autonomy, we have a right to defend our security, there is, he still makes room for the fact that some people will choose in certain instances to sacrifice themselves, that there is still an element, even though he's saying that this is a law of nature, there is still an element of choice, whether or not we follow that law of nature, even on the scale of nation states, there is still a choice for that nation to make the decision. Yeah, there's always that choice, because again, it's a law of nature, not this confusing natural law idea, okay? So, and even if the United States was willing to go along with the International Court of Justice, okay, suppose we decided to go along with that, okay? And we should, because there actually is a sufficient reason for us to do so, and we're actually a lawless rogue country for not doing it, like other countries have signed up to, okay? So, but even if we did sign up to it, we could easily violate it, okay? And the, and other people who have signed up to it have violated it, and that's why people go, why former warlords in Yugoslavia are sitting in prisons in the Netherlands now, because their countries agreed to subject themselves to that, and they couldn't just use the argument, hey, it's a state of nature out there, no it's not, you agreed to abide by these rules about how war would be conducted, and then you violated those, so we have a right to, so, I mean, it's really important to remember that, that just because somebody passes a law doesn't mean everybody follows it, okay? And not everything that's called a law actually has a sufficient reason, like there might not actually be a sufficient reason why I can't smoke a joint on the beach, okay? And so I break that so-called law, I don't think it's a natural law, okay? The only things that are really laws are those things that actually have sufficient reasons for it, okay? And the basis for sufficient reason for Hobbes is production of peace, seeking after peace, reason dictates for every person for his own good to seek after peace as far forth as there is hope to attain the same, and to strengthen himself with all help he can procure for his own defense against those from whom peace, from whom peace cannot be obtained, okay? So that is the basis of all laws of nature actually. Our reason is telling us we need to do whatever it is to survive in the state of nature, but we can't survive in the state of nature because even weak people could, even people much weaker than us could kill us easily if they wanted to. So what we have to do is seek peace and we have to strengthen and form alliances in order to protect ourselves. We have to get together with other people and say, okay, I'll choose B when they ask for what grade you want in the class. And then we'll both choose B and then we'll both be on an equal footing and it'll be fine. And that's what you should do. And when people go to war with you, that is they choose A when you chose B, then you need to seek after peace. And that means strengthening yourself by joining with other people who can combat that person. Okay, so these are the basic precepts that follow the law of nature. There can therefore be no other law of nature than reason nor other precepts of natural law than those which declare us unto the ways of peace and where the same may be obtained and defense when it may not. Okay, so one precept of the law of nature, therefore, is that everyone divests themselves. Divest means relinquish or transfer. Okay, divest himself of the right that he has to all things by nature. Okay, so it is a law of nature that I say I willingly give up, either give it up entirely or transfer to somebody else, this power to use for us and destroy and kill whoever I want. And that precept follows from the law of nature that commands us to pursue peace, to always pursue peace. Okay, he says, for when diverse humans, that means humans that have different passions, different interests, different thoughts, different abilities and powers, some are strong, some are weak, some are smart, some are dumb, when diverse humans have a right not only to all things else, but also to another's possessions. If they use the same, there is invasion and resistance, which is war, war is contrary to the law of nature, which says always pursue peace. Okay, so that is the most fundamental part of the law of nature. Now, there are other precepts that follow from this. So Hobbes thinks that you can then derive other laws like that you ought to uphold your agreements and that, or just to take some others at random, that you allow commerce and traffic from other people that doesn't harm you, that you let diplomats and so forth go and come freely and so forth. Now, one could dispute in the case of any of these, do these actually follow necessarily from the basic law, the one that we just derived from the reasoning as I've done, the precept that says that we have to, in all cases, pursue peace. So if you could show that some of those laws like allowing unfettered commerce might not actually promote peace. One might, for example, think that capitalism has some problems and that we ought to fetter some of the unrestricted trade. But what is one doing then? One is actually deriving a different precept of the law of nature, taking the same assumption that we all want peace and that we give up our rights that we have by nature to everything in order to secure that. So, I won't dwell on but you should look at and ask yourself if these other precepts that he derives if you think they follow. Now, if you don't think that he's got his original one, if we don't have total consensus that he's right about this, we ought all to sacrifice the right we have by nature to everything that's out there, including, like, I have a right to everything that's yours and yours and yours and yours and I can go out and just take that if I want. We all have that right by nature, but don't you all agree that I should willingly divest myself of that right for the sake of peace?