hobbes's state of war
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H o b b e s ' s S ta te o f W a r i Jean Hampton
Every reader of Leviathan knows that in Hobbes's state of
nature there is a war "of every one against every one", and
that any individual's life in this state is "nasty, brutish and
short". Moreover, this war is supposed to be a result of every individual doing what, according to Hobbes, a human
being cannot help but do: namely, pursue the satisfaction
of his or her own desires, chief of which is the desire for
self-preservation. However, readers of Leviathan are startled
to find that after a description of this horrible natural war
in Chapter 13 of Leviathan, Hobbes goes on to define and
defend 19 laws of nature in Chapters 14 and 15 of that
book, and these laws dictate such moral behavior as keeping
contracts, being merciful, and showing gratitude. Some
modern interpreters of Hobbes, especially A. E. Taylor and
Howard Warrender, have contended that the appearance of
these laws means that Hobbes's ethical position has to be
understood as a variant of the deontological natural law
view common among Hobbes's contemporaries, and Taylor
even considers Hobbes a precursor of Kant. 2
But if we attribute this deontological natural law view
to Hobbes, then how can he establish that his state of
nature is a state of war? That is, if these laws are, as Hobbes
himself says, "immutable and eternal" (Lev, 15, 38, 79) 3 and commanded by God (Lev, 15, 41, 80), why aren't they
binding in the state of nature and why don' t people follow
these laws so that peace rather than war prevails in this
state? A seventeenth century critic of Hobbes, the Earl of
Clarendon, complains:
How should it else come to pass, that Mr. Hobbes, whil'st he is demolishing the whole frame of Nature for want of order to support it, and makes it unavoidably necessary for every man to cut his neighbors throat... I say, how comes it to pass, that.., he would in the same, and the next Chapter, set down such a Body of Laws prescribed by Nature itself, as are im- mutable and eternal? that there appears, by this own shewing, a full remedy against all that confusion, for avoiding whereof he hath devis'd all that unnatural and impossible Contract and Covenant? 4
Perhaps Hobbes could answer this question by invoking his
psychological claim that human beings are unable to do
Topoi 4 (1985), 47 60. 0167-7411/85.15. (~) 1985 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
anything that they do not perceive to be in their best
interest (see Lev, 6, 1 -6 , 23 -24 ) , so that they are unable,
in particular, to act on these moral laws. But if people can't
act on these laws, why does Hobbes bother to articulate
them? Indeed, the fact that we can use Hobbesian psychol-
ogy to undercut action from the laws of nature shows that
the deontological meta-ethical position which the laws ap-
pear to represent is made otiose by his psychology. 5
So should we save the relevance of the objectivist
ethical position which the laws of nature seem to represent by abandoning Hobbes's psychology? We cannot, for if we do so, Clarendon would be right: we would have to attrib-
ute to Hobbesian people the ability to act on and recognize
the validity of the laws of nature such that the state of
nature would become cooperative and peaceful rather than
vicious and violent. Hence the better way to make Hobbes's
argument consistent and his state of nature violent would
seem to be to abandon the laws of nature. Understood as deontological natural laws, they are rendered functionless by
Hobbes's psychology, and not only do they make it dif-
ficult for him to argue that the state of nature is a state
of war, but they are also inconsistent with many passages
in Leviathan and other of Hobbes's writings in which he
appears to adopt a proto-Humean subjectivist meta-ethics, a position which actually is consistent with his psy- chology 6
But jettisoning two chapters of Leviathan seems a bit
drastic, and we should be sure that making Hobbes's argu-
ment consistent and saving his claim that the state of
nature is a state of war actually requires such drastic
action. Consider the fact that the laws only seemed to fit badly into the Hobbesian argument because they were
interpreted as objective, God-derived rules defining right
and wrong action. But should they be so interpreted?
Theorists such as J. W. N. Watkins 7 propose that they
should not, and interpret them as hypothetical imperatives of the form:
If you seek peace (which is conducive to your self-preservation), then be just, or merciful, or grateful, and so forth.
On this view, the laws are given an instrumentalist inter-
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48 JEAN HAMPTON
pretat ion; they dictate ways of achieving an object, i.e.
peace, which almost every person in the state of nature
would desire in virtue of his or her desire for self-preserva-
tion. Thus interpreted, the laws can be acted upon by
people described by the Hobbesian psychology and they are
consistent with the subjectivist meta-ethics suggested else-
where in Leviathan in which good and bad are defined by
an individual's desires and in which "rat ional" or "r ight"
action is defined instrumentally as that action which best
achieves an individual 's desire-defined goals. But perhaps
most important of all, this interpretat ion is actually sug-
gested by Hobbes himself at the end of Chapter 15 when he
characterizes the laws o f nature as
Conclusions, or Theoremes concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defence of themselves. (Lev, 15, 41, 80)
This characterization strongly suggests that the laws have
the hypothet ical structure Watkins at tr ibutes to.them.
But Watkins' interpretat ion doesn' t go quite far enough
because if the laws are understood as hypothet ical impera-
tives binding for all those who seek their own preservation,
then why don ' t such people obey these laws? Why aren't they followed by the self-interested human beings in
the Hobbesian state of nature such that this state is relative-
ly peaceful and cooperative? In this article I want to pursue
this question. That is, while agreeing with Watkins that the
laws of nature should be interpreted as hypothet ical imper-
atives consistent with Hobbes 's psychology and the sub-
jectivist meta-ethics which he appears to propound in
Leviathan, I want to pursue their interpretat ion more fully
so as to understand why these laws don ' t form a complete
remedy for the chaos in the natural state. And to do this, I
will have to pursue the reasons behind the chaos and vio-
lence in that state. Once we understand why warfare
inevitably erupts when there is no government, we will be
in a posit ion to understand why Hobbes's laws of nature,
even if endorsed and accepted by all the people of the
natural state, would fail to end that warfare.
But understanding the cause of conflict in the state of
nature is harder than it looks. The text o f Leviathan is quite
confusing on this question, perhaps reflecting Hobbes 's own
confusion about precisely what he should say on this issue.
Initially upon reading the book, one seems to find two
accounts of the origins of conflict in the state of nature.
The first account is what I call the "Passions" account o f
conflict. According to this account, cooperat ion among
people is generally rational - that is, it is generally in one's
interest to keep contracts, be grateful and so forth, because
performing these actions leads to peace and thus to longer
life. Nonetheless, people do not perform these actions and
fail to follow the valid hypothet ical imperatives leading to
peace because, according to this account, certain passions
disrupt many people 's reasoning and cause them to behave
irrationally, while the rest fear this disruption and (rational-
ly) refuse to cooperate in order to avoid being exploited.
Much that Hobbes says in Chapter 15 suggests this explana-
t ion o f conflict. For example, in that chapter he makes a
rather lengthy at tack on the reasoning of the " foo l" who
implies among other things that it is rational not to keep
one's bargain in the state of nature even if one 's partner
has already done so.
The Foole hath sayd in his heart, there is no such thing as Justice; and sometimes also with his tongue; seriously alleag- ing, that every roans conservation, and contentment, being committed to his own care, there could be no reason, why every man might not do what he thought conduced thereunto: and therefore also to make, or not make; keep, or not keep Covenants, was not against Reason, when it conduced to ones benefit . . . . This specious reasoning is neverthelesse false.
For the question is not of promises mutuall, where there is no security of performance on either side . . . . But either where one o f the parties has performed already; or where there is a Power to make him performe; there is the question whether it be against reason, that is, against the benefit of the other to performe, or not. And I say it is not against reason. (Lev, 15, 4-5, 73 ; my emphasis.) 8
Hobbes goes on to explain that keeping one's bargain in the
state o f nature when one has adequate assurance that one's
partner has done or will do so promotes one's reputat ion as
t rustworthy, and this makes it possible for one to enter
into confederacies with others for mutual security and
prosperity. Thus he suggests that anyone who reasons as
the fool does and who therefore reneges on his contracts
acts irrationally.
The Leviathan is also littered with passages in which
Hobbes blames people 's "irrat ional" passions - especially
the passion for glory - as the cause of strife in the state of
nature. For example, in Chapter 14, he appears to indicate
that the motivations to break a contract which men fear
are "irrat ional" ones based on desires other than the desire
for self-pre servation:
...he that performeth first, has no assurance the other will performe after; because the bonds of words are too weak to bridle mens ambition, avarice, anger, and other Passions, without the feare of some coercive Power. (Lev, 14, 18, 68)
And in Chapter 17 he names those natural passions which
are responsible for warfare and they are "part ial i ty, Pride, Revenge, and the l ike" - that is, passions related to the
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HOBBES'S STATE OF WAR 49
desire for self-glorification and capable of disrupting rational efforts at achieving one's own preservation. Finally, in his explication of why creatures like ants and bees are more sociable than human beings (Chapter 17, 6 -12 , 86-87), Hobbes never once invokes the natural passion for self-preservation as the cause of human conflict, but instead constantly blames "vain-glory": in particular, human competition for honor and dignity, the relishing of what is
"eminent", the desire to prove oneself wiser than the rest,
the sophistical talent of using words to transform evil into good (for personal advancement), and the ease with which
people are personally offended; thus implying that this "irrational" passion (or others' fear of it) is the chief cause
of conflict and non-cooperation among human beings. Hobbes's earlier works also place particular emphasis on
the disruptive role of the desire for glory in the rational
pursuit of our self-preservation. But the passions account is a dangerous one for Hobbes
to adopt - dangerous because it fails to support adequately his argument that it is rational for people to institute an absolute sovereign. Consider that if we believe Hobbes's psychological pronouncements about the predominance of
the desire for self-preservation in almost all of us, the number of times people would be disrupted by passions more powerful than this desire should be fairly small. But then it would seem that cooperation should be quite wide- spread in the state of nature. That is, if self-preservation dictates cooperation, and people generally pursue their self- preservation, then it would seem that they would generally cooperate. Of course, even rational people might well fear
that their partners were irrational, and an expected utility calculation might tell them not to cooperate with their
partners. Moreover, the greater the stakes involved in the cooperative venture, the more likely this would be true. Still, one would expect that in many medium or low risk ventures where one had excellent evidence that one's
partners were rational and unlikely to be disrupted by
these passions, cooperation would be more rational than non-cooperation. That is, an expected utility calculation would generally dictate cooperation because of the prospect
of significant gains at low risk. Thus, Hobbes's psychology, when combined with the passions account of conflict, establishes at most only moderate amounts of conflict in
that state, certainly not total war. But why wouldn't it be good news for Hobbes that his
state of nature was really quite a nice place after all? The reason is that unless Hobbes can establish total war of all against all in the natural state, he cannot argue that there is any need for an absolute sovereign. Thus, in order to make
his political argument, he must reject all characterizations of the natural state and the behavior of its inhabitants that would make that state anything less than a violent anarchy. Otherwise, Hobbes's state of nature will look remarkably similar to Locke's. In this state of nature, men and women are able to cooperate, make contracts and thereby implicit-
ly recognize private property. Why do these reasonable creatures need an absolute sovereign? Locke persuasively argued that they did not. And it is impossible for Hobbes to avoid these Lockean conclusions if his sovereign is only
needed to "police" human interactions and punish irra-
tional people. A radical political solution for disorder, like the institution of an absolute sovereign, is only needed if radical division among people exists, and insofar as the
passions account of conflict implies that frequent coopera-
tion and contractual exchange would occur in the state of nature, it does not make the conflict between people deep-seated enough to warrant the drastic solution Hobbes proposes. In such a situation, one only needs a ruler to
enforce the already existing patterns of cooperation, one does not need an absolute sovereign to create those patterns
of cooperation. So, is there any way that Hobbes could salvage the
passions account so that it could generate total warfare and thus allow him to draw the political conclusion he wants? To do so, he would have to argue that affairs in the state of nature would invariably be such that cooperation wasn't worth the risk, i.e. that an expected utility calculation would almost always counsel against cooperation. How could Hobbes argue this point? He would have to maintain
that even where the losses associated with non-cooperation
were relatively small, the probability that one's partner
would renege was very high. But such a high probability would mean a high incidence of these disruptive passions in
the population. And if action from these passions were frequent and wide-spread, self-preservation would seem not to be the dominant desire Hobbes says it is. Hence this way
of fleshing out Hobbes's passions account would conflict
with his psychology of human beings. But does Hobbes have to be wedded to this psychological
characterization of human beings as persistent pursuers of their self-preservation? The answer is yes. Hobbes's argu- ment for instituting an absolute sovereign is that doing so will promote one's self-preservation by bringing about peace. And if people are so frequently moved by passions contrary to self-preservation that almost total warfare is generated, how could there be general agreement on insti- tuting an absolute sovereign? The passions disrupting cooperative activities in general in the state of nature would
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50 JEAN HAMPTON
also seem to disrupt the creation and complet ion o f the
contract to institute the sovereign. In other words, if
these passions are so deep-seated as to generate total war, it
would seem that the rational pursuit o f self-preservation
would not be powerful enough among enough of the
populat ion to bring about peace. Thus, it is to preserve the
almost universal applicabil i ty o f his hypothet ical imperative
to institute an absolute sovereign - indeed, to preserve the
almost universal applicabil i ty of all his laws of nature - that
Hobbes credits people with the predominant desire to
preserve themselves, and this means that the psychology
with which this interpretat ion of the passions account
conflicts, cannot be abandoned in favor of that account.
So no mat ter which way we move as we try to salvage
this account we are impaled by one horn or another o f a
bad dilemma. If we accept that account, either we also
accept Hobbes 's psychology, in which case we end up with
too much cooperat ion in the state of nature to necessitate
an absolute sovereign, or we postulate the existence of
powerful and widespread passions disrupting people 's
pursuit of self-preservation, in which case we have not
only abandoned that psychology but endangered the
applicabil i ty o f Hobbes 's hypothet ical imperative to insti-
tute the sovereign.
It is perhaps because Hobbes appreciated the dangerous
political implications o f the passions account o f conflict that
he presented a very different kind of explanation of the
origins of conflict in Chapters 11, 13, and 14 of Leviathan.
In those chapters and primarily in Chapter 13, conflict is
blamed on rat ionali ty rather than on the disruptive passions
such .as glory; hence I call this the Rationality Account o f
Conflict. On this account, reason in service to desire for
self-preservation dictates war rather than peace in the state
of nature. The first premiss of the argument is that the
dominant passion in almost all human beings is the desire
for self-preservation. And, says Hobbes, the desire to live
means the desire to satisfy constantly arising needs and
wants generated by a living body. Hobbes does not say here
that human beings have an infinite number of desires, only
that they will have a large number o f desires that will never
cease as long as a person lives. But in order to satisfy their
numerous desires, people need the material means to do so.
According to Hobbes, the search for means is the search
for "power" (Lev, 11, 2, 47), and whenever a person finds an object that can be used to satisfy his desire, that person
believes himself to have a "r ight" to that object.
Alas, because each person desires and believes he has the
right to so many objects, people will inevitably come to
desire and try to appropriate the same object. But, says
Hobbes, since there is a rough equality of strength and
mental abili ty among people in this state, no one is ready to
acknowledge another 's superior right to an object by
virtue of this other person's superior strength or superior
claim to it, and competi t ion for it is created. Hence, says
Hobbes, compet i t ion is the first cause o f conflict, i.e. it
"maketh men invade for Gain" (Lev, 13, 7, 62):
...if any two men desire the same thing, which neverthelesse they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their End, (which is principally their owne conservation, and sometimes their delectation only,) endeavour to destroy, or subdue one an other . . . . if one plant, sow, build, or possesse a convenient Seat, others may probably be expected to come prepared with forces united, to dispossesse, and deprive him, not only of the fruit of his labour, but also of his life, or liberty. And the Invader is in the like danger of another. (Lev, 13, 3, 61)
And, clearly, insofar as Hobbes is assuming that competi-
t ion for goods will exist in the state of nature, he is assuming
that there will be in that state a "moderate scarcity o f
goods", which Hume tells us is no more than to assume that
the circumstances which make justice necessary actually
prevail in this state. 9
The realization that others are competing for the goods
which one has seized or will want to seize breeds "diffi-
dence", that is, distrust. Each person realizes that to
prevent a t tempts at gaining possession of the goods he has
seized, goods which he needs to further his own preserva-
tion, he must amass as much power as he can; thus he
makes preemptive strikes, using
...force, or wiles, to master the persons of all men he can, so long, till be see no other power great enough to endanger him: And this is no more than his own conservation requireth, and is generally allowed. (Lev, 13, 4, 61)
This distrust therefore constitutes a second cause of con-
flict, based on a desire to preserve oneself; that is, it causes
a person to invade in order to secure a good defense against
his enemies.
It is only at this point that Hobbes says a person in the
state o f nature begins to claim a right to all things. The
danger of at tack on his person, and the advantages of
power seen in preventing attacks on himself and his proper-
ty and in allowing him to make such invasions against
others, mean that there is nothing that could not help him
to further his own life:
...because the condition of Man, (as hath been declared in the precedent Chapter [Chapter 13]) is a condition of Warre of every one against every one; in which case every one is governed by his own Reason; and there is nothing he can make use of, that may not be a help unto him, in preserving his life against his enemyes; It followeth, that in such a condition, every man has a
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HOBBES'S STATE OF WAR 51
Right to every thing; even to one anothers body. (Lev, 14, 4, 64; my emphasis)
However, once people begin to claim this right, there is
competition for every object, and conflict between them
can only escalate in frequency and intensity.
Hobbes could stop here if he liked, having established
two inevitable causes of invasion and quarrel (i.e. competi-
tion and fear) based solely on the rational pursuit of self-
preservation by each person. However, he adds one more
reason for invasion which is not based on this passion, that
is, invasion for glory's sake. However, what is interesting
about this third cause for invasion is that because the
previous two causes of conflict arising out of the desire
to preserve oneself are powerful enough to explain between
them the development of total war in the natural state,
this third cause is really not a necessary part of Hobbes's
argument in Chapter 13 that the state of nature is a state of
total war. Hobbes could easily have done without it. So
perhaps citing vain-glory as a third reason for invasion is
just a harmless addition to the Chapter 13 argument - j u s t a way of making the argument more persuasive to the
reader. We shall see.
It has naturally occurred to recent commentators on Hobbes's works that, given the account of conflict in
Chapter 13, the dilemma all people face in the state of
nature can be pictured using game theoretic tools, in
particular the device of the prisoner's dilemma matrix. 1~
Suppose we consider two people A and B in the state of
nature. Each person has seized a number of goods, wants
more, and hungrily eyes the goods seized by the other.
Each has the choice of invading in order to seize the goods, or refraining from doing so. They reason as the following
payoff matrix indicates:
A
B
not invade invade
not invade 3,3 1,4
invade 4,1 2,2
Each person has a choice of performing one of two actions,
and the numbers in the boxes of the matrix correspond
to their preference orderings (1 is lowest, 4 is highest) for
the state of affairs represented by that box. A ' s preference
orderings are on the left; B 's preference orderings are on the right. Let us consider A's preference orderings first. A reasons that if she and B do not invade one another's territory, each will be able to hold on to the goods they
have thus far procured, a situation which she rates with a
'3 ' (the upper left box). But she also appreciates that if
she does not invade, and B does, then she will most likely
be without any of her goods, enslaved to B, with her self-
preservation seriously endangered, a situation she rates with
a '1 ' (the upper right box). On the other hand, if she invades
and B does not, she will be the master and B the loser, with her power significantly augmented; this is her favorite outcome (rated '4', the lower left box). If both invade, the
situation is poor - the life of each is endangered but war is
at least better than total domination in that each has a chance of "winning it all", whereas if the other is the victor
everything is lost and death a likely possibility (therefore
rated a '2 ' - the lower right box). And if we consider B's preferences for the various outcomes, we see they are
symmetric with hers. But this means that, no matter what
the other person does, it is rational for each person in this
situation to be uncooperative. If the other cooperates, the
first player gains more if he/she doesn't. If the other doesn't
cooperate, once again he/she gains more by not cooperating.
Thus, the PD matrix shows how, in game theoretic lan-
guage, each person in the state of nature finds the action of
invasion "dominates" over the action of non-invasion, in so
far as it "maximizes his security level". But more impor-
tant, it pictures the way in which the predominant cause of
invasion is each person's rational pursuit of self-interest.
So is the rationality account of conflict an adequate
foundation for Hobbes's political conclusion and also
consistent with other premisses in his political argument?
Alas, like the passions account, it fails in both ways. Note
that accepting the rationality account essentially means
abandoning the idea that there are valid hypothetical
imperatives dictating peace. In other words, it means abandoning the idea that there are valid laws of nature. No
matter what your fellow human beings do, you are right
not to cooperate with them. For example, if they keep
their part of a bargain with you, you are right to renege. If they do not keep their part of a bargain with you, again
you are right to renege. Thus accepting the account means
abandoning the idea that these hypothetical imperatives have any kind of validity in that state, and Hobbes did not
want to do that. While he did indeed want to say that no
one should follow these laws, he still maintained that they
were valid in a certain way: he says in Chapter 15 that they are "in foro interno valid" although "in foro externo" not. These words are rather mysterious, and we shall be pursuing their meaning later, but suffice it to say here that accepting the rationality account would simply mean abandoning the
idea that the laws of nature had any validity whatsoever. The fool's position would have to be Hobbes's own. Clearlyl Hobbes was terribly uncomfortable with this, and we
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52 JEAN HAMPTON
should not rest content until and unless we can come up
with an account of conflict which allows us not to have to attribute to him the fool's position on the rationality of total non-cooperation.
But there is another reason for abandoning the rationali-
ty account, and this reason might well explain Hobbes's insistence in Chapter 15 that it is wrong. That reason is that the account doesn't seem to be true! It would be true if
people really were in one-time PD game situations in the state of nature, but a number of critics have argued that
they are not, and that they are in fact in multi-play PD
games. 11 And because any prisoner's dilemma they are in
now is likely to be part of a series of these situations extending indefinitely into the future rather than a one-
time occurrence, it is no longer the case that non-coopera- tion is clearly the best strategy for them to take. To present
this argument, let us use the action of "keeping a contract" as an example of a cooperative venture. If the contractual PD game were sure to be played by two parties in the state of nature only once, the action of reneging on the contract would be the most rational action for both. But, there are parties to a bargain in the natural state who know they will have good reason to contract with each other in the future, and while they know the action of breach is rational in the short run (i.e. in the first game), in the long run they know
this act will result in depriving them of their benefits from future bargains by establishing distrust between them and putting the action of breach in equilibrium. Hence, the argument is that because contractual activity between people in the state of nature is likely to be frequent and
open-ended, 12 the keeping of a contract is always rational because in addition to supplying each with the benefits of
that particular bargain, it acts as a signal to each party that
the other party will keep contracts in the future, and thus enables both to reap the long term profits of constant contractual activity.
Even if one of the parties behaves irrationally by breaking his contractual promise in the first (or successive)games, this "iterated PD game" argument counsels that the long run benefits accruing from faithful contract-keeping would prompt the other party to continue to keep his part of the bargain for a time in order to try to "teach" the other to choose the promise-keeping act. The idea would be to make the other realize that it is in his best interest to reward rather than to punish his partner's cooperative act, because otherwise he will be forcing his partner to renege in forth- coming games, and a pattern of contractual breaches will be established which will deprive both of them of the benefits of future bargains. 13 So the argument would have us
conclude that the Chapter 13 account of conflict is wrong, that rationality counsels cooperation rather than conflict.
Not only does this iterated PD argument for the ration- ality of contract-keeping seem correct, it may even be right to say that it is a plausible interpretation and development of Hobbes's remarks in his answer to the fool. As we have discussed, Hobbes appeals to the benefits of confederacy in this passage in order to persuade us that contract-keeping
is rational, and these benefits would certainly be among the present and future contractual benefits which the iterated PD argument relies on in order to establish the rationality
of keeping any particular bargain. Indeed, modern critics llke Michael Taylor and Edna Ullman-Margalit have inter-
preted Hobbes's remarks on the benefits of confederacy as
an attempt at making the iterated PD argument. 14 In any case, the natural way in which the argument links coopera-
tion with self-preservation makes it fit well with Hobbes's psychology so that it seems to be an argument he shouM have made, even if he didn't clearly see how to do this in
Chapter 15. But if Hobbes accepts the iterated PD argu- ment, he has accepted the idea that reason dictates coopera-
tion. And this means that conflict must be a function of people's irrationality, not their rationality. Thus, accepting
this argument seems to force Hobbes to fall back on the passions account of conflict, which we have already seen is inadequate.
So Hobbes appears to be in a real jam. The rationality account of conflict which it seems that he needs in order to draw his political conclusions is an account which does not follow from the premisses of his argument; and when the passions account (presupposing the iterated PD game argu- ment) is interpreted such that it is consistent with those
premisses, it does not, in turn, allow him to draw these political conclusions. All of this has provided us with an
interesting lesson in the trials and hazards of philosophical theory building! Hobbes's premisses motivate the answer to the fool and thus the passions account of conflict; Hobbes's conclusion appears to presuppose the account of conflict (generating total war) in Chapter 13. Alas for Hobbes, the two accounts conflict.
But what if we could come up with an account of con- flict which had all of the advantages of the passions and rationality accounts, but had none of either account's disadvantages? Such an account would fit with Hobbes's psychological premisses and yet generate enough warfare in the state of nature to make the institution of an absolute sovereign necessary to end it. Moreover, it would explain this conflict while still making it possible for Hobbes to argue that people would be able to carry out that institu-
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HOBBES'S STATE OF WAR 53
tion. I shall now try to construct such an account. And I believe there is enough textual evidence to indicate that Hobbes would not only welcome this account of conflict but may even have been confusedly trying to make it in
both De Cive and Leviathan. We have already seen the way in which the argument for
the rationality of contract-keeping in iterated PD situations
fits well with Hobbes's psychological premisses, so let us accept what seemed inescapable before: that given those
premisses, this argument is correct. But can we accept this argument and still say that circumstances are such in the state of nature that people (for either rational or irrational reasons) treat prisoner's dilemmas as one-time occurrences rather than as members of a series? If we could do so, we would be acknowledging the soundness of the iterated PD argument for cooperation but still endorsing, in the main,
Hobbes's Chapter 13 account of conflict! This would mean reconciling Hobbes's account of conflict in Chapter 13 with
his argument against the fool in Chapter 15. Let us see what this argument looks like.
There is, quite clearly, one circumstance which would force people to take a single-play perspective. In high-risk situations, where one could suffer crippling losses if the other party reneged and took advantage of one's coopera-
tion, it seems irrational to engage in a strategy of cooper- ating in order to teach one's partner to do the same since one is unable to absorb the loss that might be involved in the teaching.
But it appeared before that if we accepted the iterated PD game argument, we could only predict pervasive conflict in these high-risk situations; cooperation in situations of lesser risk would, it seemed, be rational. The only disrup-
ters of rationality in these situations appeared to be passions
competing with self-preservation (such as the passion for glory), and if we postulated that these passions were prominent and pervasive enough to generate almost total warfare, we would be contradicting Hobbes's psychological description of human beings and endangering the wide- spread applicability of his hypothetical imperative to institute a sovereign.
But our acceptance of the iterated PD argument does
not commit us to the passions account of conflict we previously rejected. While it certainly commits us to an explanation of conflict in medium and low-risk situations which blames such non-cooperation both on people's
irrationality and others' fear of it, the argument still does not prevent us from endorsing the main outlines of the Chapter 13 account of conflict because there is something besides disruptive passions that could force a person to
take a single-play perspective in a prisoner's dilemma: shortsightedness. The account would contend that many people fail, for one reason or another, to appreciate the long-term benefits of cooperation, and opt instead for the short-term benefits of non-cooperation, and the rest are legitimately fearful enough of this shortsightedness af- flicting their partner to doubt whether cooperation would have any educative effects. This worry, plus the risks of cooperating, could then force a person to take a single-play orientation, with the result that the uncooperative action would dominate.
But exactly why is the shortsighted person irrational? Why should we condemn him for his "live for the moment" mentality given that this is presumably the approach to life which he wants to take? If we attribute to Hobbes an
instrumental conception of rationality which is consistent
both with his psychology and with the subjectivist meta- ethics strongly suggested in Leviathan, then there is no way
in which reason can dictate apart from a person's desires
that future profits "ought" to take precedence over present ones. But a person can be condemned as irrational on this
account if (and only if) his pursuing present profits over greater future profits is a poor way of achieving the satisfac- tion of his desires, and in particular the desire for the object
he supposedly cares about most: his self-preservation. Remember that this desire generates in human beings not
only immediate preferences for certain objects but also future preferences for these or other objects, and pursuing
self-preservation effectively can mean postponing or denying oneself the gratification of a present desire in order to be able to gratify a future desire more closely connected with the avoidance of death (for example, not satisfying a desire to eat large meals in the summer in order to have enough food to eat in the winter). However, the fact that reason can dictate the gratification of a future desire over a present one is not because of anything about reason per se, but
only because of what the pre-eminent desire for self-preser- vation demands if this goal is going to be effectively pur- sued.
There is important textual evidence in De Cive that we
are on the right track in attributing this shortsightedness account of conflict to Hobbes. In that work, Hobbes actually offers the following explanation of why people fight with one another in the state of nature:
...because men cannot put off this same irrational appetite, whereby they greedily prefer the present good (to which, by strict consequence, many unforeseen evils do adhere) before the future... (DC, EW ii, iii, 32, 48) ts
and in the same work he invokes short-sightedness to
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54 JEAN HAMPTON
explain why people do not obey the laws o f nature:
most men, by reason of their perverse desire of present profit, are very unapt to observe these laws, although acknowledged by them... (DC, EW ii, iii, 27, 45)
This "perverse desire of present profit" seems to be the
irrational grasping at short-term advantage. Hobbes labels it
"greed" in the first passage, and greed is frequently cited as
a cause of conflict in Leviathan; for example when he
blames "avarice" in Chapter 14 for the failure of contracts
in the state of nature. (See Lev, 14, 18, 68)
It is also significant that Hume, whose A Treatise of Human Nature shows a deep indebtedness to Hobbes's
Leviathan in so many ways, should have espoused what
appear to be the main outlines of this account to explain the generation o f violence in a state o f nature:
You have the same propension, that I have, in favour of what is contiguous above what is remote. You are, therefore, naturally carried to commit acts of injustice as well as me. Your example both pushes me forward in this way by imitation, and also affords me a new reason for any breach of equity, by shewing me, that I should be the cully of my integrity, if I alone shou'd impose on myself a severe restraint amidst the licentiousness of others. 16
Perhaps Hume developed this account because he was
influenced by the suggestive passages from De Cive and
Leviathan just quoted. Or perhaps he simply realized the
power and plausibility o f this account of warfare. But
Hobbes can also use this powerful and plausible account to
good advantage in his social contract argument, and the
textual evidence indicates he was at least dimly aware o f
this fact.
But why would there be people in the state o f nature
who would mistakenly take a shortsighted perspective in their pursuit o f self-preservation? Hobbes does not say, but
we can, on his behalf, isolate four plausible sources o f
shortsightedness in this state, two of which have to do with
certain psychological features of some human beings, and the other two of which have to do with the way in which cooperative situations could be mistakenly interpreted by
many people in this state. The first psychological feature inclining someone towards
shortsighted reasoning is the tendency to incorrectly "dis- count" the future; specifically it is the tendency to reason incorrectly such that one does not regard future events as fully "real". The discounter knows that future events will occur, but has trouble taking them as seriously as the events he is presently experiencing or will shortly experience. This leads him in his deliberations to discount the benefits he would receive in the future because he has, as it were,
trouble "believing" in them. And the more distant the
benefit, the harder it is for him to take it seriously in his
calculations.
The failure to regard long-term benefits as real could be
a significant source of shortsightedness in the state o f
nature. The distance in time of these benefits, and the
immediate temptation o f the short-term advantages, could easily cause a self-interested person to discount them entirely, and to content herself with "the bird in the hand"
rather than the seemingly unreal prospect o f "two in the bush". And of course, if people treated a cooperative situa-
tion as a single-play PD game, the uncooperative action would dominate over the cooperative action. 17
The other psychological characteristic inclining people
towards a short-sighted perspective is extreme risk aversion. As we have already noted, the non-cooperative action is the correct maximin strategy in a high-risk PD situation. Even
when one knows that this situation might recur again and
again, the way to minimize one's potential losses is to
refrain from cooperation. And while it is arguably reasonable
to follow this strategy in high-risk situations, it seems
decidedly wrong in short-term situations. One should, it
seems, weigh the risks o f future losses (which in this kind of
situation would not be crippling) against the prospect of
significant future benefits, and opt to pursue those benefits.
However, there might be highly risk averse people in the
state of nature who could not do this, and who would try
to protect themselves no matter what profits they lost by
so doing. Once again, the proponent o f the iterated PD
argument would think there was something wrong with
these people's reasoning processes such that they were
drawing a mistaken conclusion, and that true safety would
actually be gained only if they risked cooperation. But it is the kind of reasoning mistake which Hobbes could plausibly
argue was a significant source of shortsightedness in the natural state.
If Hobbes could only cite these two psychological
"weaknesses" as causes of shortsighted reasoning in the state
of nature, he could not plausibly claim shortsightedness to
be very common in that state. The number of people in the
human population whose reasoning is distorted by extreme risk aversion or the mistaken discounting o f future benefits is not very great. However, Hobbes can also claim that there are two ways in which generally good reasoners who
do not _have these psychological tendencies could incor- rectly interpret the situation in the state of nature, and
these incorrect interpretations are both natural enough that between them they could generate substantial shortsighted- ness in this state. First, the iterated nature of the prisoner's dilemma might not be obvious to some of the less intellec-
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HOBBES'S STATE OF WAR 55
tually talented inhabitants of this state; it might never even occur to these people that they should take a multi-play
perspective and/or they might not be mentally acute enough
to work out the long-term benefits of cooperation. Such
people would prefer the short-term advantages of non-
cooperation simply because they did not understand that
the long-term advantages of cooperation were much greater.
Second, and most important of all, even if it did occur
to them that they might be in an iterated prisoner's dilem-
ma game where substantial long-term benefits make coop-
eration rational, they might decide, nonetheless, to reject
such a characterization of their situation on the grounds that future contractual interactions with their present
partners was too remote to warrant it. Remember that in
the state of nature people are supposed to be independent
of a// society. And it would be natural in such a situation
for a person to treat a prisoner's dilemma as a one-time
occurrence given the small chances of interacting with this
person again and the over-all uncertainties of this state.
In other words, establishing future cooperative ties would
seem too unlikely to make a multi-play perspective rational.
Indeed, such calculations do not seem badly wrong. Propo-
nents of the iterative PD argument would insist, of course,
that they are wrong because even if accidental meetings
with other human beings were rare, the vicissitudes of this
state would make it rational for them to seek out coopera-
tive interactions with one another so as to better deal with
the natural and man-made problems of living. (Consider,
for example, the benefits of forming a confederacy con-
tract.) The reasoner in this state believes incorrectly that
the chances of her interacting again with her fellows are
independent of what she does; she does not appreciate that
she can actually pursue cooperative interactions with her
fellows which, if successfully completed, could benefit her and them substantially (for example, building bridges over
streams, plowing fields, engaging in joints hunts for game).
It does not, however, occur to her that the chances of future cooperative interactions with others in this state are in large part up to her, and this does seem to be a very reasonable mistake, making it plausible that many people in the state
of nature would make it. This mistake would lead a person
not to cooperate with her partner, fully believing non- cooperation to be the rational course of action in what she
would regard as, to all intents and purposes, a single-play prisoner's dilemma. Indeed, in De Homine Hobbes seems to credit "mistaken" shortsightedness as a persistent feature of human reasoning disruptive of an effective pursuit
of self-preservation when he explains the difference be- tween "real" and "apparent" good:
Whence it happens that inexperienced men that do not look closely enough at long-term consequences of things, accept what appears to be good, not seeing the evil annexed to it; afterwards they experience damage. (DH, xi, 4, 48; my italics)~8
The idea seems to be that "inexperienced" people are apt
to make mistakes about what actions will further their
best interests in the long run and mistakenly pursue short-
term advantages. Relevant to his argument Hobbes can thus
say that such inexperienced people can easily fail to see
how they can act in certain ways so as to make profitable
interaction between themselves and others frequent, and
believe (erroneously) instead that the probability of inter- acting with any of their fellow human beings in the natural
state has to be estimated to be quite low.
For these four reasons, it would be plausible (or at least
arguable) for Hobbes to claim that this shortsightedness is very common in the state of nature. Indeed, the fourth cause of shortsightedness suggests how prevalent this
perspective would be, simply because the belief that one
will not interact frequently with one's fellows in this a-
social state is not obviously wrong. (What would you
think if you were in this state?) However, Hobbes does not
have to take the unreasonable position that everyone suffers
in the state of nature from some sort of shortsightedness in order to explain the origination of wide-spread conflict.
Those who are good calculators of their long-term self-
interest and who therefore do recognize the rationality of
cooperation established by the iterated PD game argument,
would rarely find it rational to cooperate if this short-
sightedness were common in others. If each party to a
contract knows there is a high probability that his partner
is too shortsighted to be able to be "taught" to cooperate, he will not think his cooperative action overly likely to
bring him benefits of future bargains. Instead, he will
think there is a very good chance that his partner will fail
to understand his strategy, and thus end up believing him
to be a "sucker" in this (from the partner's perspective)
single-play PD game. Nor would he think that, as a rational member of the state of nature, he had much chance of developing a "trustworthy" reputation enabling him to reap future contractual benefits as long as this short-
sightedness was common, because the prospective partners
of any future contracts would be more likely to see any
previous contract-keeping as establishing one's reputation as a "sucker" rather than as a trustworthy promise-keeper.
These considerations would mean that the cooperative action is risky in the state of nature; whether one should
take the risk depends upon the probability that one's partner will renege, the extent of the damage his reneging
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56 JEAN HAMPTON
would inflict, and the probability, if he did renege, that he could be educated by your cooperation to cooperate himself in the future. Clearly, as we have said, in high risk situations contract-keeping would be too dangerous for a person who was committed to self-preservation to perform.
And in low-risk situations, Hobbes could insist that the widespread short-sightedness of the natural state's inhabit-
ants would make the probability of one's partner reneging
and failing to learn anything from one's own cooperative act high enough such that an expected utility calculation
would likely dictate against cooperation. Consider, for
example, how it would affect a contract between two people to exchange his horse for her cow. If each knows there is a fairly high probability that the other will treat this as a one-time prisoner's dilemma, each will know there
is a fairly high probability that the other will renege on his or her promise, making the expected losses greater than the
expected gains.
But the situation is actually worse than this. I might believe that you are rational, and I might also be rational and thus willing to cooperate, but I might fear that you thought I was shortsighted. This fear would then cause me to worry that you would take a single-play perspective and behave uncooperatively in self-defense, leading me to take the same single-play perspective and thus to behave un- cooperatively. In other words, in order for cooperation to be ensured, there must either be common knowledge among the partners in a cooperative situation that each of the
others is rational, or each must believe that the probability
of her fellows believing her rational is quite high, so that an expected utility calculation would dictate cooperation. Hobbes would certainly argue that this "common know- ledge" or "common belief" assumption is very strong, and
unlikely to be present among many collections of people in the state of nature.
Note also how any tendency towards substantial risk aversion could cause you to over-estimate the probabilities
that )our partner was shortsighted and thus to incorrectly conclude that cooperation was irrational after an expected utility calculation. 19 Indeed, such over-estimates could be
innocently but incorrectly made by normally risk-averse people; evidence of the extent of one's partner's farsighted- ness might, after all, be hard to come by in this state.
There is another effect which knowledge of the wide-
spread existence of shortsighted people can have on the rational reasoners in the state of nature. The more convinced I am that shortsightedness is common in the state of nature, the less interested I will be in actually seeking out inter- action with my fellows in this state with an eye towards
actively cooperating with them, because I will fear that by doing so I would only be foolishly exposing myself to the dangers of exploitation and/or open conflict. But the less inclined I am to seek out interactions with my fellows, the
lower the probability that I will interact with any of them again, and thus the less likely it will be that I can expect any long-term benefits of cooperation with them. These calculations dispose me, once again, to take a single-play perspective and hence not to cooperate with my partners in a prisoner's dilemma.
In the end, this account of conflict cites both short- sightedness and the (rational or irrational) fear of it in one's
partner as the reason why people in this state of nature generally behave exactly as Hobbes characterized them in Chapter 13, despite the correctness of the iterated prisoner's dilemma argument about which he (at least) hints in
Chapter 15. That is, people are generally disposed to com-
pete violently with and exploit one another in this state
rather than disposed to behave cooperatively towards one another, because they are too shortsighted to understand the benefits of cooperation or because they conclude after
an expected utility calculation that, given the likelihood that their partner either suffers from this shortsightedness, or believes them to suffer from it, the cooperative action just doesn't "pay".
Of course, there might be situations where one estimated
the probabilities and utilities such that an expected utility calculation actually would dictate cooperation. Hence, this account of conflict could not, like the rationality account, rule out the possibility of cooperation in the way the latter account does unless it presupposed that sortsightedness was universal - an implausible assumption. But as long as the argument only makes this kind of fallacious reasoning very common, the dangers of cooperation would seem to be enough to make conflict even in low-risk situations very widespread, making the state of nature almost a state of total war, and this is probably good enough for Hobbes's purposes. Although the account admits that a few people will have established patterns of cooperation among them-
selves in the state of nature, it maintains nonetheless that the vast majority will not have done so, and will be dis- posed to fight with one another in the way that, as Hobbes himself puts it, "foul weather" tends to result in rain (see Lev, 13, 8, 62). This means that genuine peace could be achieved in this state only by a ruler with the power to create the possibility o / cooperation, and not by one merely with the limited power to police pre-existing patterns - for almost none exist.
How is this account different from the passions account
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HOBBES'S STATE OF WAR 57
previously sketched? The previous account explained
conflict by reference to certain passions, like the passion
for glory, which were said to interfere with one's rational
pursuit of self-interest. The problem with this explanation
was, as we saw, that either these passions were taken to be
extremely powerful in much of the populat ion, in which
case we purchased pervasive warfare but at the price of a
description of human beings at odds with Hobbes 's psychol-
ogy and one that made the applicabili ty of his hypothetical
imperative to insti tute a sovereign uncertain at best; or
these passions were understood to be no more common
that Hobbes's psychology would have us believe, in which
case there would be far too much cooperation in the state
of nature to make a ruler with absolute power necessary
for the achievement of peace. The account of conflict just
sketched, however, establishes almost total war in the
natural state and is nonetheless completely consistent with
Hobbes's psychology. It explains conflict by reference, not
to disruptive passions, but to fallacious reasoning, and this
can be held to be extremely common among the inhabitants
of the state of nature without in any way endangering
Hobbes 's psychological characterization of human beings
because it is a mistake that people who are predominantly
concerned about their self-preservation not only could but
would naturally make. It seems plausible to suppose that
many people who were terribly worried about preserving
themselves, and wound up generally in their own concerns,
would naturally grasp at short-term advantages, many of
them fearful that doing anything else would be foolish.
However, this account can certainly be supplemented by
an explanation for conflict that blames glory for at least
some of the warfare in the natural state. Hobbes 's psychol-
ogy recognizes that we are moved by other desires which
occasionally (although not usually) compete with and win
against self-preservation. As long as these desires are not
held to be very prominent or powerful among the popula-
t ion generally, Hobbes can invoke them to supplement the
previous two causes of conflict. Indeed, perhaps this is what
he meant to do in Chapter 13 - that is, perhaps he meant
to say that people 's believing, either rightly or wrongly,
that they were in a one-shot prisoner's dilemma was the
chief source of conflict in the state of nature, while ir-
rational passions such as the desire for glory were minor,
although not unimportant , disrupters of cooperation in
that state. Given that our new interpretat ion of the Chapter
13 account of conflict doesn' t establish total conflict, and
doesn' t implicate rat ionali ty as the sole source of conflict,
there is no theoretical obstacle preventing Hobbes from blaming passions like glory for at least some of the conflict
in the natural state.
However, the desire for glory can actually be used to
bolster the shortsightedness account of conflict. As Hobbes
himself says in The Elements of Law, people who suffer
from "vainglory" are "indisposed to allow equality with
themselves to others" (EL of L, English Works, Vol. ii, 14,
chapter heading, 70) and "hope for precedency and superi-
ority above their fellows" (EL of L, English Works, Voi. ii,
14, 3, 71). And because we want and even need to see ourselves as powerful and superior, even though we are not,
we are liable to underestimate our opponent ' s powers and
overestimate our own. Thus emboldened, we will be more
likely to think it reasonable to wage war with him or her.
To put it more exactly, it affects the probabilities o f our
expected util i ty calculation. We will tend to overestimate
the probabil i ty of our winning a conflict and underestimate
the probabil i ty of being beaten by our opponent , and that
will make our calculation more likely to favor warfare.
This Hobbesian idea, suggested in The Elements of Law, seems to be on solid psychological ground. I doubt whether
many soldiers at the start of a war have seriously doubted
that their side will win. A Hobbesian would say that this is the
human ego talking, leading people to wage war "for gain",
or to make what they believe will be effective preemptive
strikes. Moreover, other people's fear that the effects of
ego may lead their partners to make this kind of miscalcula-
t ion will make them less likely to trust their partners, and
more likely to turn to violence themselves. As Hobbes
himself says in De Cive:
All men in the state of nature have a desire and will to hurt, but not proceeding from the same cause, neither equally to be condemned. For one man, according to that natural equality which is among us, permits as much to others as he assumes to himself; which is an argument of a temperate man, and one that rightly values his power. Another, supposing himself above others, will have a licence to do what he lists, and challenges respect and honour, as due to him before others; which is an argument of a fiery spirit. This man's will to hurt ariseth from vain glory, and the false esteem he hath of his own strength; the other's from the necessity of defending himself, his liberty, and his goods, against this man's violence. (DC, EW ii, I, 4, 7)
If you know that your partner is disposed to think herself
more powerful than she is, and thus disposed to think she
could win a confrontat ion with you, you are fearful of
making yourself prey to her violence, and thus become
disposed to "defensive" violence yourself.
So far, the shortsightedness account of conflict has
passed two tests of acceptabil i ty: it seems to generate
enough conflict to make it plausible that only an absolute
sovereign can bring about peace, and it appears to be
consistent with Hobbes 's psychology. There is also, how-
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58 JEAN HAMPTON
ever, some textual evidence that Hobbes may even have
been trying to make this argument in Leviathan and De
Cive. We have already quoted two passages from the latter
book in which Hobbes blames shortsightedness for warfare
in the natural state. Moreover, given that he gave both the
Chapter 13 account o f conflict and the answer to the fool
in Leviathan, and given that the shortsightedness account
o f conflict allows us to find a way to accept both passages
as correct, it might be that Hobbes was actually aiming at
this account o f conflict in both passages, albeit doing so in
a way that suggested two opposing explanations of conflict-
generation. However, as we shall now explore, this account
allows us to give a very successful interpretat ion o f Hobbes 's
remarks in Leviathan and De Cive on the validity of the
laws of nature, giving us perhaps the best evidence that it
was an account he was at least trying to promulgate in both
those books.
As we have already discussed, Hobbes characterizes his
laws o f nature as hypothet ical imperatives, that is, conclu-
sions or theorems designed to specify actions that will be
means to one 's self-preservation. However, he is very hazy
about the nature o f these laws' validity:
The Lawes of Nature oblige in foro interno; that is to say, they bind to a desire they should take place: but in foro externo ; that is, to the putting them in act, not alwayes. For he that should be modest, and tractable, and performe all he promises, in such time, and place, where no man els should do so, should but make himselfe a prey to others, and procure his own certain ruine, contrary to the ground of all Lawes of Nature, which tend to Natures preservation. (Lev, 15, 36, 79)
Clearly it is to stop his readers from thinking that these
laws provide a full remedy for the warfare in the state of
nature that Hobbes qualifies the laws' validity, saying that
some of them are only "in foro interno" valid and not "in
foro externo" valid. But what do these peculiar terms
mean? From Hobbes 's remarks in Chapter 15 we know that
the peculiar validity these laws have has something to do
with not making oneself a "prey" to others. And in Hobbes 's
statement o f the second law of nature, there is a "directive"
built into the law i tsel f to determine the willingness o f
one 's partner to perform the peaceful action before deciding
to do so oneself. It is right, he says,
That a man be willing, when others are so too, as farre-forth, as for Peace, and defence of himselfe he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himselfe. (Lev, 14, 5, 64-65; my emphasis)
These two passages therefore suggest that the laws have the
following structure:
If you seek peace (which is a means to your preservation), then do action x, as long as others are willing to do x.
In other words, the laws of nature are to be understood as
hypothet ical imperatives with a rider attached to them
which specifies the condit ions under which doing x is
rational.
Exact ly w h y this rider must be at tached to each of these
laws is explained by the disruptive role which the account
of conflict just developed assigns to our shortsightedness.
According to this account, the rider has to be at tached to
these laws because only then will they be true hypothet ical
imperatives. Each of the actions mentioned in the laws
leads to peace, and involves cooperat ion with others. But
each action will only lead to peace if not only you but also
your cooperative partner(s) engage in the action. For
example, your contract-keeping will further your self-
preservation by leading to peace only if your contractual
partner is willing to do likewise. I f he reneges while you
keep, your self-preservation has been damaged, and your
chances for peace in the future diminished. According to
the iterated PD argument, if we can determine that our
partner appreciates this point now, or would appreciate this
point in the future after a little educative help from us, his
willingness to perform these peaceful actions should cause
us to perform them also. Doing so will generate a coopera-
tive equilibrium, and a state o f peace, rather than a state of
competit ive violence. Thus, the iterated PD argument helps
us to understand the mysterious phrase "in foro interno
valid": Hobbes uses it to endorse the laws as true hypothet-
ical imperatives. They correctly describe to us how we can
preserve ourselves by telling us ways of achieving peace,
ways which will be effective means to this goal as long as a
certain condit ion is fulfilled - the willingness of others to
perform these peace-producing actions also.
But the shortsightedness of men and their occasional
tendency to seek glory before anything else explains why
these laws are "in foro externo invalid" in the state o f
nature. That phrase simply means that the actions which
the laws direct ought not to be performed in the state of
nature, because the rider at tached to these laws will no t be
satisfied in this state. According to the shortsightedness
account o f conflict, although cooperat ion is rational, the
prevalence of shortsighted and glory-prone people will
mean one usually cannot risk cooperat ion oneself because
one cannot be sure enough in most cooperative situations
that one's partner will be cooperative (or learn to cooperate).
So the fact that the rider to these laws would rarely, if
ever, be satisfied would mean that the actions dictated by
the laws should not be performed. And remember that this
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HOBBES'S STATE OF WAR 59
was the explanation of people 's not following the laws of
nature actually given by Hobbes in De Cive: "Most men, by
reason of their perverse desire of present profit , are very
unapt to observe these laws, although acknowledged by
them". (DC, EW ii, iii, 27, 45)
So it seems we have arrived at the conclusion we wanted.
First, we have presented an account of conflict consistent
with Hobbes 's psychology which, because it reconciles his
seemingly inconsistent remarks in Chapters 13 and 15 on the
origins of conflict in the state of nature, and because it fits
with certain things he says in De Cive and Leviathan, would
appear to be an account Hobbes actually meant (and was
trying to) espouse. And second, that account enables us to
understand how the laws of nature can be interpreted,
consistent with Hobbes 's psychology and ethical subjec-
tivism, as true hypothet ical imperatives presupposing the
desire for peace and self-preservation which, nonetheless,
people should not follow in the state of nature.
But is this an account which allows Hobbes to argue that,
despite their violence against one another, people in the
state of nature could nonetheless institute an absolute
sovereign? As we saw earlier, this was a serious problem
for the old passions account of conflict which could explain
total warfare in the natural state only by making the cause
of conflict, i.e. disruptive passions, so powerful and wide-
spread that it was unlikely people in this state could act on
a hypothetical imperative to institute a sovereign. Because
the shortsightedness account does not challenge Hobbes 's
psychology, people who are afflicted with shortsightedness
or who fear it are still able to institute a sovereign if they
perceive that do ing so will advance their self-preservation.
The only concern this account raises is whether short-
sighted people will be able to understand that creating a
sovereign is the only remedy for war. What Hobbes has to
do later in his social contract argument is to contend suc-
cessfully that because fallacious reasoning is widespread,
instructions about the benefits of cooperation won' t work
(shortsightedness, in other words, is hard, if not impossible,
to cure), but that both short and farsighted reasoners will
come to realize that the rational way to deal with this
deep-seated irrationality precipitating warfare is to institute
an absolute sovereign who will make it in one's short-term
interest to cooperate. Finally, Hobbes has to be able to say
that people are just rational enough to be able to perform
the cooperative actions necessary to institute such a sover-
eign. Can Hobbes pull off this project with the short-
sightedness account? Exploring this question requires
lengthy and detailed philosophical work which I cannot
provide here, but which I do provide elsewhere. 2~ Suffice
to say now that the shortsightedness account turns out to
be amazingly sturdy, and the problems Hobbes has at the
later stages of his social contract argument are not a func-
t ion of this account.
However, there remains one final question of importance.
Granted that we have found the right account of conflict
for Hobbes's justification of absolute sovereignty, how
plausible is it? How plausible is the psychology and the
ethical subjectivism upon which it rests, and how plausible
is the claim that uncorrectable shortsightedness is rampant
among human beings? In my view, not very. It might all
seem plausible to a man surrounded by the violent political
environment of the seventeenth century, but many of us
today find the ethical subjectivism suspect, and even
subjectivists find Hobbes 's psychological pronouncements
simplistic and the claim that a great many of us are not
only seriously shortsighted but also ineducable, one that is
exaggerated and unduly pessimistic. But lest we take an
overly rosy view of our capacity to be other-interested and
of our ability to learn to reason successfully, I will quote
from a passage in Leviathan in which Hobbes is clearly
addressing skeptics like us:
It may well seem strange to some man, that has not well weighed these things; that Nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to invade, and destroy one another: and he may therefore, not trusting to this Inference, made from the Passions, desire perhaps to have the same confirmed by Experience. Let him therefore consider with himselfe, when taking journey, he armes himselfe, and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his dores; when even in his house he lockes his chests; and this when he knows there bee Lawes, and puhlicke Officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall bee done him; what opinion he has of his feUow subjects, when he rides armed; of his fellow Citizens when he lockes his dores, and of his children, and servants, when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words? (Lev, 13, 10, 62)
It is an interesting passage upon which to reflect. Daily life
in the twentieth century would certainly suggest that if
Hobbes is wrong, he is unfortunately not far wrong. 21
Notes
This paper was originally presented at the Conference on the History of Ethics at the University of California, Irvine in January 1984, and is drawn from portions of three chapters of my book, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
See Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Oxford, 1957) esp. p. 220ff; and A. E. Taylor, 'The ethical doctrine
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60 JEAN HAMPTON
of Hobbes', in Hobbes Studies, ed. by K. Brown (Blackwell, Oxford, 1965), esp. p. 37.
a All references to Leviathan in the text will be as follows: (Lev, chapter number, number of paragraph of chapter in which the passage quoted or cited appe~s, page of 1651 edition in which passage appears). This reference system is designed to allow readers to find the quotation or passage cited no mat ter what edition of Leviathan they use. 4 The Earl of Clarendon (Edward Hyde), A Brief View and Survey of... Leviathan (1676), p. 37. s In his article 'Hobbes's concept of obligation' Thomas Nagel explores the problems which prevent a deontological natural law view from being anything but futile given the Hobbesian psychol-
ogy. See Philosophical Review LXVIII (1959), 68ff. I cannot undertake here to explore all of the passages inLeviathan,
De Cive and De Homine in which this subjectivist position is out-
lined, the most important of which are in Leviathan, Chapters 5 and 6, and De Homine, Chapter XI. Hobbes's meta-ethical views are explored at length in Chapter 1 of my book. 7 j .W.N. Watkins, Hobbes's System ofldeas (Hutchinson, 1965), pp. 75-99, and esp. pp. 82-99. 8 I do not have time to give a complete exegesis of this important passage here, but I do so in Chapter 2 of my book, where its rele- vance to the passions account of conflict is also explored. 9 Hume, ,4 Treatise o f Human Nature, III, II, ii. 10 Many have had the idea of using the prisoner's dilemma matrix to interpret Hobbes's remarks in Leviathan. For example, see John Rawls, A Theory o f Justice (Harvard, Cambridge, MA, 1971) p. 269; Michael Taylor, Anarchy and Cooperation (London, 1976), Chapter 6; Brian Barry, Political Argument (London, 1965), pp. 253-4. David Gauthier challenges this interpretation on the basis of Hobbes's remarks in his "answer to the fool" in Chapter 15; see Gautliier's The Logic o f Leviathan (The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1969), pp. 76-89. Edna Ullman-Margalit also discusses the answer
to the fool passage in her book The Emergence o f Norms (The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1977), pp. 62-73, and I will be dealing with her discussion later in this article. tl For a recent argument to this effect, see Gregory Kavka, 'Hobbes's war of all against all', Ethics 93 (1983), 291-310. 12 For a discussion of the argument, see R. D. Luce and H. Raiffa, Games and Decisions (John Wiley and Sons, New York 1957), pp.
98-99.
is Robert Axelrod has conducted computer experiments using
different strategies for dealing with iterated prisoner's dilemmas and has found that cooperative strategies in these situations amass considerably more "utility" points than non-cooperative strategies. See his 'Effective choice in the prisoner's dilemms', Journal o f Conflict Resolution 24 (1980), 3-25; and his 'More effective choice in the prisoner's dilemma', Journal of Conflict Resolution 24 (1980), 379-403. 14 See Edna Ullman-Margalit, The Emergence o f Norms (The
Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1977), pp. 62-73. The repetitive PD game idea is also discussed by Michael Taylor in Anarchy & Coop- eration, Chapter 6, Section 1, especially p. l l2ff , as a way of explicating Hobbes's arguments for the rationality of contract- keeping. Finally, Gregory Kavka discusses it in 'Hobbes's war of all against all' [in Ethics 93 (1983), 291-310], viewing it correctly as a criticism of the Chapter 13 account of conflict but not seeing how, in fact, it provides a good interpretation of Hobbes's remarks in the
answer to the fool. ~5 All references to De Cive in the text are to the edition of that work in Molesworth's English Works o f Thomas Hobbes. Citations are as follows: (DC, Vol. ii of English Works, chapter number, section number, page number). 16 A Treatise o f Human Nature, III, ii, vii, p. 535 in Selby-Bigge edition. 17 This appears to be the most significant source of shortsighted reasoning in Hume's eyes. See the Treatise, III, ii, vii, (esp. pp.
535-7 in the Selby-Bigge edition). 18 References to De Homine are to Bernard Gert's translation in
Man and Citizen, ed. by Gert (Humanities Press, 1968). The refer- ences have the following form: (DH, chapter number, section number, page number in Gert's edition). 19 I am indebted to Don Hubin for suggesting this point. 20 See Chapters 4 - 7 of my book.
al I would like to thank Christopher Morris, Brian Barry, Don
Hubin, and those who attended the conference on the History of Ethics at UC Irvine for fruitful discussions of some of the ideas in this paper.
University o f California, Dept. o f Philosophy,
Los Angeles, CA 90024, U.S.A.