Reply to Mark Murphy

1.

Hobbes put his ideas about ethics in the form of a theory of natural law. The core of this theory appears in chapters 14 and 15 of Leviathan. Those chapters contain a systematic exposition of the laws of nature that pertain to the maintenance of social order. Hobbes began this exposition by defining a law of nature as a "general rule, found out by reason," and he concluded it by referring to the laws he had expounded as "dictates of reason." ¹ What he meant in saying that these rules were found out by reason and were dictates of reason is the subject of some controversy. A common interpretation is that Hobbes, having previously advanced an egoistic theory of human motivation and having then affirmed that the ultimate end of voluntary actions is the actor's well-being, took the laws to be consequences of the determination of means to this end. A good example of this interpretation can be found in Sidgwick's Outlines of the History of Ethics. ² Introducing his account of Hobbes's ethics, having first described Hobbes's psychology, Sidgwick writes,

What, then, is the conduct that [according to Hobbes] ought to be adopted. . . ? In the first place, since all voluntary actions of men tend to their own preservation or pleasure, it cannot be reasonable to aim at anything else; in fact, nature rather than reason fixes the end of human action, to which it is reason's function to show the means. Hence, if we ask why it is reasonable for any individual to observe the rules of social behavior that are commonly called moral, the answer is obvious that this is only indirectly reasonable, as means to his own preservation or pleasure. ³

One can find other examples of this interpretation in the commentaries of prominent contemporary writers on Hobbes such as David Gauthier and Jean Hampton. ⁴

The interpretation appears sound as long as one looks only at the chapters in Leviathan that contain the core of Hobbes's ethics. Once one examines earlier chapters, however, problems emerge. In particular, it becomes clear that the interpretation does not fit the accounts of reason and the other powers of human cognition that Hobbes gave in these early chapters. Hobbes uses the first three chapters of Leviathan to develop an account of the cognitive powers human beings have in common with other animals, and in the next two chapters he then discusses the powers that, being the result of acquiring language and the capacity for speech, are unique to human beings. In chapter 5, he identifies reason with one of these powers. It is, he says, the faculty of reckoning with words and other symbols. ⁵ And in chapter 8, he divides human cognitive powers into two categories, natural wit and acquired wit, and places the faculties of imagination, judgment, and prudence in the former and that of reason in the latter. ⁶ Means-to-ends thinking, he makes clear, involves the combined exercise of powers that belong exclusively to the category of natural wit. It does not involve the exercise of reason. So unless one assumes that Hobbes abandoned the accounts of reason and the other powers of human cognition that he gave in Leviathan's early chapters, one cannot interpret him as having taken the contribution of means-to-ends thinking to the determination of the laws of nature as what qualifies them as general rules found out by reason or as dictates of reason. In other words, to accept this common interpretation of Hobbes's exposition of the natural law means attributing to Leviathan a fundamental incoherence between its early chapters and the chapters containing that exposition.

I raised this problem for the interpretation in my article "Reason and Ethics in Hobbes's Leviathan." ⁷ The problem, I argued, results from the supposition, which anyone giving this interpretation must make, that Hobbes, in defining the laws of...