“Peace is Good, and therefore also the way, or means of Peace, which...
are Justice, Gratitude, Modesty, Equity, Mercy . . . that is to say, Moral Virtues;
and their contrary Vices, Evil. Now the science of Virtue and Vice, is Moral
Philosophy; and therefore the true Doctrine of the Laws of Nature, is the
true Moral Philosophy” (Leviathan, p. 79). So, he is defining moral philoso-
phy as the science of these dictates of reason, the Laws of Nature, which it
is necessary for everyone to follow if peace is to be achieved. Or, to put it in
another way, he thinks of moral philosophy as the science of what is neces-
sary to preserve the good of men in groups. He is claiming that the object
of moral philosophy is to work out and explain the content of these pre-
cepts, the Laws of Nature—to explain why they are based on rationality.
The account we could then give for why they are reasonable principles is
that they turn out to be the kinds of precepts that are required to make so-
cial life possible.
Hobbes sees himself as explaining the basis of these principles, not as
the schools do via Aristotle (mediocrity, passions), nor by an appeal to reli-
gion or to revelation etc; nor by an appeal to history, e.g. Thucydides. The
Laws of Nature as dictates of reason are not arrived at by induction, by a
survey of the history of nations, etc. They are arrived at by deductive sci-
ence: by going back to first principles of body and of human nature, and see-
ing how political society must (the citizen or the Leviathan) work, looking at
its parts viewed when society is, so to speak, dissolved. He analyzes the basic
elements of society, human beings, attempting to identify fundamental in-
terests by which everyone is moved. Then, basing everything on that analy-
sis, he concludes that in order to realize these fundamental interests, it is
necessary that these dictates of reason, or laws of nature, should be fol-
lowed by everyone. In order to achieve that, of course, there must be a Sov-
ereign. The Sovereign, or the Leviathan, is an artificial person who must
fulfill a certain end. As we’ll see next time, the task of the Sovereign is to
make it reasonable for all of us to honor these dictates because we know
that the existence of an effective Sovereign is going to guarantee that others
are going to honor them also. In the absence of that guarantee it would
not be reasonable or rational for anyone to honor them. The Sovereign is
the necessary condition of its being rational for any of us to act on and to
follow these reasonable principles. If this artificial person is to serve this
end or role effectively, political society must be constructed, as it were, in a
[67]
Hobbes’s Account of Practical Reasoning
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College
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