The Leviathan’s Conscience: Hobbesian Human Nature and Moral Judgment

2017 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 778-789 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Branstetter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The State ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Practical Judgment ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
Moral Improvement ◽  
Individual Judgment

Hannah Arendt claims that Thomas Hobbes was responsible for constituting modern people as apolitical subjects who can no longer make independent moral judgments. The refusal to think that Hobbes allegedly engendered was a major factor in twentieth-century totalitarianism’s worst crimes. In her view, Hobbes’s Leviathan established the architecture of the totalitarian state and initiated the cultivation of people so incapable of exercising moral judgment that they stood idly by and let such a state commit horrors in their name. I argue that Hobbes rejected the proto-totalitarian form of domination Arendt attributes to him and expressed hope about the human capacities for practical judgment and moral improvement. Instead of creating thoughtless subjects which authorize any crime the state might commit, he suggests that the Leviathan should cultivate the public’s capacity for reason and judgment to make violence unnecessary. Considering Hobbes’s accounts of reason and science in light of his materialism shows that the Leviathan requires the exercise of individual moral thought and judgment to function properly. I suggest that the primary duty of the Hobbesian sovereign might be understood primarily in terms of the cultivation of individual judgment and reason rather than its suppression.

Thomas Hobbes's Materialism, Language, and the Possibility of Politics

2008 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Dungey
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
First Principles ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Obligation ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
The Social

AbstractThomas Hobbes sought a reconstruction of philosophy, ethics, and politics that would end, once and for all, the bitter disputes that led to the English Civil War. This reconstruction begins with the first principles of matter and motion and extends to a unique account of consent and political obligation. Hobbes intended to produce a unified philosophical system linking his materialist account of human nature to his moral and political theory. However, his materialism gives rise to a set of perceptions, imagination, and desires that contribute to the chaos of the state of nature. The sort of person that emerges from Hobbes's materialist anthropology is unlikely to be able to make the necessary agreements about common meaning and language that constitute the ground of the social contract. Therefore, Hobbes's materialism frustrates the very purpose for which it is conceived.

The cultural capital of the moralist and the scientist

2010 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 340-341
Author(s):  
Min Ju Kang ◽  
Michael Glassman
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Action ◽  
Moral Intuitions ◽  
Moral Thought

AbstractIn this commentary we explore Knobe's ideas of moral judgments leading to moral intuitions in the context of the moral thought and moral action debate. We suggest that Knobe's primary moral judgment and the setting of a continuum with a default point is in essence a form of cultural capital, different from moral action, which is more akin to social capital.

HUME AND SMITH ON SYMPATHY, APPROBATION, AND MORAL JUDGMENT

2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 208-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Sayre-McCord
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Affective Reactions ◽  
Adequate Account ◽  
Moral Thought

AbstractDavid Hume and Adam Smith are usually, and understandably, seen as developing very similar sentimentalist accounts of moral thought and practice. As similar as Hume's and Smith's accounts of moral thought are, they differ in telling ways. This essay is an attempt primarily to get clear on the important differences. They are worth identifying and exploring, in part, because of the great extent to which Hume and Smith share not just an overall approach to moral theory but also a conception of what the key components of an adequate account of moral thought will be. In the process, I hope to bring out the extent to which they both worked to make sense of the fact that we do not merely have affective reactions but also, importantly, make moral judgments.

scholarly journals Hobbes in the Anthropocene: Reconsidering the State of Nature in Its Relevance for Governing

2021 ◽  
pp. 030437542110086
Author(s):  
Maximilian Lakitsch
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Accountability ◽  
Internal Dynamics ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Political Modernity

The theoretical work of Thomas Hobbes marks the dawn of political modernity and thus also the beginning of modern reasoning about governing. In his Leviathan, Hobbes creates the modern space of the political through the exclusion of the world’s social and natural abundance. This crossroads of political thinking might not least be of relevance for the Anthropocene. After all, affirming the Anthropocene returns mankind to a cosmos of infinite human–nature interrelationships, which strongly resembles Hobbes’s conceptual depiction of the premodern state of nature and its incomprehensible, contingent, and precarious world, a world that Hobbes had intended to ban for good. In this context, this article reconsiders the state of nature’s internal dynamics in its relevance for governing in the Anthropocene—at the expense of the normative claims of modernist governing. After all, embracing the complex ontologies of the Anthropocene and the state of nature disperses agency among the human and nonhuman world, which questions the idea of ethical and political accountability. Without such a reference, governing runs the risk of becoming arbitrary and thereby another shallow projection of modernist conceptions. This article develops an interpretation of political subjectivity as a reference for governing, deriving from the materialistic world of the Hobbesian state of nature. On this foundation, the article elaborates on how this reading of subjectivity reconfigures the conception of political space and how this shift affects the scope of governing.

Reid and Moral Emotions

2009 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabine Roeser
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Cognitive Theory ◽  
Moral Emotions ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Affective States ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Control

The name of Thomas Reid rarely appears in discussions of the history of moral thought. This is a pity, since Reid has a lot of interesting ideas that can contribute to the current discussions in meta-ethics. Reid can be understood as an ethical intuitionist. What makes his account especially interesting is the role affective states play in his intuitionist theory. Reid defends a cognitive theory of moral emotions. According to Reid, there are moral feelings that are the result of a moral judgment made by reason. The judgment and the feeling together constitute what Reid calls sentiments. Reid thinks that affective states (feelings and sentiments) play the role of helping reason to guide and control the egoistic feelings and passions. The affective states are particularly important, in Reid's view, because the motivating force of reason is often defeated by the stronger motivating force of the passions. So without affective states, we would often not be able to do what is morally good or right. In this paper, I will argue that the role of the affective states is still too limited in Reid's approach. He takes affective states to have a merely motivational function, namely, to help reason to control the passions and motivate to action where reason is too weak. Reid thinks that in making moral judgments we do not need to have feelings, feelings are at most a result of a judgment. Instead, I will argue that affective states also play an epistemological role.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology By Daniel J. Mahoney. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. 200p. $65.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 616-617
Author(s):  
Peter Augustine Lawler
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The State ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Black Book ◽  
Communist Ideology ◽  
The World ◽  
Abundant Evidence ◽  
Good And Evil

This very remarkable and most timely book differs from others on Solzhenitsyn by highlighting his “critique of ideology” and his “recovery of the ‘natural world’” (p. 3). Ideology, for Solzhenitsyn, is the name for the lie characteristic of the twentieth century: Human beings, through historical transformation, can end suffering and so make virtue or the distinction between good and evil superfluous. The state and God can wither away because we will no longer be political and spiritual beings. We know that ideology could not change human nature or what Daniel Mahoney calls “the ontological structure of the world,” but it could magnify human evil to genuinely monstrous dimensions. Solzhenitsyn's contention that communist ideology was responsible for the murder of tens of millions has become much less controversial in recent years. The Black Book of Communism, Mahoney shows, provides abundant evidence for what Solzhenitsyn already knew.

MUST MORALITY MOTIVATE?

2002 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Practical Rationality ◽  
The State ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Michael Smith ◽  
Moral Requirements

Internalism – here the view that moral judgments entail motivation – is often taken to support non-cognitivism about morality. However, Michael Smith has defended a variety of it in combination with a cognitivist account of morality. Despite the eminence of Smith’s contribution, his case in favour of internalism is flawed. I distinguish several internalist positions and argue that Smith’s version, unlike standard ones, expresses a view about, not the nature of the state one is in when one makes a moral judgment, but the norms of practical rationality. I then defend the externalist appeal to the possibility of amoralism. Such an appeal need not beg the question against internalism and can in any case be backed up by independent considerations. Moreover, neither of Smith’s two main arguments in favour of internalism – the reliable connection argument and the appeal to rationalism about moral requirements – are sound. Having shored up the case for externalism and dismissed Smith’s case against it, I end the essay with a suggestion as to why many philosophers have been attracted to internalism even though the theory turns out to be ill-founded.

On Authority and Alienation: A Meditation

1991 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 530-546
Author(s):  
Gerhart Niemeyer
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The State ◽  
Mental Condition ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Buridan’S Ass ◽  
The Look

In a mental experiment that divested man of all institutions of order, Thomas Hobbes called the resulting imaginary situation “the state of nature,” and described it as “war of all against all.” In other words, he established an assumption that aggression is the original quality of human nature, an assumption he supported with correct observations. I submit that, if such a mental experiment made sense, it would be more to the point to call this imaginary nonsocial man “confused,” and I am ready to support this assumption with correct observation. I have found myself in a country whose language I could not speak, whose writing I could not read, and whose habits I did not know. The native person accompanying me as an interpreter was separated from me by crowds. Here I was, all alone. I did not know the name of my street, the look of my house, or even the direction of the compass, since the day was clouded. The confusion that befell me was general, all-encompassing, basic, and utterly frightening. While I was completely free to go in any direction I wanted, all these possibilities were the same to me, like to Buridan's ass, so that I could not move for simple lack of discernment. I can easily conceive an imaginary nonsocial man being in the same mental condition, much more easily than a warrior engaged in a big enterprise such as a “war against all.” This is the assumption underlying the following investigations on authority and alienation.

scholarly journals Nature, civility and eschatology: Thomas Hobbes’s progress in three acts

2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 884-900 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marko Simendic
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Natural Condition ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
The State ◽  
Human Reasoning ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Hypothetical Situation

This paper argues that Thomas Hobbes?s theory contains an account of progressive defragmentation and unification of power, accompanied by the progression in human reasoning capacities. If the consequence of human nature is abandonment of natural condition and subjection to a sovereign, then similar principles should apply to the sovereigns themselves, since Hobbes sees them as continuing to exist in the state of nature. In turn, the relations between sovereigns must also lead to defragmentation of political authority, either by conquest or through peaceful submission. Total defragmentation of power might also have eschatological consequences, as the unified power of one human being over the whole world would remove ?external violence? as a cause of ?the dissolution of a commonwealth? while the perfection of reason would progressively remove the ?internal? causes. This is a hypothetical situation that could relate Hobbes?s description of the Kingdom of God from Leviathan to his wider political theory by marking the single sovereign representative of now immortal all-encompassing Leviathan as the Antichrist and thus announcing the second coming of Christ.

Kropotkin

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Kinna
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Analysis ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Special Character ◽  
Revolutionary Politics

This book is designed to remove Peter Kropotkin from the framework of classical anarchism. By focusing attention on his theory of mutual aid, it argues that the classical framing distorts Kropotkin's political theory by associating it with a narrowly positivistic conception of science, a naively optimistic idea of human nature and a millenarian idea of revolution. Kropotkin's abiding concern with Russian revolutionary politics is the lens for this analysis. The argument is that his engagement with nihilism shaped his conception of science and that his expeditions in Siberia underpinned an approach to social analysis that was rooted in geography. Looking at Kropotkin's relationship with Elisée Reclus and Erico Malatesta and examining his critical appreciation of P-J. Proudhon, Michael Bakunin and Max Stirner, the study shows how he understood anarchist traditions and reveals the special character of his anarchist communism. His idea of the state as a colonising process and his contention that exploitation and oppression operate in global contexts is a key feature of this. Kropotkin's views about the role of theory in revolutionary practice show how he developed this critique of the state and capitalism to advance an idea of political change that combined the building of non-state alternatives through direct action and wilful disobedience. Against critics who argue that Kropotkin betrayed these principles in 1914, the book suggests that this controversial decision was consistent with his anarchism and that it reflected his judgment about the prospects of anarchistic revolution in Russia.

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