Hobbes’s Leviathan - Moral Philosophy
Hobbes’s Leviathan - Moral Philosophy
Hobbes’s Leviathan is one of the many outstanding books on moral philosophy. Hobbes writes in a clear and engaging manner which makes his underlying thesis perfectly clear from the start: Man is a self-interested animal, and that this self-interest is enough to create authoritative and obligatory concepts of justice, citizenship, and morality. He states his thesis right from the start and is the basis for his theory that for all things dealing with ethical intuition the answer is generated from one thought, that is the rational self-interest of all humans. Although his theory sounds like the perfect society in which everyone is looking out for everyone, I believe that his theory attempts to define and in turn reduce our intuitive concept of morality into the simple term of self-interest. No matter how this argument is derived, there is a group of ethical situations in which the antecedent is true but the consequence is false. It is often the case where the self-interest of a person in the society is in direct contradiction of the society. In this paper I will discuss a class of people that I will refer to as “free loaders”. “Free loaders” are people who try to get something for nothing and try to get it by any means possible. I will prove that Hobbes’s theory does not apply to all situations. In this paper I will show how “free loaders” dirupt Hobbes’s theory that self interest is the basis for morality.
In order to better validate my thesis there is a brief summary needed to present the basic ideas of the book with emphasis on the points that are relevant to my paper. Hobbes begins with two parts on nature: one is psychological and the other is physiological. The psychological assumption is that all men have desires, and that the goal of all men is to have power in order to get what they desire. “I put fourth as a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in death.” (pg. 58) The physiological assumption is that all men are created and remain equal in intelligence, morals, and goals. This equality among men means that every man can be and is a threat to every other man in that there...