Against custom or the settled way

Hobbes is far from the only one to assimilate moral wrong to violations of custom like picking your nose in public, or setting the table with the silver uncommonly arranged - though he departs from this incipient naturalistic relarivism in providing his contract theory to found justice in a universalist manner, but not small morals.

Maggie's mother's spontaneous assimilation of morals to custom is not thus qualified.

The Mill on the Floss, The Final Rescue, Chapter 3.

This is quite different from assimilation of moral wrong with getting a calculation, translation, or fact wrong, to which others subscribe.

Undoing Leviathan

Krugman says the GOP crazies are out to undo the social contract that, in Hobbes' view, saved us from a wretched state of nature.

Crazies including the likes of George Will, for instance.

Even before the Renaissance

Inferno, Canto X.

Dante's contemporary references all seem so out of place in this work.

A pair of 13th Century Florentine Epicureans is introduced.

Were they actual atheists?

Did they believe, of the pagan gods, what Epicurus did?

What did they believe of the Christian God?

Four centuries before Gassendi and Hobbes.

Five before La Mettrie, Helvetius, and Holbach.

Kantian ethics

"Treat everyone as an end in himself, never as a means solely."

Looking at the formula of universal law, and perhaps under the influence of R. M. Hare, some philosophers have professed to see Kant's ethics as founded in utilitarianism, albeit of the rule variety.

Looking at the formula of ends, I see his ethics as closer to the those of Hobbesian contract theory.

Of course, he says his inspiration is in Rousseau.

Free men are not sacrificed to the interests of others.

Not even when the others are the majority.

But are you more likely to be a winner or the loser if one is killed for body parts to save many?

So, really?

Les Miserables

Hugo spends about the first hundred pages or so of Les Miserables portraying for us the saintliness of Monseigneur Bienvenu, Bishop Myriel of Digne.

He declaims against atheism, which he identifies with Epicurus, Hobbes, and a vision of human life as an egoist war of all against all, and urges an empty theology that is not even a bare theism, and a view of Christ, poverty, and goodness that hears only Jesus's command to give all you have to the poor.

It's rather slow going, but then our author moves on and brilliantly tells the story of Jean Valjean's early life, crime, punishment, early days after his release, and rescue from his profound and repulsive badness by the brave and selfless Bienvenu.

Valjean as a young man lives with and is the sole support of his widowed young sister and her seven children, one a mere infant.

He is an illiterate and unskilled workman relying on day labor for all.

In the midst of one harsh winter there is no work and a day comes when there is nothing for the family to eat, literally nothing.

Valjean, consumed with hunger and desperation, punches through the glass window of a bakery and runs off with a loaf of bread.

The baker pursues and spreads alarm, and he is overtaken and captured.

Within days he is sent in chains to the galleys, sentenced to five years in conditions of inexpressible horror four attempts at escape from which earn him extension of his sentence to 19 years.

Hugo in words and Valjean wordlessly in his heart agree the theft was wrong, but damn society's heartlessness for the poverty and hunger that occasioned it and the appalling injustice of such punishment, and Valjean is crushed into remorseless hatred of society, mankind, and the whole creation.

Hugo ties that same heartless cruelty of society, that appalling punishment, and the profoundly vicious criminality of Valjean they have brought about, all three, to the vision of atheism, or atheist vision of the world, described above.

There is a brief section of those first hundred or so pages on Bienvenu in which the bishop visits a dying old revolutionary.

The fierce man of the people repudiates atheism and the bishop accepts the legitimacy of the Revolution, even conceding his own moral inferiority to the dying hero.

When he is self-righteous, religious, sentimental, moralistic, or even merely political, Hugo is awful.

But he is all the same a magnificent talent, and his narrations of incidents, actions, and events, as well as his revelations of character in them, are wonderful and compelling.

I have read Les Miserables unabridged in English twice and French once.

I am reading it again.

Hobbes's problem

Contracts without the sword are but words, he says.

In the state of nature, he says, that power is lacking and desperately missed.

But the compact that creates the Leviathan is different.

In being sworn it creates the sword by which it will be enforced.

Philanthropy, pets, and socialism

Two arguments for the rich, against resisting socialist redistribution.

First, enough is enough.

After that, the rest matters very little and most of it not at all.

Read Hobbes.

You risk the real good of peace for what, to you, are necessarily trifles of vanity.

Second, many of you spend lavishly on pets, stables of horses, saving the whales, preserving polar bears, and the like.

Why not take as much interest in necessitous people as you do in necessitous animals?

But overseas philanthropy will not do, whatever accolades it wins from other rich folk.

It is your neighbor's lot you must relieve.

Your near neighbor's.

Your countryman's.

The distress of distant foreigners, however much greater it may be, is outside the city walls.

Your disaffected compatriot is by your side.

Consider that, carefully.

Libertarians, soi-disant "cosmopolitan liberals," and all forms of contemporary post- and anti-nationalists are unanimous in rejecting compatriot - I leave the issue of nationality aside - as a morally significant category.

That is unfortunate since accepting it as that makes what is anyway necessary more palatable.

《Pause》

But socialism, you say, is far from philanthropy, and the latter is much the lesser evil.

It is voluntary, no more costly than one will allow, covers only expenditures one approves, and teaches gratitude or, at any rate, helpless dependence on the benevolence and power of the rich.

Socialist redistribution is just the opposite.

It is involuntary, more costly than one wants, spent in ways one does not control, and teaches the altogether unacceptable lesson that the state can and even perhaps morally may take what it wants from the rich and spend quite as it likes, if they, the people, like it as well.

And as for dependence, there, too, it teaches a bad lesson.

It teaches dependence on the state, on the party of the people, on politics, and on the vote, but most certainly and most objectionably not on the rich, their power, and their good will.

But surely that, too, is not too great a price for peace, though many a foolish oligarch has thought so?

Bismark, you recall, was quite clear it made good sense.

You may think the thousands of years of successful slavery show the rich can have peace on much better terms than that, if they are determined and bold.

But plebians are not slaves, and slaves do not vote.

Du Contrat Social

Rousseau says at the outset that man's first law is to look out for his own conservation, his first cares are those he owes himself, and as soon as he reaches the age of reason, being sole judge of the means of his conservation, he becomes his own master.

How like Hobbes he sounds.

But there are many differences.

For one, Hobbes everywhere repeats the evils of anarchy are worse than the worst despotism.

Rousseau stoutly maintains tyranny can indeed be worse than anarchy.

He reminds us the slave is governed and lives or dies for his owner's good.

But legitimate government is erected by a people for their good.

Not an easy distinction for either Rousseau or Hobbes to maintain given, as they both say, people accept imposed rule so as not to be killed.

And that is exactly Seneca's - and Rousseau's, and Hobbes's - understanding of how people become or remain slaves.  

For another,  Rousseau denies the state of nature is a state of war, pitting each and every against each and every man - basing this on the unfortunate and false claim that war is a relation only among states, because "among things of diverse natures there can be no true relation."

Reading Hobbes, again

". . . preservation of life being the end for which one man becomes subject to another, every man is supposed to promise obedience to him in whose power it is to save or destroy him."

Chapter 20, Leviathan.

Hobbes late in this chapter considers the objection that the extent of power he assigns the sovereign creates horrific danger for those ruled, and replies the evils of civil war and violent civil discord that arise where such power is lacking are worse.

Based on the horrors of tyranny we have seen in the 20th Century, those evils are not worse, and even nowhere near as bad as the evils of tyranny.

Nor is such horrific power necessary to prevent them.

Reading Hobbes's Leviathan. Property.

The right and power of Hobbes's Sovereign are absolute, irresponsible, and even totalitarian.

In a state of nature - that is, in a state of war - every man has an equal right to all things, he says, including even each other's bodies or persons.

As a necessity of peace, it belongs to the Sovereign to lay down rules creating property, determining mine and thine for each and all, providing methods for and conditions of exchange, and so on.

It is interesting to see how far Rousseau agrees with Hobbes about the transition from nature to political society.

For both, the surrender is total and the power unlimited of the Sovereign or General Will.

For both, property rights, justice, whose in particular is what in particular, and rules of exchange are creations of the sovereign, as they are for Hume conventions.

More Hobbes

"For no man giveth but with intention of good to himself; because gift is voluntary; and of all voluntary acts the object is to every man his own good . . . . "

" . . . A man that,  by asperity of nature,  will strive to retain those things which to himself are superfluous and to others necessary; and for the stubbornness of his passions cannot be corrected, is to be left or cast out of society, as cumbersome thereunto. For seeing every man, not only by right but by necessity of nature,  is supposed to endeavour all he can to obtain that which is necessary for his conservation,  he that shall oppose himself against it for things superfluous is guilty of the war than thereupon is to follow; and therefore doth that which is contrary to the fundamental law of nature, which commandeth to seek peace."

"Covenants without the sword are but words . . ."

"Amongst men there are very many that think themselves wiser and abler to govern the public better than the rest; and these strive to reform and innovate, one this way and another that way, and thereby bring it into distraction and civil war."

There are two traditions in politics.

One erects politics upon, or subordinates it to, morality and the other does not.

Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Christians,  and Locke are in the former camp.

Protagoras, the Sophists, the Epicureans, Thucydides, Machiavelli,  Spinoza,  and Hobbes are in the latter.

Reading Hobbes

Might does not make right.

There is no such thing as right for it to make.

But there is surely might.

As to his particular variant of egoism,  I think Hobbes is mistaken,  though not by much.

Says he, early in Leviathan,

" . . . of the voluntary acts of every man the object is some good to himself. "

This is untrue.

But the object is rarely the good of another.

And such others are few.

And the cost to oneself is rarely much, if anything,  in net.

It might be said in defense of a more altruistic view of humanity that, after all, for very nearly all of us just staying alive is a struggle.

It's root, hog, or die.

But that cannot account for the behavior of the rich and mighty, can it?

It is many long decades since Bill Gates faced such a struggle.

That's the thing about the great and the mighty.

They are exempt from any such desperate necessities.

And we see what they do in their freedom.