Moral Relativity and the Sovereign

Hamilton, James J.

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-27733-7_4

James J. Hamilton²

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Abstract

Ancient Pyrrhonism had an enormous impact on intellectuals in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Pyrrhonists opposed all other philosophical schools on the grounds that their doctrines are all equally plausible and we can never know which is true. The destructive consequences of a skeptical doctrine that questioned the value of all knowledge undermined traditional philosophy and raised doubts about the validity of the new science. I will show that Hobbes co-opted it for his own purposes by integrating Pyrrhonist and traditional ideas and arguments in his philosophy, though he was not a skeptic in the Pyrrhonist sense. The result was the emergence of new principles and constructs by a sepconic articulation process, and the radical transformation of traditional moral and political philosophy. The result is one of his greatest philosophical contributions, moral subjectivity (the individual determines what is moral), and relativity (each person has his own good and bad) within the context of a theory of immutable natural law.

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Notes

1.
This chapter is a revised and repurposed version of James J. Hamilton, “Pyrrhonism in the Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 20 (2012): 217–47.
2.
Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism [hereafter PH], ed. Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), bk. I, ch. 14, paras. 36–39, pp. 12–13; bk. I, ch. 15, paras. 164–69, pp. 40–41.
3.
Hobbes, Elements of Law II.10.5, 186.
4.
Ibid. II.10.8, 188.
5.
Ioannis D. Evrigenis, Images of Anarchy: The Rhetoric and Science in Hobbes’s State of Nature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 188.
6.
There is no agreement among scholars on the nature of Hobbes’s theory of obligation. I adopt by default the standard interpretation of the ground of the law of nature as avoidance of death, and the laws of nature as the means to peace. A sophisticated recent restatement of this view can be found in Azibadeh, Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics. For a different but important interpretation see S. A. Lloyd, Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: Cases in the Law of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
7.
Hobbes, Elements of Law I.17.12, 93.
8.
Ibid. I.19.1, 100. Also ibid. I.14.6, 71.
9.
Sextus Empiricus, Against the Ethicists, ch. III, sects. 88–89, p. 429. Also ibid., ch. III, sect. 44, p. 407. Montaigne makes no reference to the classical concepts of good and evil as what attracts and repels us and may not have been familiar with Against the Ethicists. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, ed. and trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 2003), bk. I, ch. 50, 338.
10.
There is disagreement about what Hobbes meant by science. Cf. Marcus P. Adams, “Hobbes’s Laws of Nature in Leviathan as a Synthetic Demonstration: Thought Experiments and Knowing the Causes,” Philosophers’ Imprint, 19 (2019): 1–23; Lloyd, Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, 151–210; A. P. Martinich, Thomas Hobbes (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 86–103; John Deigh, “Reason and Ethics in Hobbes’s Leviathan,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 34 (1996): 97–109.
11.
Sextus Empiricus, Against the Ethicists, ch. IV, sect. 118, p. 443.
12.
Ibid., ch. V, sect. 166, p. 465. Also Sextus Empiricus, PH, bk. I, ch. 11, paras. 23–24, p. 9; Montaigne, Essays, bk. II, ch. 12, 560–65.
13.
On one occasion, however, he offers us Sextus’s and Montaigne’s formulation on the objects of our obedience. Hobbes, Anti-White XXXVIII.4, 414.
14.
Hobbes, Elements of Law I.7.3, 29. Also Sextus Empiricus, PH, bk. I, ch. 14, paras. 79–90, pp. 22–25.
15.
Hobbes, Elements of Law I.2.10, 7; Hobbes, Anti-White III.1, 116–17.
16.
Hobbes, Elements of Law I.5.14, 23. Montaigne also used paradiastolic redescription for Pyrrhonist purposes. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3:111–13.
17.
Sextus Empiricus, PH, bk. III, ch. 23, paras. 197–201, 205–206, 209, and 213, pp. 196–99; Montaigne, Essays, bk. II, ch. 12, 653–55, 657–60.
18.
Hobbes, Elements of Law II.9.3, 180.
19.
Popkin, History of Scepticism, 3–16.
20.
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, bk. IX, sect. 95, 2:507.
21.
Hobbes, Elements of Law I.5.14, 23; I.2.10, 7. For Hobbes’s rejection of the criterion of reality see ibid. I.3.10, 12; [Hobbes], “Third Set of Objections,” First Objection, 2:121. See also Gianni Paganini, Skepsis: Le débat des modernes sur le scepticisme (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 2008), 203.
22.
Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, lines 2155–56, pp. 568–69. Also Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 5, 20–21; ch. 30, 179.
23.
William Chillingworth, The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation (London: Bell and Daldy, 1870), 72–173. Hobbes’s amanuensis, James Wheldon, recorded a copy of the book in a catalog of the Cavendish library around 1659. It was placed there sometime between its publication and the Restoration and may have been available to Hobbes in the late 1630s. Hamilton, “Hobbes’s Study,” 451.
24.
Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Bennett, 1:409.
25.
The expression is that of Richard H. Popkin, “Hobbes and Skepticism,” in History of Philosophy in the Making, ed. Linus J. Thro (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1982), 133–48; 141.
26.
Michel de Montaige, Essais, 3 vols. (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1969), bk. I, ch. 31, 1:254. Also Sextus Empiricus, PH, bk. I, ch. 11, paras. 21–24, p. 9.
27.
Hobbes, Elements of Law II.6.13, 158.
28.
Ibid. I.11.8, 58; Hobbes, De Cive XVIII.14, 292–93; Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 26, 149; ch. 43, 323–24.
29.
I explain my interpretation on this point further in Chap. 6.
30.
Hobbes, Elements of Law II.10.8, 188–89.
31.
Ibid. II.9.1, 179.
32.
Ibid. I.18.10, 98. Cp. Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, 45–46 (“best endeavours”) and 130 (“utmost endeavours”). Martinich argues for the importance of Chillingworth and Great Tew to Hobbes’s theology. But he errs in his claim that Hobbes held a doctrine of monarchical infallibility. Martinich, Hobbes, 108–13.
33.
Hobbes, Elements of Law I.16.18, 81. He amended the initial MS version with the necessary language. Ibid. II.1.7, 111.
34.
Hobbes, De Cive III.30, 119 (“toto conatu”).
35.
Ibid. II.1, 98–99. Also Hobbes, Elements of Law I.15.1, 74–75; Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians, ed. and trans. Richard Bett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), bk. I, pt. B, ch. 3, sect. b, sub-sect. v, para. 369, p. 73.
36.
Hobbes, De Cive III.32, 120–21.
37.
Thomas Hobbes, De Cive: The English Version Entitled in the First Edition Philosophicall Rudiments Concerning Government and Society [hereafter Philosophicall Rudiments], ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), III.29, 73–74. All references to De Cive bear the page numbers from the Latin version unless Philosophicall Rudiments is specified.
38.
Hobbes, De Cive III.32, 120–21. Also Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 4, 17; Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3:136–38.
39.
Jesuit moral theologians had held the same view. Horro Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought: The Society of Jesus and the State, c. 1540–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 373.
40.
Hobbes, De Cive XVI.10, 239–40.
41.
Ibid. XIV.14, 212.
42.
Ibid. XIV.9, 209–10. Also ibid. IV.4, 123; VI.10, 140; XVII.10, 259–60. Suárez, Grotius and Selden also had held that the Biblical prohibition against theft is not applicable where there has been no division of goods and there are no property rights. But unlike Hobbes, they hold that an effective division could take place before the establishment of government.
43.
Hobbes seems to think of adultery as a form of theft by men, as did “many theologians popular with Puritans,” because the woman was thought of as more susceptible to adultery and as the property of the man. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 30, 179; Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 309.
44.
Hobbes, De Cive II.10–11, 102–103; VI.1, 136; VI.15, 144–45; IX.4–7, 165–66. For conjugal contracts in the state of nature see ibid. IX.6, 166. In The Elements of Law Hobbes had adopted an alternative to the institution of marriage in the state of nature, a covenant of “cohabitation … for society of all things” between a “husband” and “wife.” Hobbes, Elements of Law II.4.6, 133; Nancy J. Hirschman, “Hobbes on the Family,” in Martinich and Hoekstra, Oxford Handbook of Hobbes, 242–63; 253, 258. There is no conjugal contract in Leviathan. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 20, 103; Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Malcolm, ch. 20, 2:309.
45.
Perhaps what Hobbes means by property (mine and thine) is just a stable right to something by which a person can prevent its use by everyone else, a view reminiscent of that of Cicero, who asserts in Pro Caecina (For Caecina) that without law there is no means by which people can determine what belongs to them because there is no universal and unchanging common standard. For Cicero as for Hobbes, everything is common by nature; private possessions can exist before the establishment of the republic only as moral claims. A stable system of private possessions is a creation by legal grant of the republic. Cicero, Pro Caecina, in Pro lege Manilia; Pro Caecina; Pro Cluentio; Pro Rabirio Perduellionis, trans. H. Grose Hodge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 97–205; 167. Hobbes quotes Pro Caecina in Leviathan, ch. 24, 127–28.
46.
Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, ed. Arthur Hugh Clough from the translation of John Dryden, 2 vols. (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 1:68–69.
47.
Hobbes, De Cive XIV.10, 210.
48.
Francisco Suárez, De legibus, ac Deo legislatore (On Laws and God the Law Maker), in Selections from Three Works of Francisco Suárez, S. J., trans. Gwladys L. Williams, Ammi Brown, and John Waldron, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1944), bk. II, ch. 8, sects. 5–6, 1:134; William Barclay, The Kingdom and the Regal Power, trans. George A. Moore (Chevy Chase, MD: Country Dollar Press, 1954), bk. III, ch. 3, p. 156.
49.
Grotius, Right of War, bk. III, ch. 4, sect. 2, 3:1272–73; Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, 8.
50.
James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Speech to Lords and Commons, 21 March 1609, 202.
51.
Sextus Empiricus, PH, bk. III, ch. 23, para. 215, p. 200; Montaigne, Essays, bk. II, ch. 12, 653–55.
52.
Hobbes, De Cive VI.16, 145–46; XIV.10, 210.
53.
Montaigne, Essays, bk. II, ch. 12, 658; François La Mothe Le Vayer, Dialogues fait a l’imitation des anciens (n.p.: Fayard, 1988), “Dialogue sur le marriage,” 452–508.
54.
Jason P. Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 264; G. J. Toomer, John Selden: A Life in Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 2:535–36, 684, 691.
55.
Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 310–14; Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (London: Panther, 1972), 275; Rosenblatt, Chief Rabbi, 144.
56.
Grotius also recounted the ancient pagans’ practice of divorce. Grotius, Right of War, bk. II, ch. 5, sect. 9, paras. 1–4, 2:514–23; Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, 8.
57.
Hobbes, Answer to Bramhall, 378–79.
58.
Hobbes, De Cive XVII.18–20, 265–67.
59.
Ibid. XIV.10, 210.
60.
Hobbes, Philosophicall Rudiments XII.1, 146.
61.
David Gauthier, “Thomas Hobbes and the Contractarian Theory of the Law,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 16, (1990): 5–34; 22–23.
62.
Luciano Venezia, Hobbes on Legal Authority and Political Obligation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 91–92.
63.
Jean Hampton, “Hobbes and Ethical Naturalism,” in Philosophical Perspectives, 6: Ethics, 1992, ed. James E. Tomberlin (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1992), 333–53; 338–39.
64.
Gregory S. Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 340–41; Abizadeh, Hobbes, 19, 39–43, 95–138.
65.
Martin Harvey, “Hobbes’s Conception of Natural Law,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, 37 (1999): 441–60; 446.
66.
Hobbes, De Cive XIV.14, 212. Also Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 26, 140.
67.
S. A. Lloyd, “All the Mind’s Pleasure: Glory, Self-Admiration, and Moral Motivation in On the Citizen and Leviathan,” in Douglass and Olsthoorn, Hobbes’s “On the Citizen,” 51–70; 64.
68.
Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 26, 143.
69.
Deborah Baumgold, “The Composition of Hobbes’s Elements of Law,” History of Political Thought, 25 (2004): 16–43.
70.
Two of his early critics, Roger Coke and Thomas Tenison, were shocked at the extent and consequences of his use of Pyrrhonism, in particular the relativist and subjectivist aspects of his ethics. Mark Goldie, “The reception of Hobbes,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 589–615; 606.
71.
Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 21, 113.
72.
Ibid., ch. 26, 143; “Review, and Conclusion,” 395.
73.
Ibid., ch. 15, 80. Also ibid., ch. 13, 63; ch. 15, 71–72.
74.
Ibid., ch. 4, 17.
75.
Ibid., ch. 6, 24.
76.
Ibid., ch. 26, 138; ch. 43, 330. Also Hobbes, Anti-White XXXVIII.4, 414. For the conceptual difficulties of this paradox see Ross Harrison, “The equal extent of natural and civil law,” in Hobbes and the Law, ed. David Dyzenhaus and Thomas Poole (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 22–38.
77.
Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 42, 306. Also ibid., ch. 12, 56; ch. 26, 138.
78.
Ibid., ch. 14, 70; ch. 20, 103; ch. 27, 151–52; ch. 30, 179; ch. 43, 322.
79.
Ibid., ch. 27, 151–52; ch. 29, 169. Also ibid., ch. 13, 62; ch. 30, 179. Cp. Hobbes, De Cive I.10, 95–96; XIV.19, 214–15; Hobbes, Answer to Bramhall, 284–85.
80.
Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 39, 248. Suárez calls the pope “the supreme pastor of the church.” Suárez, De legibus, bk. II, ch. 14, sect. 24, 2:284.
81.
Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 26, 149; ch. 40, 249–50; ch. 42, 271–73.
82.
Zachary Estes and Thomas B. Ward, “The Emergence of Novel Attributes in Concept Modification,” Creativity Research Journal, 14 (2002): 149–56.
83.
Rothenberg, “Janusian, Homospatial, and Sepconic Articulation Processes,” 5–6.
84.
Ward, Smith and Vaid, “Conceptual Structures,” 23.
85.
Johann P. Sommerville, “Hobbes, Selden, Erastianism, and the History of the Jews,” in Hobbes and History, ed. G. A. J. Rogers and Tom Sorell (London: Routledge, 2000), 160–88.
86.
For four different arguments about why Hobbes was not a legal positivist, see Mark C. Murphy, “Was Hobbes a Legal Positivist?” Ethics, 105 (1995): 846–73; S. A. Lloyd, “Hobbes’s Self-Effacing Natural Law Theory,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 82 (2001): 285–308; Larry May, Limiting Leviathan: Hobbes on Law and International Affairs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 67–84; David Dyzenhaus, “Hobbes on the Authority of Law,” in Dyzenhaus and Poole, Hobbes and the Law, 186–209.
87.
Runco, Creativity, 14.

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James J. Hamilton

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Hamilton, J.J. (2023). Moral Relativity and the Sovereign. In: Hobbes's Creativity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27733-7_4

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