JamesMartinHouser is a 56yr. old man, and was diagnosed with HIV in 1999.
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Types of Treatments: #HIVUn, #HIVUntreatable, and Hobbs - Laws Of Nature

Additional Conditions: Bound and Gagged, No Legal Capacity, Unable To Assert PATIENT PHYSICIAN COMMUNICATION, Disabled Patient-Centered Communication, Unable ALIGNING EXPECTATIONS, Dumbfounded To Know, CRPD Article 12 Denied, UDHR Article 19 Denied, Discouraged, Depressed, Extremely Angry, No Compromise, Suicide Is Painless, #BigManKillingTechBug, UDHR Article 25 D, Common Sense Denied, Peacebuilding Not Possible, and Hobbs Laws Of Nature Peace? W

Timeline Effectiveness: Very Somewhat Not Very

Destruction of Leviathan, engraving by Gustav Doré (1865). In the public domain. Accessed from Wikimedia Commons.

No, I don’t mean which laws of nature does he list–that’s easy. The first two, in Chapter 14, state:

1. Everyone should “endeavour peace” when it is possible to attain; if not, we can engage in “war.”

2. We should be willing to transfer our natural right to all things in the state of nature to a sovereign power, when others are willing to do so too, for the sake of peace and defense of our security.

Then there are 17 more in Chapter 15, saying things such as: we should keep our covenants (so long as there is a common power to enforce them), we should pardon past offences by those who repent of them, acknowledge equality of persons, treat people impartially when judging disputes, and more.

My question is: What sort of things are these laws? What does it mean to say they are laws of nature?

Different ways of thinking about what “laws” are

One way to think about “laws of nature” is to imagine them like physical laws, like the laws of motion. If Hobbes’ laws of nature were like this then it would seem they would describe how people just naturally act; they would be laws in the sense of descriptions of universal regularities of human action.

But it’s pretty clear that Hobbes’ laws of nature are not simply descriptions of how humans always or usually act. What comes closer to that sort of thing are statements he says about our common desires and aversions, as discussed on Monday–things like desire for power (“one’s present means to obtain some future apparent good” (Chapter 1, Sect. 1, p. 50), or fear of death.

Another way of thinking of “laws” is as rules created by an authority, such as a governmental authority (civil laws) or the commandments of God. Are the laws of nature laws in that sense? Turns out Hobbes says yes, that we can think of them as “delivered in the word of God, that by right commandeth all things” (Chapter 15, sect. 41, p. 100). So then, all these things we should do would be commandments given to us by God.

“general rule[s], found out by reason”

But Hobbes actually talks about laws of nature in quite a different way than this, most of the time. In his lecture on Hobbes, Robert Crawford pointed out that there is a difference between thinking of “natural law” (which can be considered as a commandment by God) and “laws of nature”–the latter being instead “precepts determined by reason” (from my notes on the lecture).

Here’s how Hobbes defines a law of nature: “a precept or general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same; and to omit that, by which he thinketh it may be best preserved” (Chapter 14, sect. 3, p. 79). So here, it sounds like we can use our reason to determine that we ought to do whatever we can to preserve ourselves.

But that doesn’t sound all that different from thinking of laws of nature as what we naturally tend to do, because, as noted above, we already do tend to naturally seek to preserve ourselves. So what gives?

Articles of peace that protect people “in multitudes”

Hobbes also calls the laws of nature “articles of peace,” suggested by reason, by which people can live together well in groups without falling into a state of war (Chapter 13, sect. 14, p. 78): “These are the laws of nature dictating peace for a means of conservation of men in multitudes” (Chapter 15, sect. 34, p. 99).

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2022-07-17 10:39  107K