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Warrender and His Critics1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Brian Barry
Brian Barry
Affiliation:
Nuffield College, Oxford
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Extract

The decade of criticism directed at The Political Philosophy of Hobbes has found the critics united in rejecting many of Warrender's conclusions, but it has not produced a generally accepted alternative interpretation. I shall argue in this paper that this has happened because the critics have not been searching enough in their criticism. Often they have taken over without discussion two crucial but highly questionable features of Warrender's book: first, his ignoring the definition of ‘obligation’ given in Leviathan; and, second, his presentation of logically independent conclusions about Hobbes's theory as if they were related. As a result of the first, Warrender's critics have sometimes followed him into error; and, as a result of the second, they have sometimes been led to dismiss correct conclusions in the belief that these were logically bound up with other conclusions that really were wrong. Too often they have thrown out the baby and kept the bathwater.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 43 , Issue 164 , April 1968 , pp. 117 - 137
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1968

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References

2 Warrender, Howard, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of Obligation (Oxford: 1957).Google Scholar

3 References in this form are to the pages of the edition of Leviathan edited by Oakeshott, M. (Oxford: 1960).Google Scholar

4 He does quote Hobbes as saying that when a man has given up a right he is under an obligation, but loses the point of it by taking it to mean simply that being obliged is ‘suffering impediment’ (Warrender, , 101).Google Scholar But giving up a right is not merely one among a number of possible ways of coming under an obligation, it is (by definition) the only way.

5 In De Cive Hobbes in fact distinguishes two kinds of ‘natural obligation’. The first is exhibited by God's attaching unpleasant consequences to certain kinds of behaviour and thus controlling the rational members of His creation through their ability to foresee these consequences and take appropriate avoiding action. This is the kind of ‘natural obligation’ already discussed, and the kind which Warrender proposes to make central to his interpretation of the Leviathan. The second kind of ‘natural obligation’ is exhibited by God's making stones fall and planets revolve. In the Leviathan this kind of ‘natural obligation’ gets even shorter shrift than the other; so far from being an example of ‘obligation’, God's operations in this manner are only metaphorically allowed to be even an example of ‘reigning’.

6 Goldsmith, M. M., in his Hobbes's Science of Politics (New York and London: 1966)Google Scholar, has been very thorough in giving footnote references to the parallel passages; the quotation from De Cive (which he gives on p. 112) is one of the few which are not given with a cross-reference to Leviathan.

7 ‘The argument of De Cive is based upon a concept of arbitrary impediment to liberty which Hobbes had abandoned by 1646.… The most important point regarding the paragraph on natural obligation in De Cive [i.e. the passage quoted by Warrender] is that Hobbes had to jettison it when he wrote Leviathan. His first species of natural obligation, whereby the liberty of all created things is limited by the laws of their creation, had to disappear, because lack of intrinsic power does not restrict liberty. His second species of natural obligation, whereby the liberty of God's subjects is taken away by fear and hope aroused by His irresistible power, had to disappear, because there could no longer be arbitrary impediments to liberty; fear and hope, too, do not restrict liberty.’ Hood, F. G., The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: 1964), 45 and 50.Google Scholar

8 Notice that Hobbes here effectively admits that there is something in De Cive to be ‘caught’ that does not recur in Leviathan.

9 Hobbes actually took up the interpretation of his phrase about ‘power irresistible’ in his reply to Bramhall; and he clearly rejected the construction put on it by Warrender (and, as we shall see below, Plamenatz). ‘He would make men believe, I hold all things to be just, that are done by them who have power enough to avoid the punishment.… I said no more, but that the power, which is absolutely irresistible, makes him that hath it above all law, so that nothing he doth can be unjust.’ (E.W. IV, 146.)Google Scholar

10 In the other sense of ‘justice’, which presupposes the existence of a relevant covenant, there is a necessary connection between justice and obligation, but even if we supposed that this was the relevant sense here, the obligation that would follow from it would unfortunately come in the wrong place to help Warrender. For, in this sense of‘justice’ what we can infer if we know that someone is behaving justly is that he himself is carrying out an obligation; we still cannot say that anybody else has obligations. At the most then, saying that God behaves justly in commanding men might entail that in so doing God is carrying out His own (contractual) obligations.

11 Note may also be taken of Hood's view that the laws of nature oblige qua commands of God delivered in Scripture. This is repeated at least five times (4, 49, 227,228 and 253—the last sentence in the book) each time without any reference. This compounds Warrender's illicit move from ‘law’ to ‘obligation’ with a groundless denial of God's being able to give laws without resorting to revelation. Hobbes' makes it clear that the ‘word of God’ includes the ‘dictates of reason and equity’ (Lev., 275)Google Scholar, so that there is a ‘triple word of God, rational, sensible and prophetic (Lev., 233).Google Scholar It is true that in De Cive Hobbes says that the laws of nature are properly laws ‘as they are delivered by God in holy Scriptures’. But, quite apart from the fact that this is altered in Leviathan to the more general formulation of ‘the word of God’, Hobbes immediately adds, in De Cive, that the ‘laws of nature are divine laws as well because reason, which is the law of nature, is given by God to every man for the rule of his actions; as because [they occur in Scripture]’. (Both passages from E.W. II, 50–51.)Google Scholar A more general point against Hood is that Hobbes sometimes maintains that the Bible is a law to us only on the authority of the sovereign: ‘How came it then to be a law to us? Did God speak it viva voce to us? Have we then any warrant for it than the word of the prophets? Have we seen the miracles? Have we any other assurance of their certainty than the authority of the Church? And is the authority of the Church any other than the authority of the commonwealth…? (Liberty and Necessity, E.W. V, 179.)Google Scholar Even if we discount this as a polemical excess, the fact that Hobbes was willing to put it forward at all suggests that he did not regard it as undermining the thing closest his heart—the obligation to obey the sovereign. Yet this it would certainly do if (as Hood maintains) that obligation depended ultimately on the Scripturally-based obligation to obey the laws of nature. For the obligation to keep (or even endeavour to keep) the laws of nature could not be valid until (per impossible) a sovereign had already been brought into existence. And even if this difficulty could be circumvented, there could be no obligation to obey infidel sovereigns (since, by definition, they would not underwrite the Bible); yet Hobbes holds that there is in general such an obligation.

12 As originally defined, the ‘right of nature’ was a right to act in self-defence only; you could hurt another man legitimately only if you sincerely believed him a threat to your existence. It was a ‘right to all things’ only in the sense that there was no general category of action (e.g. killing) that it ruled out. But thus limitation is soon dropped. For example, God's ‘natural right’ is ‘to afflict men at his pleasure’ (Lev., 234)Google Scholar; but obviously He had no need of self-defence. It is easy to see why Hobbes drops the restriction. He wants to say that the covenant setting up a sovereign simply leaves him to exercise his ‘right of nature’ without impediment, but to restrict the powers of the sovereign to acting in his own self-defence would obviously defeat Hobbes's whole purpose. The ‘right of nature’ must therefore be unlimited to save the sovereign's absolute authority; God is an incidental beneficiary.

13 Even if we accepted for the sake of argument that the definition of law quoted by Warrender applied to God's law as well as civil law, we should get the conclusion that men have a contractual obligation to obey God's laws, which is something that Hobbes explicitly denies, and in any case is not what Warrender wants to maintain. Warrender quotes the passage to prove that men have a natural obligation (in the De Cive sense) to obey God's laws, but the passage would not support this even if it were about God. And since, if it were about God, it would have to mean that every man has covenanted with God to obey Him, we can add that it certainly is not about God.

14 Plamenatz, J., ‘Mr Warrender's Hobbes’ (Political Studies, vol. V, No. 3 [1957], 297Google Scholar; reprinted in Brown, K. C. (ed.) Hobbes Studies (Oxford: 1965), 75).Google Scholar The same view is expressed in Man and Society (London: 1963), vol. I, 130.Google Scholar In a subsequently written account, he suggests that this sort of obligation to obey someone can be treated as a special case of a more general concept such that ‘when Hobbes says a man is obliged… to do something he implies that, if he saw his advantage clearly, he would necessarily do it’. (Introduction to Leviathan [Fontana paperback, London: 1962], 32.)Google Scholar The obligation to keep covenants is still treated as logically on a par with (say) the obligation to kill another man; it is obligatory when it pays and all that is meant by saying it is obligatory in some situation is that it does pay. (Incidentally, the idea that the laws of nature are obligatory qua commands of God, and the move from God's ‘irresistible power’ to man's obligation to obey Him, recur on pages 28 and 30.)

15 Summary by Plamenatz, , Political Studies, vol. V, No. 3 (1957), 296Google Scholar; Brown, (ed.), 73–4.Google Scholar

16 (c) is dealt with on pages 89–94 of Hobbes's System of Ideas. With (d) and (e) we must be more inferential since Watkins employs the concept of ‘obligation’ very little in his exposition. (There is no entry in the index.) However, on 87–9 he denies that the laws of nature are morally obligatory without suggesting they are obligatory in some other way; and in dealing with the reasons for obeying the sovereign he mentions only two: firstly that he ‘bears the person’ of the subjects (160–1) and secondly that he can ‘cause men, by threat of punishment’ to obey the law (162).

17 Hood also calls this ‘natural obligation’, but it is clearly not the ‘natural obligation’ of the De Cive passage. He does not, in my view, produce any textual evidence for believing that Hobbes at any time recognised any form of obligation except those resulting from physical manipulation, fear of consequences, and contract. Obligations to God are not an additional form of obligation; they must take one or more of these three forms. Incidentally, Warrender seems to have set the fashion for speaking of ‘moral obligation’ as if this were a Hobbesian category—both Watkins and Hood do it. As far as I am aware, the term ‘moral obligation’ appears nowhere in Hobbes. He does sometimes say that the laws of nature are (among other things, such as natural and positive divine law) moral laws, ‘because they concern the manners and conversation of men, one towards another’. (Elements of Law, 5–1.)Google Scholar But just as divine law does not entail divine obligation neither does moral law entail moral obligation. (The sovereign's laws do, of course, involve an obligation, which we may if we like call political or legal obligation, though as far as I know Hobbes does not. But if we do, we must be clear that it is not a new form of obligation, but one of the three forms mentioned—in fact, the contractual form—applied to certain special covenants.)

18 It is perhaps worth noting that Macpherson, C. B.'s essay in Marxist psychoanalysis, The Political Philosophy of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: 1962)Google Scholar, which aimed to supply the ‘hidden premises’ allegedly needed to make Hobbes's theory work, took its warrant from the consensus among commentators on Hobbes that his political theory is incoherent. But if the theory is in fact coherent already, the case for an elaborate reconstruction to make it coherent immediately collapses.

19 Incidentally, to say that a promise obliges only when keeping it conduces to your security does not entail saying that everything which conduces to your security is obligatory. If an action conduces to your security, then it would indeed be contrary to ‘that reason, which dictateth to every man his own good’ (Lev., 95)Google Scholar, not to do that action; but doing it is obligatory only if you have promised to do it.

20 First, Hobbes says that ‘on any reasonable suspicion it is void’, and adds discouragingly that ‘he which performeth first, does but betray himself to his enemy’. But a little later, he stipulates that ‘the cause of fear, which maketh such a covenant invalid, must always be something arising after the covenant made’. (Lev., 89–90.)Google Scholar Cf. Goldsmith, , op. cit., 135–7.Google Scholar

21 To say, as Warrender does, that the sovereign operates ‘in a system of rights and duties that he does not himself control or create except in the most trivial sense’ (Warrender, , 28)Google Scholar, is surely to overstate the point. The sovereign's commands obviously do create ‘a system of rights and duties’ which is new, though the obligation to observe them is not of a new kind. Watkins quite properly objects to Warrender here (Watkins, 154–7) but he again rejects too much. It is quite true that ‘what the legislator commands, must be held for good, and what he forbids for evil' (Watkins, , 155)Google Scholar, but it does not follow from this that nothing is generally agreed on as good or evil until the sovereign commands it. ‘All men agree on this, that peace is good, and therefore…the laws of nature are good’ (Lev., 104).Google Scholar

22 In De Cive, Hobbes makes the point by saying that ‘a man is obliged by his contracts’ but the law ‘ties him being obliged’ (E.W. II, 185).Google Scholar Contrast Austin's view that legal obligation consisted in the chance or likelihood of suffering an ‘evil’ at the hands of the sovereign.

23 ‘The ground of these rights [of the sovereign] have the rather need to be taught diligently, and truly taught; because they cannot be maintained by any civil law, or terror of legal punishment.’ (Lev., 220.)Google Scholar And in Behemoth, Hobbes, wrote, ‘If men know not their duty, what is there that can force them to obey the laws? An army, you will say. But what shall force the army?’ (E.W. VI, 237.)Google Scholar Thus Hobbes, like Hume in the well-known opening of the essay ‘Of the First Principles of Government’, is clear that it is ‘on opinion only that government is founded’. (Hume's Essays [Oxford: 1963, edn.], 29.)Google Scholar

24 What makes rules for collective conservation a means to individual conservation is the fact of virtual equality. Since no man can hope to dominate others securely by a sheer superiority of natural strength everyone must accept terms which are equally favourable to all (i.e. which will conserve men in multitudes) if there is to be peace. (See Lev., 100–101.)Google Scholar

25 The laws of nature are also said to ‘oblige’ at Lev., 219–220.Google Scholar

26 A covenant is the giving up of a right, so that the third law of nature, ‘that men perform their covenants made’, means that when you have given up a right it should stay given up. Now, according to Wernham one adopts a law of nature by ‘giving up the right’ to do what it forbids, but then where does this put the adoption of the third law of nature? On Wernham's view, adopting the third law of nature would have to consist in giving up the right to go back on one's word when one had given up a right. But this is absurd. If the man's giving up rights is already effective in controlling his actions, his giving up the right to break the third law of nature is redundant; but if it is not already effective then giving up the right to break the third law of nature is ineffective, too, and we have an infinite regress.

27 M. M. Goldsmith also tries to reconcile the ideas ‘that all obligations are self-imposed’ and that the laws of nature are obligatory. He writes: ‘If these natural regularities [the laws of nature] apply whether they are known or not, how can a man be obliged to obey them only by his own act? In the sense of physical necessity [i.e. the actual regularities themselves], surely no one has a choice. Nevertheless, there is another sense in which these laws oblige only by a man's own act; it is by his own discovery of their existence and their necessity that he realizes that he is bound to respect them in the sense of taking account of them in his deliberations.' (Hobbes's Science of Politics, 132–3.)Google Scholar If this kind of tortured reasoning is necessary to reconcile the two ideas, this is equivalent to their being irreconcilable; to say that the ‘act’ which puts a man under an obligation is discovering a regularity is, at best, a rather weak joke. The laborious attempt is especially perverse because the phrase quoted—that there is ‘no obligation on any man, which ariseth not from some act of his own’—is perfectly clear in its context. (Lev., 141Google Scholar; reference on 134 of Goldsmith.) Hobbes is arguing that the obligation of the citizen depends on the terms of the covenant setting up the sovereign; thus the ‘act of his own’ by which alone a man undertakes obligations is the act of making a covenant.

28 Perhaps a comment is unavoidable at this point on Hobbes's statement (Lev., 84)Google Scholar that ‘obligation and liberty… in one and the same matter are inconsistent’. If Hobbes had wanted to make obligation and liberty strict contradictories he could have done it by two alternative pairs of definitions. One pair would be that obligation in a matter is having given up a right to do it, and liberty is not having given up a right to it; the other pair would be that liberty is not suffering corporal impediment (chains, imprisonment, etc.) and obligation is suffering them. Unfortunately, in Leviathan he picked his definition of ‘obligation’ from the first pair and his definition of ‘liberty’ from the second pair. But in practice he brings his use of ‘liberty’ in line with his definition of ‘obligation’: in his chapter on ‘The Liberty of Subjects’ he sticks at the beginning to saying that ‘in the proper sense for corporal liberty’ it is ‘freedom from chains and prison’ (Lev., 138)Google Scholar, but he then uses the word to cover (a) those matters where there is no command of the sovereign (i.e. no law) so no contractual obligation, and (b) those matters (e.g. self-destruction) where no covenant can give rise to obligations. Hobbes would have been much better off if he had couched his formal definition of freedom in terms of the absence of contractual obligation. His actual definition produces absurd results when substituted for occurrences of the word ‘liberty’. For example, substitute it in his definition of ‘laying down a right’ as ‘divesting yourself of the liberty of hindering someone else's right’; the latter would then read, ‘divesting yourself of the absence of external impediments [e.g. chains or prison] to hindering someone else's right’. Thus undertaking an obligation would entail literally, not metaphorically, chaining yourself up! This point is worth making because it is as well to be clear that the correlative of ‘corporal liberty’ is not ‘natural obligation’, for ‘natural obligation’ is not physical restraint but fear of consequences. So Hobbes's misjudgment in clinging to ‘corporal liberty’ is no encouragement to those who wish to read ‘natural obligation’ into a central position in Leviathan.

29 Hart, H. L. A., The Concept of Lata (Oxford: 1961), 80.Google Scholar

30 Plamenatz would attribute to Hobbes the view that the state obliges qua gunman; Warrender that God, qua super-gunman, obliges you to obey the state.

31 See Hart, , op. cit., 79–88.Google Scholar