This is particularly the case since in the state of nature there is no morality as commonly understood. The ‘right of nature’ is a ‘right to all things’; in the state of nature, in order to exercise one’s right to self-preservation one effectively has a right to do anything, including killing, raping, etc so there is nothing we can really identify as moral obligation in the state of nature.

I agree that Hobbes doesn’t say that the antecedent to the conditional is true, and probably didn’t believe in it. But it seems to me that his overall argument in Leviathan must address itself to people who believe in it to be successful. So the question whether the assumption that the laws of nature are divine laws creates a problem is a question one might reasonably ask about the text.

You’re rationally obliged to obey the laws of nature, if you can expect everyone else to, because that’s the best way to get what you want (not to die). The LoN tell you what’s rational in a strategic situation (i.e. one in which the results of what I do depend on what you do and vice versa).

The obligation to the sovereign, in contrast, is an obligation incurred by a contract. This creates the problem that there can be no contracts until there’s a sovereign (because promises are only binding if you have a reasonable expectation that the other party won’t default, and you can’t have such an expectation in the state of nature). So, it looks like it’s impossible to contract to set up a sovereign (I’m always reminded of the student howler about Lincoln having been born in a log cabin he built with his own hands).

I don’t agree with GR’s last paragraph, though: Hobbes says that if the laws of nature are commanded by God, then they’re laws properly so called (last paragraph of Leviathan ch.15). He doesn’t say that the antecedent of that conditional is true. And there are good reasons to think that he’s doesn’t believe it.

Virgil Xenophon in 12: I don’t quite get the contrast between ‘pseudo’ and ‘quasi’, but there is no ‘entire social construct within which the “voluntary” agreement is made’ – there are no social constructs in Hobbes’s state of nature. Hence the Lincoln’s cabin problem noted above.

In the earlier chapter, to say that the laws of nature bind in foro interno (leaving aside the God stuff) is to say that it would be irrational for someone not to keep promises or to harm others if he had assurance that others will abstain from such acts. I’m not sure whether this claim is true, but it seems that this is what Hobbes believed. So if, per impossibile, you found yourself in a state of nature where everyone else abstains from cheating, aggression, etc. it would be against reason for you to cheat, harm, etc. But of course, this does not entail that you’re obliged in the sense of being subject to any other person’s authority. You’re obliged to reason (if that makes sense). So far, then, no contradiction.

Of course, Hobbes also says that the laws of nature are laws of God, and that they are to be considered proper laws or impositions of some sort of personal authority once we understand them to emanate from God. It seems that this way of reading the laws of nature might indeed lead to the contradiction you’re talking about. Perhaps one could solve the problem here by saying that divine authority differs from human authority in not depending on consent (perhaps since God, unlike the Leviathan, is all powerful independently of any human authorization or recognition).

I think of Cudworth (wholly unjustly) in terms of that book review from the joke supplement to Mind a few years ago—the one of the Philosophy of Sir Thomas Clott, who (amongst other things) believed language to be the secretion of a particular sort of gland.

I’m wishing I could locate my copy Gauthier’s Logic of Leviathan at the moment, but anyway …

A number of people have pressed the same idea on me, namely that, given Hobbes’s psychology, the counterfactual involving amiable anarchists just isn’t a live possibility.

I can’t say I’m happy about that way of approaching things, since it makes the claim about no obligation without voluntary acts a universal but contingent truth rather than a deep fact about the nature of obligation. Maybe that wouldn’t bother Hobbes.

But I’m satisfied that the voluntarist claim is Hobbes’s core commitment here and that the use of the word “oblige” in the context of the LoNs is just an unhelpful muddying of the waters. The final para of ch.15 where he declares that LoNs aren’t laws, properly speaking, anyway looks fairly decisive too.

I would imagine that Hobbes believed that there is a hierarchy of needs and attendant obligations. The strongest need is to protect one’s self and one’s own. People also have a need for wider society, but since circumstances can be such, particularly if the order of that wider society has broken down, that the need for that wider society, and thus the attendant obligation to treat others in that society fairly, conflicts with the greater need and obligation to protect one’s own. One is thus only bound to civil behavior insofar as the current state of civil society creates no conflict between accepting that obligation and protecting one’s own.

It seems to me a cavil to claim a contradiction in the statement about obligations only arising by one’s own act. Hobbes clearly did not believe that human beings are self-created, in the sense of having needs and obligations only insofar as we will them out of nothing. We are born with a set of such needs and obligations. But the obligations to wider society only take force if one has deliberated, found them not in conflict with the greater obligation to self, and thus accepted the obligation to behave civilly.

Perhaps a practical example will help. My self-imposed obligation to not shoot Republicans on sight remains in force only insofar as their campaign to erode civil society and return us to a state of nature does not, quite yet, put their continued existence in clear conflict with my safety and that of my family. I have a natural obligation to not shoot others on sight, but I have to accept, after careful deliberation on the state of our civil society, that this rule, when applied to Republicans, does not conflict with deeper obligations, before I will accept that following this rule still applies to Republicans.