Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

244 RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM
to be a fight to the death, most people are unlikely to channel their efforts into
production. If people agree to work at all while under the threat of all-out war,
then, according to Hobbes, they will tend to produce things on their own and for
themselves. War, even cold war, threatens production by the division of labour,
and indeed threatens to halt production of any kind (ibid.). And the effects of
open as against latent war are of course much worse. Besides the loss of the good
of society, open war brings the loss of reliable shelter, the loss of methods of
distributing goods in general demand, the decline of learning, the good of
assured survival, the probable loss of life and, what is worse, a probably painful
death. The life of man is reduced to being ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and
short’ (E III 113).
The fearfulness of war is supposed to give people who are at war a reason for
putting an end to it and people who are not at war a reason for continuing to live
in peace. The goal of securing peace and the means of doing so are specified by
the so-called laws of nature (L, chs 14 and 15), about eighteen such laws in all.
The fundamental laws require one to seek peace if it is safe to do so; and to lay
down rights that will enable peace to be made and kept. These two laws, as well
as one requiring that one keep one’s agreements, are the laws of nature that
enable the state to be established and war ended. Further laws of nature call for
traditionally recognized virtues: equity, gratitude, a willingness to be
accommodating and so on.
Now anyone who sees that peace is good and sees that the behaviours enjoined
by the laws of nature are means to peace has a reason for abiding by the laws of
nature—even in the course of a war. Each person has a reason for abiding by the
laws of nature, but not an utterly compelling or categorical reason. For in a state
of war each person retains the right of conducting himself as he likes, and may
judge that it is better to violate the laws of nature even while others obey them.
Since those who obey the laws put themselves at risk by doing so, and since even
the laws of nature do not have to be observed when it is unsafe to do so, the general
uncertainty over how others will behave makes the laws of nature into ineffective
instruments of peace.
Hobbes’s solution to this problem is to make the right of private judgement
one of the rights laid down for the sake of peace. He describes a covenant that
transfers responsibility for the personal safety and well-being of individuals from
those individuals themselves to a man or body of men who are empowered to act
for the safety and well-being of them all. The covenanters become subjects of the
responsible individual or assembly, and are obliged to obey his or their laws for
as long as it is not life-threatening to do so. In other words, the parties to the
covenant delegate the right to see to security and well-being to others, in return
for more certainty about survival and well-being. The man or body of men to
whom the decisions are delegated then declares, in the form of coercive civil
laws, those things that must and must not be done if the peace is to be kept and
security and well-being promoted. The laws can touch virtually any sphere of
private or public life, though Hobbes counsels against a legal regime that is very