Journal of the History of Philosophy

1. A. E. Taylor, "The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes," Philosophy 13 (1938): 406-24, esp. 408.

2. One can find the orthodox interpretation in Henry Sidgwick's Outline of the History of Ethics, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan and Company, 1902), 163-70, and there are no doubt earlier statements of it. Recent statements include David Gauthier, The Logic of "Leviathan" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 27-98; and Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 27-57. The principal statements of the dissent's interpretation are found in the article by A. E. Taylor cited in the previous footnote and Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 1-102. An excellent review and assessment of the controversy, which offers an extensive list of recent essays on the topic, is given in Edwin Curley, "Reflections of Hobbes: Recent Work on His Moral and Political Philosophy," Journal of Philosophical Research 15 (1990): 169-250, esp. 187-94.

3. Some recent orthodox interpretations, e.g., Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, 19-24, qualify this statement of Hobbes's egoism. Their use of decision theoretic models to explain Hobbes's arguments makes the question of whether Hobbes took all voluntary action to spring from self-interest no longer crucial to their showing that Hobbes's ethics is based on his moral psychology. Accordingly, they characterize Hobbes's theory of motivation as largely or predominantly egoistic. These qualifications, however, as will become clear, are incidental to the tenets of the orthodox position that I examine in this essay. For an excellent discussion of these issues see Gregory S. Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 44-51.

4. See Curley, "Reflections of Hobbes," 190.

5. All references will be to the Cambridge edition, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); hereafter abbreviated with the letter L. I have modernized some of the spelling and punctuation.

6. I particularly regard as methodologically suspect the common enterprise of ransacking Hobbes's corpus for pieces of text that one can then excise and stitch together to support an interpretation of his thought, abstractly conceived, as if the various works he produced over many years exhibited the kind of constancy and unity of thought that one has trouble realizing in a single work produced in a comparatively short time.

7. L, 101-103.

8. Henry Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, 7th edition (London: Macmillan and Company, 1907), 119-22.

9. L, 92.

10. L, 91. The full definition is "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." As a convenience, I will repeat only the first part of the definition and let that stand for the whole.

11. L, 91-92.

12. L, 103 (emphasis added).

13. L, 32. Note that the sentence preceding the definition makes clear that the phrase 'in this sense' is meant to specify the sense of reason as a faculty of the mind in contradistinction to the sense that it has in the term 'right reason' and that Hobbes specifies in the next paragraph. Reason in the sense of right reason is, according to Hobbes, like arithmetic, an "infallible art."

14. Ibid. See also the contrast Hobbes draws between reasoning and deliberation in ch. 6; L, 45.

15. L, 34.

16. L, 21-22. To be more exact, Hobbes attributes the perception that a certain action or operation is a means to an end to the faculty of invention. He attributes the evaluation of alternative means to a given end (by which one determines which of the alternatives is the best) to the faculties of judgment and prudence. But this complication does not affect the general point, for Hobbes also holds that these latter faculties are distinct from reason. The relevant passages are contained in the first fifteen paragraphs of ch. 8, where Hobbes distinguishes natural...