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Chris Korsgaard
Handout 7: Hobbes on the Motive of Obligation; Enduring Influence of Natural Law Theory and
Rationalism
I. Hobbess Story, a Reconstruction:
1. We have a restless desire of power after power that puts us at war.
2. We have a natural right to everything.
2a. A natural right is a liberty to do what in our own judgment will preserve ourselves.
2b. A liberty is the absence of an impediment.
3. We are under LN.1 which tells us to seek peace, but if we cant get it to use the arts of war, in
order to preserve ourselves.
How do we know that? God made us self-preserving machines, so he made us to preserve
ourselves. But he also made us rational and capable of decision. So God has entrusted us
with our own preservation: this is the source of both our natural right of self-government,
and of LN.1.
4. LN.1 implies LN.2, that we should be willing to transfer our natural right of self-government
to a sovereign and so join the commonwealth, so long as others agree do so as well.
5. Since a natural right is a liberty, and a liberty is the absence of an impediment, we transfer our
right to the sovereign by setting up an impediment: we give him our power.
How can we make the social contract if contracts are not binding in the state of nature? Since we
make the social contract by transferring a natural right and so by setting up an impediment that is,
by giving all our power to the sovereign, and contracts are binding once the sovereign has power,
the social contract makes itself binding.
II. Moral Motivation, Motives of Obligation, and the Free Rider Problem
The Free Rider problem is the flip side of collective rationality: it is not rational to obey the laws of
nature until everyone else does; but it may be rational to break the laws of nature once everyone else
does, when you can get away with it: it may be rational to cheat.
Complication:
If rationality = maximizing the satisfaction of your interests, cheating when you can get away with it
may not only be rationally allowable but rationally required.
If rationality = doing what is necessary to preserve yourself, we might think cheating when you can
get away with it (when you wont be expelled from the community, say) is rationally
allowable but not rationally required.
Classification Problems:
Kant is usually also called a rationalist, since he believes moral principles are principles of reason,
but unlike these others he does not believe principles of reason are part of the framework of the
universe, nor that they are self-evident they are the laws of our own minds, and they need to be
deduced or established.
Intuitionism
1. A view about how we know moral truths they are self-evident to direct rational apprehension
2. A view according to which there are a plurality of moral principles and no method for
adjudicating conflicts between them
Tenets of Dogmatic Rationalism
1. Moral Principles are Rational Principles
2. Right actions are not just instrumentally but intrinsically rational or right to do:
Clarke: Fit in themselves, in virtue of the relations between people or people and things
Wollaston: True rather than False
Wolff: Tending to the perfecting of our nature (where that is not exactly an instrumental
property)
Clarke (and Butler): moral actions are also useful
3. Moral Principles are apprehended through reason, perhaps by intuition
Support of this thesis through the Mathematics Comparison
(e.g. Clarke, Ross, Scanlon, Parfit)
4. Reason obligates and motivates us to moral action