Why the fool is Wrong: Hobbes on Contracts
For Hobbes, a contract is when a right is “mutually transfer[ed].” There are certain situations which make a contract invalid, such as a contract formed under torture. Such a contract terminates either by performing the transfer or being forgiven (aka released from the agreement by the party who already transferred their right). To break a contract otherwise is to be unjust or perform an injustice.
However, the concept of injustice only exists within a commonwealth. Prior to the formation of a commonwealth, all men have a right to all things. Hobbes believes that a higher power (such as a commonwealth) must exist in order for a contract to be followed through by both individuals. The higher power punishes people for being unjust. Without such a power, people will violate their contracts for their own benefit. People fear the higher power’s punishment thus will be compelled to follow their contracts.
A fool may say that reason guides men to break their contracts or rebel against their commonwealth. However, in both situations, Hobbes would find it to go against reason and the law of nature which guides people to not destroy themselves. To destroy your own commonwealth is unwise because your commonwealth compels people to follow their contracts and help ensure self-preservation. Additionally, to break a contract is to undermine the whole system of contracts which ensures your self-preservation. In a society without such contracts, the state of nature will prevail endangering one’s survival.
However, Hobbes does not think that all surrendering of rights is necessarily mutual. Hobbes identifies a gift as a non-mutual transferring of rights. However, Hobbes still believes that the motivation for a gift is self-centered. His provided motivations for such an action are to gain friendship, redeem their soul to gain entry into heaven, or relieve guilt.
Violet's Original Post (I can't seem to make a new one):
ReplyDeleteAre People Property of God, or Themselves? According to Locke
I am curious about Locke's reasoning in Chapter IV in his argument that a person cannot consent to slavery, and if it may be in tension with his reasoning for how a person can come to own property.
In Chapter IV, Locke argues that one cannot consent to slavery because “No body can give more power than he has himself; and he that cannot take away his own life, cannot give another power over it" (17). He presupposes his conclusion from Chapter II that one cannot harm oneself because people are created by God. In the state of nature, one has liberty, but “he has not liberty to destroy himself… for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker… they are his property" (9). Locke's argument for why one cannot consent to slavery thus follows: people cannot harm themselves because they are God's property. Because they do not have the power to harm or destroy themselves, they cannot grant this power to someone else. This argument pivotally hinges on people not having complete ownership of themselves.
Yet in the following chapter, his argument for how one can own something in a state of nature rests on having property in oneself. Locke reasons that because “every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself,” therefore “The labour of his body… [is] properly his" (19). So, by mixing what is unquestionably yours with goods from God, one can have ownership over previously common resources. In this argument, having complete ownership over yourself may be necessary to justify one's labor being one's own, and therefore to have ownership over property.
These two premises – that people are the property of God, and that people are the property of themselves – seem to be in conflict.
However, these possibly inconsistent premises could be reconciled so long as one can have complete ownership of one's labor despite being property of God. Is this possible? If property ownership means the exclusive right to control something, would that include the labor of that thing? Perhaps God's property ownership operates differently from a person's possession of an earthly item.
Alternatively, if people do not have ownership of their labor, but rather God owns their labor, perhaps this does not pose a problem for people's ownership of labor's fruit because God wishes for people to benefit from goods of the Earth. In this case, people own their own labor in effect, even though God actually owns their labor, for the sake of justifying property ownership. Is this kind of proxy-labor-ownership what Locke intended? Perhaps I only got caught up in definitions.
I find it interesting nonetheless, however, that people are simultaneously property of God, yet have ownership of themselves. It seems this can only be consistent so long as God is an exception to typical, earthly rules of ownership.
An unexplored and very interesting question, nicely framed. There is a book coming out from a philosopher at the University of Arizona that spends two chapters attempting to provide a compelling answer to just this question. One issue this brings up is that of inalienable rights. I can sell you my farm, but not my vote -- the latter is in an important sense inalienable. Locke seems to think that our property in ourselves is in key respects inalienable.
DeleteYou make several interesting points here, but some of the earlier ones seem to be in tension with the later ones. For example, if a higher power must exist for a contract to be followed through, then isn't the fool right after all?
ReplyDelete