gauthier hobbes

© 2001 University of Southern California and Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

258 PACIFIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

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Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 82 (2001) 258–284 0279–0750/00/0100–0000© 2001 University of Southern California and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Published by

Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

HOBBES: THELAWS OF NATURE*

DAVID GAUTHIER

Abstract: Are Hobbes’s laws of nature to be understood primarily as theoremsof reason, or as commands of God, or as commands of the civil sovereign?Each of these accounts can be given textual support; each identifies a rolethat the laws may be thought to play. Examining the full range of textualreferences, discussing the place of the laws of nature in Hobbes’s argument,and considering how the laws may be known, give strongest support to thefirst of the three accounts, that the laws are primarily rational precepts andonly secondarily civil and divine commands.

1.

How shall we think of the laws of nature, as they occur in Hobbes’s moraland political thought? As “not known by men for any thing but their ownnatural reason, . . . [and so] but theorems, tending to peace, and thoseuncertain, as being but conclusions of particular men”? (IV.284–5)1 As“delivered in the word of God, that by right commandeth all things”?(15.41) As “the commands of the commonwealth, and therefore also civillaws; for it is the sovereign power that obliges men to obey them”? (26.8)Hobbes offers all of these answers. Each may be defended as conveyingthe heart of his account of the laws of nature by a selective appeal to hiswritings. But what may be concluded from a more comprehensive appeal?

In this essay I shall examine Hobbes’s account of and references to thelaws of nature in the English version of Leviathan, in the Latin versionwhere it differs from the English, and in his disputations with BishopBramhall. Hobbes began writing Leviathan about 1646, and publishedthe English version in 1651. My primary concern is with his treatment ofthe laws of nature in that work, but his subsequent writings will aid us ininterpreting it. Bramhall published a reply to Hobbes’s account of libertyand necessity in 1655, and Hobbes responded in 1656; this contains a

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remarkable attempt to base all law, the laws of nature included, in assent.Bramhall then published a critique of Leviathan in 1658, and Hobbesresponded in 1668, directly elucidating some of his arguments and claims.Also in 1668, Hobbes published the Latin version of Leviathan. Even if,as some students of the text suggest, some or even large parts of it werewritten prior to the English version, it represents Hobbes’s last publishedaccount of his moral and political theory, although it has been somewhatneglected in discussions of his thought.

I do not propose to consider in any detail Hobbes’s earlier accountsof the laws of nature—those in the Elements of Law, and De Cive, althoughI shall from time to time refer to the latter. In my view, when Hobbeswrote these works, he simply had not thought through the problems thathe faces if he treats the laws of nature primarily as theorems of reason, orthe problems that he faces if he treats them primarily as divine com-mands, and the possibility of treating them primarily as civil laws had yetto occur to him. As I shall argue, Hobbes never does think through all ofthe issues surrounding the roles that the laws of nature must play in hisargument, but in both Leviathan and the responses to Bramhall he moveswell beyond his initial views.2

I shall begin with two preliminary but essential matters—the funda-mental conception of law that Hobbes accepts, and the sources of ourawareness or knowledge of the laws of nature. The account of the sourcesimmediately leads to the three interpretations suggested by my originalquestions, and I shall sketch these in somewhat more detail. I shall thenexamine at some length the textual evidence that must be appealed to inassessing these interpretations. This will allow me to consider whether theevidence enables us to decide among them, and also, a related but in someways different matter, whether the role the laws must play in Hobbes’soverall argument allows us to decide among them. I shall conclude thatHobbes really has no alternative but to treat the laws of nature primarilyas theorems of reason, and so neither as divine nor as laws properlyspeaking, but that so treating them has very significant costs, perhaps notfor the core of his political theory, but certainly for some parts of it thathe would not have wanted to sacrifice.

2.

In the English Leviathan, Hobbes says “that law in general is not counsel,but command; nor a command of any man to any man, but only of himwhose command is addressed to one formerly obliged to obey him”.(26.2) The difference between counsel and command, according to Hobbes,is that the reasons for the counselled act are deduced “from the benefitthat arriveth by it to whom” it is addressed, (25.3) whereas the reason for

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the commanded act is the will of the person who issues it, and, Hobbesadds, “the proper object of every man’s will is some good to himself”. (25.2)Civil law differs from law in general only in specifying “the name of theperson commanding, which is . . . the person of the commonwealth”. (26.2)

Although civil law and its relation to the laws of nature will occupy uspresently, it may be worth noting here that if we take Hobbes’s insistencethat the reason for law is to be found in the will of the lawgiver, togetherwith his view that the object of the will is a good to the person willing,and then note that the civil law is given by “the person of the common-wealth”, we reach the quite unexceptionable conclusion that the object ofthe civil law must be the public good. For the good of “the person of thecommonwealth”—the sovereign—is not the private or particular benefitof the individual or assembly which exercises sovereign power, but ratheris determined by “the end for which the sovereignty was ordained”, (21.15)which, as Hobbes makes amply clear, is for the subjects “to live peaceablyamongst themselves and be protected against other men”. (18.1)

Returning to the characterization of law in general, we should under-line Hobbes’s insistence that law is addressed “to one formerly obliged toobey” the commander. Law is not the source of obligation. Rather, itmakes prior obligation determinate. And what then is the source of thisprior obligation—the obligation to obey the lawgiver? Hobbes claimsthat there is “no obligation on any man which ariseth not from some actof his own; for all men equally are by nature free”. (21.10) So law is thecommand of some person whom one is formerly obliged to obey in virtueof some act of one’s own—Hobbes speaks of “the act of our submission”.(ibid.) As we shall see shortly, in his debate with Bramhall Hobbes em-phasizes that all law depends on the assent of the subjects. (V. 178–80)

Since I shall want to appeal to the dependence of law on prior obliga-tion in presenting what I consider to be the best (though not fully satisfy-ing) reading of Hobbes’s account of the laws of nature, I should in fairnessnote that the passage in 26.2 of the English Leviathan that I quoted above,and which sets out this dependence, is not paralleled in the Latin version.There, Hobbes simply notes that it is evident law is not counsel butcommand, and refers to the distinction between the two in the precedingchapter—a reference that is tacit in the English version. I should of coursehave liked Hobbes to repeat his insistence on prior obligation, but I donot take his silence to reflect a change in his view.

Before leaving the characterization of law I should perhaps note thatelsewhere I have argued that Hobbes’s insistence on prior obligation isone of the features of his account of law that makes it at best misleadingto treat him as a forerunner of legal positivism.3 For the positivist, theidentification of a command as a law does not require any normativeappeal or claim beyond the legal system itself, whereas for Hobbes itdoes. I think this difference is of deep importance, and that Hobbes’s

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view is sound, but my present task is not to defend his view of law. How-ever, as we shall see later, if Hobbes were a legal positivist, there wouldbe stronger reason to understand the laws of nature primarily as civil laws.

3.

The three characterizations of the laws of nature that I want to discusswill come directly into view once we note the ways in which we come toknow the laws. The first, of course, is by natural reason. Hobbes’s firstreference to the laws of nature in Leviathan brings this out: “And reasonsuggesteth convenient articles of peace, upon which men may be drawnto agreement. These articles are they which otherwise are called the Lawsof Nature, . . .”. (13.14) And in the next chapter, Hobbes speaks of “AL N . . . [as] a precept or general rule, found out by reason”.(14.3) In the ensuing discussion, Hobbes does not suggest any other wayof finding out the laws of nature until the very end, where he concludeswith the claim that we may “consider the same theorems, as delivered inthe word of God, that by right commandeth all things”. (15.41)

So the laws of nature may be found out by reason, or they may beknown from the word of God. But are these distinct? A. P. Martinich, forone, does not think so, insisting that “ ‘the word of God’ here refers toGod’s natural revelation to humans through right reason, as he sayselsewhere”. (M.125)4 I shall argue presently, appealing to Hobbes’s debatewith Bramhall, that Martinich is wrong. But Hobbes does say that “Goddeclareth his laws . . . by the dictates of natural reason . . .”, (31.3), andthat “The word of God is . . . to be taken for the dictates of reason andequity”, (36.6) so it is certainly not evident that Martinich is wrong.However, right or wrong, it is clear that Hobbes also thinks that the lawsof nature “are delivered by God in holy Scriptures . . . the speech of Godcommanding over all things by greatest right”. (DC 3.33) And so we maytake delivery in Scripture, the prophetic word of God, to be a second wayin which we apprehend the laws of nature, leaving to resolve later thequestion whether both natural reason and Scripture relate God to thelaws of nature, or only the latter.

And there is a third way in which the laws of nature may be known—as part of the civil laws of the sovereign. “When a commonwealth is oncesettled, then are they [the laws of nature] . . . the commands of the com-monwealth, and therefore also civil laws; for it is the sovereign powerthat obliges men to obey them.” (26.8) To be sure, Hobbes does say that“whatsoever men are to take knowledge of for law, not upon other men’swords, but everyone from his own reason” must be the law of nature,(26.13) but he insists that “the laws of nature . . . consist in equity, justice,gratitude and other moral virtues . . . [and] the differences of private

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men, to declare what is equity, what is justice, and what is moral virtue”,make “the ordinances of sovereign power” necessary. (26.8) He acknow-ledges that though the law of nature “be easy to such as without partialityand passion make use of their natural reason, . . . yet considering thatthere be very few, perhaps none, that in some cases are not blinded byself love or some other passion, it is now become of all laws the mostobscure, and has consequently the greatest need of able interpreters”.(26.21) So even if in theory the civil law is needed only to oblige men toobedience to the laws of nature that they know through natural reason,yet in practice the civil law is needed so that a uniform and authoritativeversion of the laws of nature may be known by all.

Natural reason, Scripture, and civil law are thus all sources of ourknowledge of the laws of nature. There is, or need be, no great problemin this. But for Hobbes a problem does arise if we ask what we know, orindeed what we can know, in each of these ways. Does each give us accessto law? And if not all of these ways give us access to law, then does thismatter? Do we know what we need to know of the laws of nature, unlesswe know them as law?

The problem arises when Hobbes says, at the end of his account of thelaws of nature in chapter 15 of Leviathan, and (in the English version)before he speaks of considering them “as delivered in the word of God”,“These dictates of reason men use to call by the name of laws, but impro-perly; for they are but conclusions or theorems concerning what conducethto the conservation and defence of themselves, whereas law, properly, isthe word of him that by right hath command over others.” (15.41) ThatHobbes takes this passage seriously is evident from the fact that he twicelater refers to it. In his discussion of civil law in chapter 26 of Leviathan,he says, “For the laws of nature, which consist in equity, justice, grati-tude, and other moral virtues on these depending, in the condition ofmere nature (as I have said before in the end of the 15th chapter) are notproperly laws, but qualities that dispose men to peace and to obedience”.(26.8) And in his dispute with Bramhall he says, “After I had ended thediscourse he mentions of the laws of nature, I thought it fittest in the lastplace, once for all, to say they were the laws of God, then when they weredelivered in the word of God; but before, being not known by men forany thing but their own natural reason, they were but theoremes, tendingto peace, and those uncertain, as being but conclusions of particular men,and therefore not properly laws”. (IV.284–5)

Hobbes is quite clearly saying that the laws of nature, as given by naturalreason, are not laws—not the commands of someone whom men areobliged to obey. But he does not deny that they are, or come to be, laws.Indeed, he has two very different accounts of how they come to be laws,suggested in the second and third of the quotations with which I beganthis essay. The one concludes chapter 15 of the English Leviathan; the

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whole sentence is, “But yet, if we consider the same theorems, as deliveredin the word of God, that by right commandeth all things; then are theyproperly called laws”. (15.41) This sentence is entirely absent from theLatin version. The other comes from chapter 26; the whole sentence is,“When a commonwealth is once settled, then are they actually laws, andnot before, as being then the commands of the commonwealth, and there-fore also civil laws; for it is the sovereign power that obliges men to obeythem”. (26.8) Here the Latin and English versions are in harmony.

So it is as commands of God, or alternatively, as commands of thesovereign, that the laws of nature come to be known as laws. And theseare contrasted with the deliverances of natural reason, in which the lawsof nature are known only as theorems tending to peace. I can find noother plausible interpretation of these passages, although I have alreadynoted other places in which Hobbes equates the deliverances of naturalreason with the commands of God. We shall return to these.

4.

Let me now sketch the three distinct interpretations of the status and roleof the laws of nature in Hobbes’s argument which correspond to the threequotations with which I began. Each interpretation treats as primary oneway of knowing the laws—as theorems of reason, as commands of God,as command of the civil sovereign. The first considers the laws as prim-arily rational precepts or theorems, stating what is necessary to preserva-tion, and so what a person, insofar as she is rational and concerned withher preservation, ought to do or be willing to do. As such, the laws ofnature are not literally laws; they are not commanded by someone whomthe subjects of the laws are obliged to obey; they have, in themselves, nomoral force. Although, as I shall argue shortly, they are not thereforeempty of all moral significance, they can not be taken, strictly speaking,as obligatory, so that Hobbes’s frequent insistence that men in generalhave an obligation to observe the laws of nature must be at best mislead-ing, and his claim that sovereigns in particular have such an obligation isunwarranted.

However, Hobbes is still able to maintain that subjects have an obliga-tion to obey their sovereign, and the sovereign makes obedience to thelaws of nature obligatory, both as part of civil law, and as divine com-mands. But that the laws of nature are obligatory in these ways is astrictly secondary matter. Their principal role is as rational precepts, andin this capacity, as I shall show, they offer a rational grounding formorality and sovereignty.

The second and third interpretations differ from the first in consideringthe laws of nature primarily as laws. The second interpretation insists

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that the primary role of the laws of nature is to determine the particularobligations of those to whom they are addressed, and that these obliga-tions must depend on a prior general obligation of obedience to the law-giver, who can only be God. The first sub-version of this interpretationargues that, as Hobbes says, God gives laws to all who acknowledge hisexistence and providence through natural reason; the second sub-versionargues that God gives these laws only to those who accept the Scripturesas His Word. On either view the laws of nature are, as Hobbes frequentlyinsists, obligatory, and as much for sovereigns as for their subjects. “Theoffice of a sovereign . . . consisteth in the end for which he was trustedwith the sovereign power, namely, the procuration of the safety of thepeople, to which he is obliged by the law of nature, and to render anaccount thereof to God, the author of that law, and to none but him.”(30.1) Surely this is clear and unambiguous in its support for the viewthat the laws of nature, to play their essential role, must be commands ofGod. It will, however, prove an embarrassment to the defenders of thisinterpretation that, as I shall argue, Hobbes has no satisfactory accountof how the sovereign, or anyone else, knows the laws of nature to becommands of God.

The third interpretation agrees that the primary role of the laws ofnature is to determine our obligations, and that these must depend on aprior obligation to obey the law-giver, but identifies the law-giver as thesovereign, who commands the laws of nature as part of the civil law. Onthis view, the laws of nature may also and rightly be considered as com-mands of God, but again this depends on the sovereign, whose ecclesiast-ical authority makes him the interpreter of divine law. This view, like thefirst, offers no very convincing account of the sovereign’s own obligationto obey the law of nature. It also, as we shall see, has little convincing tosay about the subjects’ prior obligation to obey the sovereign. If one wereto treat this interpretation merely as an account of how the laws ofnature come to be laws, while allowing that their primary role is asrational precepts, then it would be a supplement to the first. But if oneregards the laws of nature as primarily laws—and on the face of it thisseems quite reasonable—then treating them as commands of the sover-eign nicely avoids some of the problems that arise in treating them simplyas commands of God.

5.

If we are to decide among these interpretations, or to conclude that weare unable to decide among them, we must examine Hobbes’s texts withcare. I have already remarked on the first introduction of the laws ofnature in ch. 13 of Leviathan, and noted the first words of the definition

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in ch. 14—“A L N . . . is a precept or general rule, found outby reason”, which continues, “by which a man is forbidden to do thatwhich is destructive of his life or taketh away the means of preservingthe same, and to omit that by which he thinketh it may be best pre-served.” My concern here is not with the content but with the form of therequirement—with Hobbes’s use of ‘forbidden’. The account continuesby distinguishing right, which “consisteth in liberty to do or to forbear”from law, which “determineth and bindeth to one of them; so that lawand right differ as much as obligation and liberty, which in one and thesame matter are inconsistent”. Law forbids; it determines; it binds—and,it is natural to infer, whereas a right in some matter gives one liberty todo as one pleases, a law places one under obligation to do what conformsto it. Indeed, we may do more than infer this if we consult the Latinversion, in which Hobbes says explicitly “sed lex ad faciendum obligatvel ad non faciendum”.

That law binds and obliges is certainly Hobbes’s view. But may helegitimately infer that the law of nature binds and obliges? Is he in aposition to claim that the law of nature is properly law?

The natural condition of man is, as we know, a condition of war inwhich the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. (13.9)So it is clear that war is the enemy of preservation, and peace the neces-sary condition of a secure existence. Hobbes’s first law of nature, “to seekpeace, and follow it”, or “that every man ought to endeavour peace, as faras has hope of obtaining it” is easily inferred as “a precept, or general ruleof reason”. (14.4) But does it bind or oblige? Does every man have anobligation to endeavour peace—or is the ‘ought’ in the first law no morethan the ‘ought’ of rationality? Need any person be concerned with thelaw-giver, or is it enough that she must see, if she will but exercise herown natural reason, the necessity of peace to security and preservation?

Hobbes’s next move is crucially important. What must each man do toendeavour peace? Here, Hobbes reminds us of the right of nature, “theliberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for thepreservation of his own nature, . . . and consequently of doing anythingwhich, in his own judgment and reason, he shall conceive to be the aptestmeans thereunto”. (14.1) Doing anything—including, if it seems good tohim, invading, overcoming, killing his fellows. Hobbes is clear about theconsequences—“For as long as every man holdeth this right of doinganything he liketh, so long are all men in the condition of war.” (14.5) Itis then another easy inference to the conclusion “that a man be willing,when others are so too, as far-forth as for peace and defence of himself heshall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things, and be con-tented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other menagainst himself ”. (ibid.) The benefit, to each, of his own unrestricted libertyis less than the cost to him of the unrestricted liberty of his fellows; it is

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therefore a good bargain for each to accept limits on one’s own liberty inreturn for his fellows’ acceptance of similar restraints on their liberty.

“And when a man hath . . . abandoned or granted away his right, thenis he said to be O or B not to hinder those to whom suchright is granted or abandoned from the benefit of it; and . . . that heought, and it is his D, not to make void that voluntary act of his own,and that such hindrance is I, and I, as being sine jure, theright being before renounced or transferred.” (14.7) Obligation enterswith the renunciation or laying down of right. Given the right of natureas a normative, moral primitive, then obligation is introduced by acceptinga restriction on this right, the scope of the obligation being determined ofcourse by the particular restriction. I have already appealed to Hobbes’sexplicit insistence, “there being no obligation on any man which arisethnot from some act of his own; for all men equally are by nature free”.(21.10) In the passage from chapter 14 which I have just quoted, we aregiven the basis for this insistence, and told from what kind of act obliga-tion arises.

Hobbes then has no need to treat the law of nature as law, or as initself binding or obliging, to explain how men come to be bound andobliged. Men oblige themselves by their own acts of laying down right.But the law of nature is not therefore irrelevant to Hobbes’s account ofobligation. For it is a precept, or general rule of reason, and so a law ofnature, that each man be willing to lay down some portion of his naturalright, when others are similarly willing. And Hobbes proceeds to tell usthe way in which right is laid down—the words and actions involved. “Andthe same are the B by which men are bound and obliged, bonds thathave their strength, not from their own nature . . . but from fear of someevil consequence upon the rupture.” (14.7) Obligation and motivation aredistinct; the bonds oblige of their own nature, but their efficacity dependson the consequences of breaking them.

Alas, none of this can be recovered from the Latin version, which tellsus nothing about obligation arising from the laying down of right. To besure, the sentence that I have quoted from chapter 21 does have its Latinequivalent. What is absent is the essential grounding for the claim that allobligation arises from one’s own acts, which Hobbes provides only inchapter 14 of the English text. How seriously should we take this absence?I think that any answer must depend on whether the account of obliga-tion through laying down right provides a satisfactory reading of Hobbes’sfurther treatment of obligation and the laws of nature, and so must waitfor the conclusion of this enquiry.

But before proceeding, let me note what I take to be an essential fea-ture of the account of obligation that I should like to recover from chap-ter 14. Although the role of the laws of nature in grounding obligation is

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adequately performed if we treat the laws simply as general precepts ofreason, and therefore as embodying no normative element beyond that inrationality itself, it does not follow that, for Hobbes, obligation is apurely rational concept. For as we saw, what the law of nature prescribesis the laying down of right, and while Hobbes’s conception of right is inimportant ways unlike our own, in not being in any way correlative withduty, it is nevertheless a normative conception, and, in my view, notreducible to reason. In Hobbes’s earlier writings, he does treat the rightof nature as “that liberty which every man hath to make use of hisnatural faculties according to right reason”, (DC 1.7), but this attempt tobase natural right on right reason is absent from Leviathan. And thisseems to me no oversight on Hobbes’s part, for if natural right were theexpression of right reason, then laying it down would seem to require therenunciation of right reason, which is surely not Hobbes’s view. Rather,it seems to me best to understand the right of nature as, if you like, whatright reason exercises, but as itself possessing an independent moralnormativity. Laying down right is not, then, renouncing right reason, butrenouncing some part of what right reason would otherwise exercise—curtailing the space within which one’s individual reason is properly operat-ive. And this is surely very appropriately thought of as putting oneselfunder obligation.5

6.

The second law of nature calls for mutual renunciations of right; theseare effected by covenant. From this second law, “by which we are obligedto transfer to another such rights as, being retained, hinder the peace ofmankind, there followeth a third, which is this that men perform theircovenants made, without which covenants are in vain, and but emptywords, and the right of all men to all things remaining, we are still in thecondition of war”. (15.1) So Hobbes speaks of men being obliged to laydown their rights, and obliged by the law of nature. And although coven-ants, as mutual transfers and so layings down of right, would seem tooblige as such, in accordance with the account in 14.7, yet Hobbes intro-duces a third law, requiring the performance of covenants. When later onHobbes reminds us that men are obliged by their covenants, it is to thelaw of nature, that “we should not violate our faith”, that he appeals,referring to it as “a law of God”. (43.5) So the tidy account of obligationthat I have sketched, treating it as laying down natural right and appeal-ing to the laws of nature strictly as rational precepts, is not employed byHobbes in later chapters of Leviathan. For him, it seems, the laws ofnature must oblige, and the source of their obligation must be God.

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Hobbes enumerates sixteen more laws of nature; their content need notdetain us. Pausing then only to note that in the final paragraph of chapter14, Hobbes claims that an oath adds nothing to the obligation under-taken in a covenant, which “if lawful, binds in the sight of God withoutthe oath as much as with it”—and in Latin, that it binds not in the sightof God but “by the force of natural law”—we should now considerHobbes’s concluding discussion of the laws of nature in the last para-graphs of chapter 15. And here Hobbes’s language should leave us in nodoubt that he thinks of the laws of nature as obliging. For he says, “Thelaws of nature oblige in foro interno, that is to say, they bind to a desirethey should take place; but in foro externo, that is, to the putting them inact, not always”, (15.36) and “The same laws, because they oblige only toa desire and endeavour . . . are easy to be observed”. (15.39) Yet he is aboutto tell us that these dictates of reason are called laws “but improperly”.I postpone commentary.

Hobbes consistently claims that the laws of nature are “immutableand eternal”. (15.38) It might be thought that this requires him to treatthem as commands of an immutable and eternal God, rather than mereconclusions of human reason, but here he offers an explanation of theirunchangeable nature that is compatible with treating them only as rationalprecepts. For what he says is that “injustice, ingratitude, arrogance, pride,iniquity, acception of persons, and the rest, can never be made lawful.For it can never be that war shall preserve life, and peace destroy it.”(ibid.) The relations of war, peace, and preservation, are the bedrock onwhich immutable precepts can be founded. This passage is also absent inthe Latin.

And the science of them is the true and only moral philosophy. For moral philosophyis nothing but the science of what is good and evil in the conversation and society ofmankind. Good and evil are names that signify our appetites and aversions, which in dif-ferent tempers, customs, and doctrines of men are different; and divers men differ . . .in their judgment . . . of what is conformable or disagreeable to reason in the actions ofcommon life . . . ; from whence arise disputes, controversies, and at last war. And thereforeso long a man is in the condition of mere nature (which is a condition of war) as privateappetite is the measure of good and evil; and consequently, all men agree on this, that peaceis good, and therefore also the way or means of peace (which, as I have shewed before,are . . . the laws of nature) are good (that is to say, moral virtues), and their contrary vices,evil. (15.40)

This is a splendid summary of Hobbes’s argument. And it surely showsthat the key role of the laws of nature is to serve as a “means of peace”,a role adequately performed by “conclusions or theorems concerningwhat conduceth to the conservation and defence of themselves”. (15.41)But does Hobbes see this? And does it fit what he says elsewhere?

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7.

We shall need to look in some detail at Hobbes’s references to the laws ofnature in the ensuing parts of Leviathan. I have already quoted passagesthat suggest a different account of the nature and role of the laws thanthe one I have been at pains to construct from parts of chapters 14 and15. But before turning to this, I shall examine two quite different texts—Hobbes’s replies to Bishop Bramhall. For these shed important light onhow the laws of nature come to be laws.

As I noted above, in 1656 Hobbes replied to Bramhall’s reply toHobbes’s Of Liberty and Necessity. Two passages in that reply demandour attention. The first is Hobbes’s insistence that all law depends on ourassent (V.178–80) Hobbes considers (i) “the positive law of God, containedin the Bible”, (ii) “the law of nature [which] was written in our hearts bythe finger of God”, (iii) “the laws of conquerors, who come in by thepower of the sword”, and (iv) “the laws of our ancestors, which weremade before we were born”. In Hobbes’s discussion, (ii) is taken last; Ishall follow his order.

(i) “The Bible is a law.” How a law? By the authority of the Church.“And is the authority of the Church any other than the authority of thecommonwealth, or that of the commonwealth any other than that of thehead of the commonwealth, or hath the head of the commonwealth anyother authority than that which hath been given him by the members? . . .because the legislative power is from the assent of the subjects, the Bibleis made law by the assent of the subjects.”

(iii) “He [the Bishop] thinks, belike, that if a conqueror can kill me ifhe please, I am presently obliged without more ado to obey all his laws.May not I rather die, if I think fit? The conqueror makes no law over theconquered by virtue of his power; but by virtue of their assent, thatpromised obedience for the saving of their lives.”

(iv) “But how then is the assent of the children obtained to the laws oftheir ancestors? This also is from the desire of preserving their lives . . .when they be grown up to strength enough to do mischief, and to judg-ment enough to know that other men are kept from doing mischief tothem by fear of the sword that protecteth them, in that very act of receiv-ing that protection, and not renouncing it openly, do oblige themselves toobey the laws of their protectors; to which, in receiving such protection,they have assented.”

(ii) “And whereas he [the Bishop] saith, the law of nature is a lawwithout our assent, it is absurd; for the law of nature is the assent itselfthat all men give to the means of their own preservation.”

Hobbes’s treatment of assent to the laws of a conqueror and to the lawsof our ancestors cover ground already familiar to the reader of Leviathan.

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Indeed, his treatment of assent to the positive law of God should also befamiliar, if the reader has penetrated (as perhaps few today do) into thedepths of Part III. For Hobbes asks of the two tables of the law, “who itwas that gave to these written tables the obligatory force of laws? Thereis no doubt but they were made laws by God himself, but because a lawobliges not, nor is law to any but to them that acknowledge it to be theact of the sovereign, how could the people of Israel . . . be obliged toobedience to all those laws which Moses propounded to them?” (42.37)The answer, of course, is that the people of Israel “had obliged them-selves . . . to obey Moses”; “Moses, and Aaron, and the succeeding highpriests were the civil sovereigns”; “the canonizing, or making of the Scrip-ture law, belonged to the civil sovereign”. (ibid.) And the sovereign rulesby the covenant of his subjects. God makes the content of Scriptural law,but the civil sovereign gives it the force of law, acting on the basis of hissubjects’ assent to his rule.

Just as there is no obligation on any man not arising from some act ofhis own, so there is no law binding any man not arising from his ownassent—even the laws of God and nature. Hobbes had spoken differently;in De Cive he said, “For it is manifest that the divine laws sprang notfrom the consent of men, nor yet the laws of nature. For if they had theiroriginal from the consent of men, they might also by the same consent beabrogated; but they are unchangeable”. (DC 14.2) But Hobbes has sincediscovered how law may be unchangeable in its content, as expressing thewill of God (in Scripture) or the conditions of preservation, yet owe itsbinding status to assent, whether by the covenant of submission to thesovereign, or by natural reason determining the necessity of peace, and sothe means of peace, for preservation. Making the obligatory force ofScripture depend on assent to the civil sovereign fits well with Hobbes’soverall argument. But his treatment of the obligatory force of natural lawmay raise a doubt. Grant that all men assent to the means of their ownpreservation; yet does this constitute an assent to law? Does not assent tolaw require the recognition of a law-giver?

The other passage from this first reply of Hobbes to Bramhall thatwarrants our attention concerns moral goodness, law, and right reason.

It is the law from whence proceeds the difference between the moral and the naturalgoodness: so that it is well enough said by him [Bramhall], that “moral goodness is theconformity of an action with right reason”; and better said than meant, for this right reason,which is the law, is no otherwise certainly right than by our making it so by our approba-tion of it and voluntary subjection to it. . . . From whence it appears that moral praiseis . . . from obedience to the laws. . . . We choose no further than we can weigh. That isgood to every man, which is so far good as he can see. All the real good, which we callhonest and morally virtuous, is that which is not repugnant to the law, civil or natural; forthe law is all the right reason we have, and, (though he, as often as it disagreeth with hisown reason, deny it), is the infallible rule of moral goodness. The reason whereof is this,

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that because neither mine nor the Bishop’s reason is right reason fit to be a rule of ourmoral actions, we have therefore set up over ourselves a sovereign governor, and agreedthat his laws shall be unto us, whatsoever they be, in the place of right reason, to dictate tous what is really good. (V.193–4)

Men covenant to set up a sovereign, whose reason they agree to takefor right reason. And this right reason is the law, which for them is theinfallible rule of moral goodness. We must ask how this account relatesto Hobbes’s claim that the science of the laws of nature is the true andonly moral philosophy. Hobbes’s insistence that the laws of nature “are . . .actually laws, . . . as being . . . the commands of the commonwealth . . . ;for it is the sovereign power that obliges men to obey them” (26.8) mayseem to be the key to the answer, and perhaps also to the resolution ofthe doubt raised by his claim that assent to the laws of nature is assent tothe conditions of our preservation. Perhaps assent to the laws of nature,like assent to the laws of Scripture, is all contained in the act by whichmen submit to their sovereign.

8.

As I noted above, Bramhall returned to the fray with an attack on Levia-than published in 1658; Hobbes responded ten years later. One of hismain concerns is to insist yet again that the “Scriptures . . . were madelaw to us here, by the authority of the commonwealth, and are thereforepart of the law civil”. (IV.369) But he also sheds additional and perhapsunexpected light on his understanding of the laws of nature in the pas-sage to which I have already referred in section 3 above, and in which heresponds to Bramhall’s claim that “in describing the laws of nature, thisgreat clerk [Hobbes] forgetteth the God of nature”. (IV.284) Let us con-sider the reply again. Hobbes says, “After I had ended the discourse hementions of the laws of nature, I thought it fittest in the last place, oncefor all, to say they were the laws of God, then when they were deliveredin the word of God; but before, being not known by men for any thingbut their own natural reason, they were but theoremes, tending to peace,and those uncertain, as being but conclusions of particular men, andtherefore not properly laws.” (IV.284–5)

Recall that in this passage Hobbes is referring to his account of thelaws of nature in Leviathan, and in particular to the concluding para-graph of chapter 15. Hobbes is therefore interpreting that paragraph,telling us what he intended by it. And what he intended is clear; the lawsof nature are first known only as theorems, conclusions of natural reason.They are not known as laws. They come to be known as laws, only whenthey come to be delivered in the word of God, which is contrasted with

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natural reason.6 So how are the laws of nature delivered in the word ofGod? Hobbes continues, “Besides, I had formerly in my book De Cive,cap. IV, proved them severally, one by one, out of the Scriptures: whichhis Lordship had read and knew. It was therefore an unjust charge of histo say, I had not one word in them [i.e. in describing the laws of nature]that concerns religion, or that hath the least relation in the world to God;and this upon no other ground than that I added not to every article, thislaw is in the Scripture.” (IV.285) I think that we must conclude from thispassage, taken together with Hobbes’s clear denial that delivery in naturalreason is delivery in the word of God, that the laws of nature are deliveredin the word of God in, and only in, Scripture.

So the laws of nature come to be laws, properly so called, only whendelivered in Scripture. But as we have seen, delivery in Scripture doesnot, in itself, make a command a law. Scripture is made law only by theauthority of the commonwealth, only by the sovereign, and as such it is apart of civil law. So the laws of nature, considered as delivered in theword of God, come to be laws only as parts of the civil law. This wouldrule out the second interpretation; either the laws of nature are primarilytheorems of reason, requiring us to authorize the sovereign who makesthem into civil laws, or they are primarily civil laws, whether or notconsidered as also delivered in the word of God.

But before accepting this conclusion, we need to consider more ofHobbes’s reply. “We agree that the Scriptures are the word of God. Butthey are a law by pact, that is, to us who have been baptized into thecovenant. To all others it is an invitation only to their own benefit.”(IV.363) Here Hobbes seems to suggest an alternative account of how thelaws of nature come to be law. For if they are delivered in Scripture, andif Scripture comes to be law by baptism, then the laws of nature wouldcome to be laws for those who are baptized. They would still be lawsonly by assent, since baptism is the act by which a Christian assents tothe “new covenant” which “restore[s] unto God . . . the kingdom which,being his by the old covenant, had been cut off by the rebellion ofthe Israelites in the election of Saul”. (41.4) But this kingdom awaitsthe resurrection, “when he [Christ] shall be king . . . of his own elect, byvirtue of the pact they make with him in their baptism”. (41.6) Baptism,then, makes the laws of nature laws, only at the second coming. In thisworld, Christ “hath not subjected us to other laws than those of thecommonwealth”, (42.43) and so we are subject to the laws of Scriptureonly as part of the civil law. That the Scriptures are law by the pact ofbaptism does not, then, upset the conclusion that the laws of nature, evenas delivered in Scripture, owe their status as laws to their place in civillaw.

One further passage from Hobbes’s answer to Bramhall invites ourattention.

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. . . the civil laws are the rules of good and evil, just and unjust, honest and dishonest. Truly,I see no other rules they have. The Scriptures themselves . . . are . . . part of the law civil. Ifthey were laws in their own nature, then were they laws over all the world, and men wereobliged to obey them in America, as soon as they should be shown there, though without amiracle, by a friar.7 What is unjust, but the transgression of a law? Law therefore was beforeunjust: and the law was made known by sovereign power before it was a law: thereforesovereign power was antecedent both to law and injustice. Who then made unjust but sover-eign kings or sovereign assemblies? . . . Just and unjust were surely made. If the king madethem not, who made them else? For certainly the breach of a civil law is a sin against God.(IV.369–70)

All but the last sentence fit beautifully with the claim that for Hobbes,all law, properly so called, is civil law, obligatory because it is the com-mand of the sovereign, to whom (although he does not repeat this here)obedience is owed by the covenant or pact by which his subjects authorizeand submit to him. But what is the force of the last sentence? Does a sinagainst God fall outside the framework of civil submission, command,and obligation?

9.

I shall now return to Leviathan, and to a series of references to the law ofnature which treat it as directly obliging as the law of God. The first is aparenthesized comment that the sovereign “never wanteth right to any-thing (otherwise than as he himself is the subject of God, and boundthereby to observe the laws of nature)”. (21.7) If the sovereign is boundas God’s subject to obey the laws of nature, then God must be the authorof those laws, and so in this parenthesis Hobbes’ appeals to the laws notas rational precepts but as divine commands. Heretofore in Leviathan,references to the laws of nature as binding or obliging have been silent asto the source of the obligation; now God is brought explicitly into theargument.

The Latin is interestingly different. Hobbes makes no direct referenceto the laws of nature, saying only that “he who has the supreme power. . . can do no injury to his citizens, even though, by iniquity, he can beinjurious to God”, and later, referring to David’s killing Uriah, “kingDavid acted inequitably, and gravely sinned against God”. But Hobbeshad already said, in the Latin but not the English text, “That he who hasthe supreme power can act inequitably, I have not denied. For what isdone contrary to the law of nature is called inequitable; what is donecontrary to the civil law, unjust.” (18.6) So the reader might infer thatDavid’s action was inequitable in being contrary to the laws of nature,and that he sinned against God as the author of those laws. But note thatwhereas in the English text, the reader has at least been prepared for the

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idea of God as author of the laws of nature by the concluding sentence ofchapter 15, there is, as I have pointed out, no equivalent to this sentencein the Latin version. Explicit reference to the laws of nature as laws ofGod has yet to appear in the Latin text.

And I find that such reference first appears in chapter 26, “Leges civileset civilia omnia transeunt et mutantur; sed leges naturales, cum sint divinae,transire aut mutari non possunt”. The English is more eloquent: “Princessucceed one another; and one judge passeth, another cometh; nay, heavenand earth shall pass; but not one tittle of the law of nature shall pass, forit is the eternal law of God.” (26.24) We find no suggestion here that theimmutability of the law of nature derives only from the fact that “it cannever be that war shall preserve life, and peace destroy it”, (15.38) a claimthat, in any case, is not present in the Latin version.

In chapter 29 we find that, “It is true that sovereigns are all subject tothe laws of nature, because such laws be divine, and cannot by any manor commonwealth be abrogated. But to those laws which the sovereignhimself, that is, which the commonwealth maketh, he is not subject.”(29.9) Here it would not seem that subjection to the laws of nature dependson assent to the means of one’s preservation, or that God’s commandsare law only insofar as the sovereign makes them law.

And one more quotation should suffice to make fully clear the role ofthe law of nature in obligating the sovereign, and the status required forit to play that role, as Hobbes presents these matters in Part II of Levia-than. “The office of the sovereign . . . consisteth in the end for which hewas trusted with the sovereign power, namely, the procuration of thesafety of the people, to which he is obliged by the law of nature, and torender an account thereof to God, the author of that law, and to nonebut him.” (30.1) The Latin also contains the essential elements—thesovereign obliged by the law of nature, and God its author. Rationalprecepts, improperly called laws, will hardly fill the bill.

Hobbes does not appeal to the law of nature only to establish theobligations of the sovereign. He also appeals to it to establish the obliga-tion of the subjects to accept the right of the sovereign and his laws. “Fora civil law that shall forbid rebellion (and such is all resistance to theessential rights of sovereignty) is not (as a civil law) any obligation but byvirtue of the law of nature that forbiddeth the violation of faith; whichnatural obligation, if men know not, they cannot know the right of anylaw the sovereign maketh.” (30.4) This passage sits ill with Hobbes’sinsistence that, as we have seen, “the laws of nature . . . are . . . actuallylaws, . . . , as being . . . the commands of the commonwealth, and thereforealso civil laws; for it is the sovereign power that obliges men to obey them”.(26.8) Hobbes can not coherently argue both that natural law obligesonly as part of the civil law, and that the civil law obliges only in virtue ofa prior obligation to the natural law that commands us to keep faith.

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Hobbes continues his appeal to the natural law forbidding violation offaith in Part III of Leviathan, arguing that “to depose him [the sovereign],when he is chosen, is in no case just. For it is always a violation of faith,and consequently against the law of nature, which is the eternal law ofGod.” (42.131) And again, “The laws of God . . . are none but the laws ofnature, whereof the principal is that we should not violate our faith, thatis, a commandment to obey our civil sovereigns, which we constitutedover us by mutual pact one with another”. (43.5) This passage continuesby grounding our obligation to Scripture in the laws of nature, but withcivil law as intermediary. Hobbes says “And this law of God, that com-mandeth obedience to the law civil, commandeth by consequence obedi-ence to all the precepts of the Bible, which . . . is there only law where thecivil sovereign hath made it so, and in other places but counsel, which aman at his own peril may without injustice refuse to obey”.

It might seem from the passages that I have just been quoting, in whichHobbes grounds the obligation to obey civil law on natural law treated asthe law of God, that he introduced the idea of natural law as part of civillaw in chapter 26 only to forget—and contradict—it. But this is not quiteso. For in showing that “it is not hard to reconcile our obedience to Godwith our obedience to the civil sovereign”, Hobbes notes that “because heis a sovereign, he requireth obedience to all his own (that is, to all thecivil) laws, in which are contained all the laws of nature (that is, all thelaws of God)”. (43.22) This of course does not show that we may groundthe obligation to obey the laws of nature in the obligation to obey civillaw; rather, it shows only that the obligation to obey civil law does notintroduce any conflict with the obligation to obey natural law. Hobbescontinues to treat natural law as part of civil law, but seems not always toacknowledge that its status as law depends on its being part of civil law.

10.

How do we know that the laws of nature are divine? Hobbes answer, inParts II and III of Leviathan, is that we know this through natural reason.“God declareth his laws three ways: by the dictates of natural reason, byrevelation, and by the voice of some man, to whom by the operation ofmiracles he procureth credit with the rest.” (31.3) No universal laws havebeen given by revelation, and only God’s chosen people are given laws“by the mouths of his holy prophets”. (31.4) But God’s natural kingdomincludes “as many of mankind as acknowledge his providence by thenatural dictates of right reason”. (31.4) Although, as we have already seen,Hobbes distinguishes the deliverances of natural reason from divine lawsin his answer to Bramhall, in Leviathan he repeatedly identifies the two,first in the passage just quoted, and then in Part III, saying, “as far as

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they [the Scriptures] differ not from the laws of nature, there is no doubtbut they are the law of God, and carry their authority with them, legibleto all men that have the use of natural reason; but this is no other author-ity than that of all other moral doctrine consonant to reason, the dictateswhereof are laws, not made, but eternal”. (33.22) And again, “The wordof God is then also to be taken for the dictates of reason and equity, whenthe same is said in the Scriptures to be written in man’s heart . . .”. (36.6)The first of these latter two passages clearly contradicts Hobbes’s insist-ence in his reply to Bramhall that “being not known by men for any thingbut their own natural reason, they [the laws of nature] were buttheorems, . . . and therefore not properly laws”. (IV.284–5)

Suppose that we identify natural reason with the word of God. Neverthe-less, we may still ask why we are obliged to obey the deliverances of naturalreason. Hobbes’s answer begins by distinguishing two aspects of our rela-tion to God. He concludes chapter 30 of Leviathan with the claim that:

the same law that dictateth to men that have no civil government, what they ought to do,and what to avoid in regard of one another, dictateth the same to commonwealths, that is,to the consciences of sovereign princes and sovereign assemblies, there being no court ofnatural justice but in the conscience only, where not man, but God reigneth, whose laws(such of them as oblige all mankind) in respect of God, as he is the author of nature, arenatural, and in respect of the same God, as he is King of kings, are laws. (30.30)

As author of nature, God determines the conditions of peace, whichform the content of the laws of nature. As King of kings, he requires usto obey these conditions.

But why is he King of kings? If he is author of nature, then no doubthe may do with nature as he pleases, but this is not to rule. What is thebasis of his right to rule? Hobbes tells us, “The right of nature wherebyGod reigneth over men, and punisheth those that break his laws, is to bederived . . . from his irresistible power. I have formerly shown how thesovereign right ariseth from pact; to show how the same right may arisefrom nature requires no more but to show in what case it is never takenaway.” And he continues:

Seeing all men by nature had right to all things, they had right every one to reign over therest. But because this right could not be obtained by force, it concerned the safety of everyman, laying by that right, to set up men (with sovereign authority) by common consent, torule and defend them; whereas if there had been any man with power irresistible, there hadbeen no reason why he should not by that power have ruled, and defended both himself andthen, according to his own discretion. To those, therefore, whose power is irresistible, thedominion of all men adhereth naturally by their excellence of power; and consequently it isfrom that power that the kingdom over men, and the right of afflicting men at his pleasure,belongeth naturally to God Almighty, not as Creator and gracious, but as omnipotent.(31.5)

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This is one of the least satisfactory passages in Hobbes’s writings. Firstof all, may the right of nature, as a right to all things, be attributed toGod? The right of nature is defined by Hobbes as “the liberty each manhath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of hisown nature”. (14.1) And it is a “right to all things” because “the condi-tion of man . . . is a condition of war of everyone against everyone (inwhich case everyone is governed by his own reason and there is nothinghe can make use of that may not be a help unto him in preserving his lifeagainst his enemies)”, so that “it followeth that in such a condition everyman has a right to everything”. (14.4) But nothing threatens God’s pre-servation. His natural condition is not one of war; he has no need of aright to all things to preserve himself.

Suppose nevertheless that we grant God a right to all things. This isnevertheless not a right to be obeyed; it does not give rise in itself to anyobligation on the part of God’s supposed subjects to obey. Each man, asHobbes says, has a right “to reign over the rest”, and so may issuecommands to his fellows. But no one has an obligation to obey any of hisfellows, and so their commands are not laws. The commands of thesovereign are laws to his subjects only because they have laid down theirright to all things, and by authorizing him, obliged themselves to obeyhim. If God has power irresistible, and if we suppose that there arenatural benefits to those who obey his commands and costs to those whodisobey, then no doubt we have reason to authorize him to rule over us,obliging ourselves to obey his commands which are then laws. And weshall then regard those costs as “natural punishments [which] must benaturally consequent to the breach of the laws of nature”. (31.40) Butnow recall Hobbes’s insistence, against Bramhall, that “the law of natureis the assent itself that all men give to the means of their own preserva-tion”. (V.180) I suggested earlier that to suppose that this involves assentto law, we must assume a law-giver. And if we think of God as author ofthe laws of nature, then we can make good sense of Hobbes’s claim here,and treat our obligation to obey God’s commands and his right, notmerely to rule, but to be obeyed, as based on that assent.

Hobbes, of course, insists that we do not establish God’s rule by coven-ant, and never suggests that we authorize him or assent to his com-mands. In De Cive, where he treats God’s right to rule in the same way asin Leviathan, he proceeds to introduce a natural obligation to “yield himobedience”, arising from “fear or conscience of our own weakness inrespect of the divine power”. (DC. 15.7) Such an obligation would seemto be no more than the assent we give to the means of our preservation,coupled with our recognition of God as author of those means, althoughHobbes does not present it in these terms. It would not then be an obli-gation independent of our assent. But in Leviathan Hobbes says nothingabout this obligation. He assumes that all he need defend is God’s right

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to rule, failing to recognize that such a right, if taken as part of the rightof nature, has no correlative obligation to obedience.

Hobbes treats God’s natural right to rule as grounded directly in hisomnipotence. But insofar as this is true, it will still be the case that hisright to be obeyed is grounded in the assent of his subjects. Hobbes hasno intelligible account of the obligation of persons to obey God that isnot consonant with his insistence that there is “no obligation on any manwhich ariseth not from some act of his own” (21.10)—in this case, theassent he gives to the means of his preservation, together with his recogni-tion that it is God who prescribes those means. But Hobbes never expli-citly acknowledges this. When he refers in Leviathan to the obligation toobey God, he offers no basis for it, saying only, for example, “Nor wasthere any contract that could add to or strengthen the obligation bywhich both they [Abraham and his seed] and all men else were boundnaturally to obey God Almighty”. (40.1)

I want to conclude this long discussion of passages in the second andthird parts of Leviathan relevant to Hobbes’s account of the laws ofnature with an aside, by directing attention to his quite peculiar accountof the authority to teach. Hobbes says, “The monarch or the sovereignassembly only hath immediate authority from God, to teach and instructthe people, and no man but the sovereign receiveth his power Dei gratiasimply, that is to say, from the favour of none but God”. (23.6) Howdoes the sovereign receive authority or power from God? For the sover-eign is authorized by his subjects, so that “he hath the use of so muchpower and strength conferred on him that by terror thereof he is enableto conform the wills of them all to peace at home and mutual aid againsttheir enemies abroad”. (17.13) Authority and power immediately fromGod? Whatever can Hobbes have been thinking?

11.

How do the three interpretations of the laws of nature introduced insection 4 fare under textual analysis? Were we to have as our evidence (i)the first part of Leviathan, in which Hobbes introduces and enumeratesthe laws of nature, omitting only the discussion of obligation in forointerno and in foro externo (15.36–7), and (ii) the replies to Bramhall,supplemented by (iii) two passages in the second part—Hobbes’s insist-ence that all obligation arises from some act of the agent (21.10) and hisclaim that the laws of nature are genuinely laws only as part of the civillaw (26.8), then the first of the three interpretations would surely be insole possession of the field. We should then read Hobbes as arguing thateach person naturally possesses the right to do whatever she judges need-ful for her preservation, but that, led by natural reason to understand

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that peace is a necessary condition of preservation and well-being, sherecognizes that peace is to be had only if she and her fellows followcertain rules of conduct, foremost among which is that they give up someportion of their natural right, and so put themselves under obligation notto do what previously they might rightfully have done. In particular, sherecognizes that she and her fellows stand in need of a common power todirect and protect them, and to this end she must, if her fellows are alsowilling, authorize and give up her right of governing herself to some oneperson or group on whom all agree, so that she comes to be obliged toobey the commands of that person or group, which is to accept thosecommands as laws. Included among these commands are the rules ofconduct mentioned above, which now become laws and so obligating.And insofar as the sovereign so wills, these rules—and others—may beconsidered divine laws, commands of a being whose omnipotence leadsher to accept them as in a further sense conditions of her preservation.

Lacking in this account are three important elements in Hobbes’s treat-ment of the laws of nature in the second and third parts of Leviathan(and in the discussion of obligation in foro interno and in foro externo).The first is Hobbes’s insistence that the sovereign, like his subjects, has anobligation to obey God and the laws of nature which are God’s laws. Forif the laws of nature are to be held for divine only insofar as the sovereignwills, then he is not effectively obliged by them. The second is Hobbes’sinsistence that the obligation of the citizens or subjects to the sovereign isbased on the natural law, considered as divine, rather than grounding itstraightforwardly in the authorizing acts of the citizens. And the third ishis repeated claim that natural reason is, and is known to be, the word ofGod, by which he gives laws to those who acknowledge his power andprovidence. These elements are linked, since if the laws of nature obligeas commands of God, and oblige to the upholding of sovereignty, thenboth sovereign and subject must have natural knowledge of the laws asdivine commands.

This may suggest a form of the second interpretation. The laws ofnature are primarily divine commands, known as such by natural reason.It will not do to treat them as divine commands known as such throughScripture, since it is clear that Hobbes treats the obligation to obey Scrip-ture as derivative from the obligation to obey the civil sovereign, and asarising only insofar as the sovereign incorporates the precepts of Scrip-ture into the civil law. Knowing God’s commands is of course not in itselfsufficient to be obliged to obey them, but we may suppose that anyoneacknowledging divine power and providence will be led to assent to thesecommands as the means of her preservation. Each will give up whateverpart of his right of nature might lead him to act contrary to the laws ofnature. In this way it is possible to incorporate Hobbes’s claims thatnothing is a law without the assent of those bound by it, and that no one

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is under obligation except in virtue of some act of his own, into aninterpretation of the laws of nature that treats them primarily as thecommands of God.

Once the natural laws are in place as obligating, then the right of thecivil sovereign to be obeyed is founded on the obligation of the subjectsnot to violate faith by reneging on or acting contrary to their authoriza-tion of him. The commands of the sovereign are laws because the subjectsare obliged to obey him, and they are obliged to obey him because theyhave authorized him and by the laws of nature are obliged to keep faith.Furthermore, the duties of the civil sovereign are founded on his obliga-tion to obey natural law, and are owed, as Hobbes insists, to God aloneas author of that law.

But the fatal weakness of this interpretation is implicitly recognized byHobbes when he acknowledges that insofar as they are known only bynatural reason, the laws of nature are theorems or precepts but not laws.Natural reason is conversant about the natural conditions of our pre-servation, not about commands of God. Even if we were to supposethat natural reason is a capacity given by God, so that its deliverancesmight be taken as God’s word, yet those deliverances take the form of“theorems concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defenceof themselves”, not the form of commands. Hobbes has no intelligibleaccount of natural reason that would qualify its deliverances to be divinecommands. The passages in Leviathan in which he supposes otherwisecannot be coherently accommodated in his system of thought.

Hobbes holds that “there must be . . . one first mover, that is, a firstand eternal cause of all things, which is that which men mean by thename of God”. (12.6) This is the teaching of natural reason. Hobbesnever claims, and could not consistently claim, that natural reason alsoteaches us that this first cause is also King of kings. I see no reason todoubt that Hobbes believed that the first mover is the Christian God. Butbelief is not to the point. Although the sovereign can not commandprivate belief, he may command public acknowledgement and obedience,and it is only insofar as the sovereign does command his subjects toacknowledge God as King of kings and to treat the precepts of naturalreason as God’s commands, that the subjects come to be obliged to obeythese precepts as divine laws.

This puts Hobbes in a difficult position. For although he does notwant to say that the sovereign has any obligation to his subjects, he doesnot want the sovereign to be free from all obligation. He certainly wantshim to be obliged by and accountable to God. But may not Hobbessuppose that insofar as the sovereign acknowledges God’s power andprovidence—to be sure, not something that can be decided by naturalreason, but certainly true of the Christian—and infidel—sovereigns of theday, he will assent to God’s commands? Yes, he may suppose this. But he

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can not coherently suppose that the sovereign has any natural knowledgeof what those commands are. He may not assume that the sovereignmust identify these commands with the deliverances of natural reason.To be sure, the sovereign might do so. But this would be a happy coincid-ence, not a basis for a system of political thought.

Both the first and second interpretations capture important strands ofHobbes’s thought in Leviathan about the laws of nature. Each has sup-port in the texts; I do not see how anyone who makes a careful examina-tion of all of the relevant works could deny this. But in judging betweenthe two interpretations, one must, I think, recognize that while the firstlimits the role of the laws of nature in a way that Hobbes would notwant, the second requires Hobbes to take a view of natural reason insup-portable within his overall account. What the first interpretation can notaccommodate is the important thought that the exercise of sovereignright is necessarily limited by an obligation owed, not to the subjects butto God. It can accommodate the thought that the obligation of the sub-jects to the sovereign is prior to civil law, because it can treat that obliga-tion as arising from the act by which the subjects authorize the sovereign.And it can then sacrifice the unsustainable claim that divine law is knownthrough natural reason. The main outlines of Hobbes’s argument arethen coherently preserved.

12.

What of the third interpretation—which we might associate with legalpositivism, since it incorporates natural law entirely into civil law? It hasthe significant merit, shared with the first, of accepting Hobbes’s insist-ence that natural reason acquaints us with the laws of nature only as “buttheorems, tending to peace”, (IV.285) so that “When a commonwealth isonce settled, then are they actually laws, and not before, as being then thecommands of the commonwealth, and therefore also civil laws”. (26.4)But unlike the first interpretation, it insists that the primary role of the lawsof nature is to determine our obligations, and not merely to set out, asrational precepts, what we must do in the interest of our preservation. Itdoes not of course deny that the obligations imposed by the laws of naturedo serve the interest of our preservation. Hobbes says that “the principal[law of nature] is that we should not violate our faith”. (43.5) On thethird interpretation, this is to be understood straightforwardly as the claimthat the principal law of nature obligates us to keep faith, which, we mayadd, is in the interest of our preservation. But on the first interpretation,this is to be understood more obliquely, as the claim that the principal lawof nature tells us that in the interest of preservation, we must give up someportion of our right of nature and so obligate ourselves to keep faith.

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If this were all, then the third interpretation would avoid the weak-nesses of treating the laws of nature as primarily divine commands, whilegiving us a straightforward reading of Hobbes’ frequent claim that thelaws of nature obligate. But unfortunately matters are not so simple, astwo other passages from Leviathan that I have already referred to willremind us. “For a civil law that shall forbid rebellion . . . is not (as a civillaw) any obligation but by virtue of the law of nature that forbiddeth theviolation of faith; which natural law, if men know not, they cannot knowthe right of any law the sovereign maketh.” (30.4) If natural law is knownas law, and obligates, only as part of civil law, then it can not serve as thebasis of civil law in the way in which this passage demands. Only a priorobligation to natural law can serve to ground “the right of any law thesovereign maketh”. And again, “The laws of God . . . are none but the lawsof nature, whereof the principal . . . commandeth obedience to the law civil”.(43.5) Clearly if the law of nature obligates only as part of civil law, it cannot command obedience to it.

Treating the laws of nature as laws and obligating only as part of civillaw, Hobbes would have no account of the obligation to obey the sover-eign. For he could only reason as follows: we are obliged to obey the lawsof nature because they are civil laws, and we are obliged to obey civillaws because we are obliged to obey their maker, the sovereign, and weare obliged to obey the sovereign because we have covenanted to authorizehim, and we are obliged to keep to our covenant authorizing him becausewe are obliged to obey the laws of nature which forbid the violation offaith. But this is to reason in a circle. To cut the circle by offering afurther ground for obeying the laws of nature, Hobbes must either treatthem as laws of God, and so fall back on the second interpretation withits attendant problems, or as rational precepts counselling us to put our-selves under obligation, and so fall back on the first interpretation.

It might be urged that the third interpretation should treat the obliga-tion to keep faith, or to obey the sovereign whom one has covenanted toauthorize, simply as a normative primitive, for which no grounding canbe given. Were Hobbes to do this, then he would have to abandon theattempt, in the passages that I have just quoted, to base this obligationon a prior obligation to obey the laws of nature. But that attempt is inany case clearly doomed if one supposes that the laws of nature obligateonly as part of civil law. So this proposal would detach the keeping offaith from the laws of nature. For if the laws of nature obligate only aspart of civil law, one can not consistently suppose that one has anungrounded obligation to keep faith, as part of the law of nature.

At this point one might suggest that the third interpretation be aban-doned in favor of a fourth, in which the obligation to obey the laws ofnature is taken as the normative primitive, grounding the obligation toobey the sovereign, and his laws, including the laws of nature in their

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capacity as also civil laws. This would be, in effect, to take the secondinterpretation, in which the laws of nature obligate as commands of God,and remove God. But this proposal shares the fatal weakness of thatsecond interpretation—it requires that natural reason acquaint us withlaw. And indeed it has a further weakness; it requires that natural reasonacquaint us with law in the absence of a law-giver. If we are to allowHobbes to let natural reason access law despite his explicit denials, weshould at least not compound his incoherence by denying him a law-giver.

The negative considerations that I have advanced, however, are notsufficient in themselves fully to discredit the third interpretation. ForHobbes may have thought, incoherently, that the laws of nature are lawsonly as part of civil law, and also that the laws of nature ultimately obli-gate us to obey civil law. He may not have recognized that he could treatthe laws of nature simply as rational precepts and still ground the obliga-tion to obey the sovereign and his laws. Or, even if he did recognize thispossibility, he may have had reasons for not accepting it. He never expli-citly commits himself to the reading that I have offered of the introductionof obligation in chapter 14, and much of what he says elsewhere certainlysuggests that he thinks of the laws of nature primarily as laws, and indeedas both divine and civil laws. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the firstinterpretation offers the most coherent reading of his overall position,whether or not he was aware of it. Perhaps I should then say—it offersHobbes the most coherent reading of his moral and political theory. Andthis is where I am content to let the argument rest. I conclude that wemay understand the laws of nature as primarily rational precepts, andonly secondarily as commands of the sovereign and, through his mediation,of God—but we may do this only as making better sense of more of whatseems most important in Hobbes’s argument than do either of its rivals.

Department of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh

NOTES

* The initial draft of this paper was written at the University of East Anglia, where Iwas Visiting Research Scholar in the School of Economic and Social Studies, and presentedto a faculty reading group on Hobbes. I am grateful for feedback from the group, and forsupport from the University of East Anglia.

1 References to Hobbes: Passages from Leviathan are identified by chapter and para-graph as given in Edwin Curley’s edition of Leviathan. Roman numerals indicate volumesof Sir William Molesworth (ed.), The English Works of Thomas Hobbes (London: 1839–45)followed by page numbers. DC indicates the English translation of De Cive, as given inBernard Gert (ed.), Man and Citizen (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1991); pas-sages are identified by chapter and paragraph.

2 I shall not attempt to defend the claims I make about Hobbes’s earlier writings in thisessay, which is already quite long and complex enough.

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3 See my papers, “Thomas Hobbes and the Contractarian Theory of Law”, in DavidCopp (ed.), Canadian Philosophers: Celebrating Twenty Years of the Canadian Journal ofPhilosophy, (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1990), 5–34, and “Public Reason”, SocialPhilosophy & Policy, 12, 1994, 19–42.

4 M = A.P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on religion andpolitics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

5 For aficionados of these matters, I should acknowledge that the view I have just expressedin the preceding paragraph is not the position that I ascribe to Hobbes in The Logic ofLeviathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) and not the way in which I read my ownargument in Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). Whether it is a betterview than mine is, fortunately, not here at issue.

6 This passage in Hobbes’s reply to Bramhall seems to me to weigh conclusively againstA. P. Martinich’s claim, quoted above in section 3, that in the concluding paragraph ofchapter 15, “ ‘the word of God’. . . refers to God’s natural revelation to humans throughright reason”. Martinich is nevertheless clearly right to insist that elsewhere Hobbes doesidentify right reason with God’s word.

7 I doubt that we learn anything new from this particular sentence, but quoting it issurely irresistible.

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