Abstract
In his famous Harvard address, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed that modern Western societies tend to look at morality primarily through the lens of legality. How did this come to be? In his impressive new book, Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics, Arash Abizadeh gives an answer, although he does not share Solzhenitsyn’s sense that legalism is a problem. Abizadeh traces the emergence of a juridical notion of obligation back to the seventeenth century, especially to the works of Francisco Suárez, Hugo Grotius, and Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes quickly takes center stage. In Hobbes, Abizadeh finds not a simple abandonment of the “eudaimonistic” approach to ethics inherited from classical thought but a modified eudaimonism, still rooted in “reasons of the good,” coupled with a new emphasis on directed, contractual obligations, rooted in “reasons of the right.” According to Abizadeh, to understand the development in moral thinking that emerged in Hobbes’s wake, it is essential to recognize that there are two distinct dimensions of normativity in Hobbes’s thought, one prudential, the other juridical. Yet, although he places Hobbes in a certain historical context and discusses the role he played in a development that has shaped the way we see morality today, Abizadeh does not dwell on such matters. His engagement with Hobbes is first and foremost an effort to elaborate the structure, character, and grounds of Hobbes’s bipartite conception of ethics.
In elaborating Hobbes’s thought, Abizadeh draws extensively from the conceptual resources of contemporary metaethics and normative ethics. This is the first thing that will strike political theorists or other readers who come to Abizadeh’s book from outside the spheres of contemporary philosophy from which he draws. To his credit, Abizadeh addresses the question of the advantages and disadvantages of bringing to seventeenth-century texts terminology and distinctions that have been developed much more recently. He acknowledges that there is a risk of “anachronistic distortion” (his words), but he contends that the risk is worth running, because any imported obscurity will be outweighed by the illumination that is possible by making clear and explicit what was often left vague and implicit in Hobbes’s own writings (11–13). Is Abizadeh right about that? I suspect different readers will answer that question in different ways. To speak for myself, I found myself at times appreciating the nuance and precision of the fine-grain distinctions Abizadeh draws—for instance, between attributability and accountability. At other times, the cascade of “-ism”s, “-ive”s, and “-ity”s became overwhelming, and I found myself entangled in words, like Hobbes’s bird stuck in lime twigs—“the more he struggles, the more belimed.” The drawback of Abizadeh’s approach is not only the risk of anachronistic distortion. It is also that Abizadeh does not reproduce the vigor and vitality of Hobbes’s own prose, which conveys so directly and vividly the human significance of what is at issue. To be sure, Abizadeh’s writing is impressively clear, rigorous, and precise. But sometimes one wishes for a “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” rather than another “[e]ven irreal artificial normative properties can be the subject of truth-apt epistemically objective propositions” (274).
Abizadeh’s book has seven chapters, but it is divided into three main parts. The three parts build a unified argument, the key stage of which comes in the third part, where Abizadeh defends his striking and controversial claim that Hobbes developed a juridical notion of obligation that belongs to a different sphere of normativity than his widely acknowledged prudentialism. Although the first two parts are full of rich and complex passages, with many valuable detours into various dilemmas in Hobbes’s thought, the primary role of these parts is to prepare the way for the main event in the third part.
The aim of Part I is to establish that Hobbes’s mechanistic view of nature and of the place of human life within it is not such as to rule out the possibility of active reasoning and therefore of normative propositions or judgments that are prescriptive and “truth-apt.” Despite his view that all that truly exists are bodies in motion, Hobbes, according to Abizadeh, did not reduce human reasoning to a mere passive epiphenomenon of a deeper reality. Bishop Bramhall and certain modern commentators who echo aspects of Bramhall’s arguments are wrong to suggest that Hobbes’s determinism leads to nihilism or to a denial of all moral responsibility. If it is possible to reconcile naturalism with active reasoning and moral responsibility, then Hobbes’s conception of nature does not destroy the prospect of a genuinely normative ethics. If it did, the project that Abizadeh examines in the second and third parts of his book could never get off the ground.
In Part II, Abizadeh develops the aspect of his argument that I suspect will be most familiar to most readers, although that is not to say that he is simply retracing already trodden ground. One of the longstanding points of dispute in Hobbes scholarship is whether Hobbes’s laws of nature are merely maxims of self-interested prudence or binding moral laws that impose a more profound form of obligation. On this question, narrowly conceived, Abizadeh is on the side of the prudentialists. He argues that Hobbes’s laws of nature are expressions of “the first dimension of normativity,” the prudential dimension, because they are maxims that advise human beings about the best means of preserving themselves. Abizadeh insists that self-preservation, the end to which the laws of nature are means, does not mean mere survival for Hobbes. It means the preservation of a life worth living, and therefore Hobbes’s prudentialism is tied to a richer, more nuanced conception of happiness than many have thought (see especially 131–38, but also 155–64). But this challenge to conventional thinking about Hobbes is not as far-reaching as the challenge that Abizadeh lays out in Part III.
Part III is the most important part of Abizadeh’s book, not only because Abizadeh here makes his most original and controversial claims about the existence of a “second dimension of normativity” in Hobbes’s thought, but also because here he addresses the crucial question of the difference between the two dimensions. The second dimension is the juridical dimension, but it is marked by more than its juridical character. It arises out of the contacts, covenants, and other kinds of promises that human beings make to one another, promises that render us accountable to one another in ways that involve a more profoundly moral form of obligation than is entailed in following the laws of nature for reasons of self-interest. By making contacts and promises to one another, including the promise to obey the laws of the sovereign, human beings bring into the world and impose upon ourselves “reasons of the right” that transcend “reasons of the good.” With the difference in reasons, according to Abizadeh, comes a difference in responsibility and culpability. If human beings can be held responsible for our successes and failures in prudently seeking our own good in the loose sense that each individual’s actions can be attributed to him, we can be held accountable by others for our successes and failures in abiding by the obligations we have voluntarily imposed upon ourselves through the promises we have made (see 199–208, 217–19).
Abizadeh insists that there is a crucial difference between the two dimensions of normativity he identifies in Hobbes’s thought. In fact, he repeatedly speaks of a “chasm” between them—even a “fundamental chasm” (e.g., 6, 10, 218) and an “unbridgeable chasm” (263). At the same time, he contends that the two dimensions are closely connected or “tightly linked” (276). In the image he chose to capture the “two faces of ethics” on the cover of his book—an engraving by the Dutch artist Hendrick Goltzius—Prudentia and Justitia are depicted as lovers embracing and kissing each other. The connections between the two dimensions are clearer than the chasm between them. There is, in the first place, the connection of incentive or motive: the reason human beings make promises and contracts, including the fundamental social contract, is, according to Hobbes, that we want to preserve ourselves and then advance our interest in other ways. Self-interested prudence, however, not only drives the formation of contacts and the making of promises; it also shapes their character and limits their demands, as Abizadeh stresses (228–35). Given Hobbes’s view that human beings are driven first and foremost by self-interest (see De Cive 1.2; cf. Abizadeh 7, 110–11, 146–47, 229), this is to be expected. And the role of self-interest in limiting obligations is perhaps clearest in Hobbes’s acknowledgment that nobody can be obligated, no matter what crime has been committed, to submit without resistance to capital punishment or even to testify against his parents, since doing so would destroy his own prospects of happiness (230–32; see Leviathan 14.29–30 and De Cive 2.18–19, 6.13). We are released from our obligations when they come into direct conflict with our own good, according to Hobbes. Self-interested prudence, then, would seem to be the prime mover, the sculptor, and ultimately the escape hatch of our obligations, in Hobbes’s conception.
Given all this, one wonders: whence the unbridgeable chasm? Since “unbridgeable chasm” is an overstatement on Abizadeh’s part—after all, he describes several bridges that cross the chasm—perhaps the question should be put in a more moderate way: what makes the chasm a chasm? Abizadeh insists that the second dimension of normativity in Hobbes’s thought is neither reducible to nor derivable from the first, for, as he puts it in the subtitle of the crucial second section of his sixth chapter, “reasons of the right cannot be derived from reasons of the good” (223). This is the most important stage of Abizadeh’s entire argument, and also the most questionable. The key issue can be considered in light of an example. If I make a promise for reasons of self-interest, such that I enter into a contract that is given its shape by the self-interest operative on each side, and if I can exit the deal should it become seriously adverse to my interests, is there really such a chasm between my obligation to stick to the deal and my prudential pursuit of my own good? Abizadeh’s response is that although self-interest may provide the incentive for the deal, it is not prudence alone that gives rise to the power or capacity that human beings have to make such promises and to hold one another accountable to them. That power or capacity depends on a certain kind of intersubjectivity that is possible only because human beings can recognize one another as “persons” and impute rational intentions to one another (see especially 227–28, but also 245–46 and 258–62). For this reason, self-interest, according to Abizadeh, is not the ground on which the second dimension of normativity rests; that ground is rather the capacity in question and the directed commitments to which it gives rise. But here a reader—at least this reader—is left with a question: what deserves to be regarded as the more fundamental ground of an obligation, the incentive that leads one to assume it by making a promise or the capacity by which meaningful promises are possible between human beings? That Hobbesian obligations not only are rooted in self-interest but remain contingent on it makes me skeptical of Abizadeh’s argument. But readers who want to ponder the question and decide for themselves should pay careful attention to chapters 5–7 of Abizadeh’s book, especially section 2 of chapter 6.
Let me close by saying that Abizadeh’s book is well worth reading and wrestling with, even or especially for those who approach Hobbes with a different background from his. This is a serious and rigorous work that deserves attention, from political theorists as well as philosophers.