Compare Hobbes and Locke's views on the obligation to obey the law.

by gabbyw (student)

AS and A Level Politics

BARBADOS COMMUNTIY COLLEGE

DIVISION OF COMMERCE

DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT AND POLITICAL STUDIES

ASSOCIATE DEGREE IN ARTS

GOVERNMENT AND POLITICAL STUDIES

GOVT 100: INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL THOUGHT AND ANALYSIS

Compare Hobbes and Locke’s views on the obligation to obey the law.

October 15, 2012

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is best known for his political thought, and deservedly so. His vision of the world is strikingly original and still relevant to contemporary politics. His main concern is the problem of social and political order: how human beings can live together in peace and avoid the danger and fear of civil conflict. He poses stark alternatives: we should give our obedience to an unaccountable sovereign (a person or group empowered to decide every social and political issue). Otherwise what awaits us is a “state of nature” that closely resembles civil war a situation of universal insecurity, where all have reason to fear violent death and where rewarding human cooperation is all but impossible.

John Locke (1632–1704) is among the most influential political philosophers of the modern period. In the Two Treatises of Government, he defended the claim that men are by nature free and equal against claims that God had made all people naturally subject to a monarch. He argued that people have rights, such as the right to life, liberty, and property, that have a foundation independent of the laws of any particular society. Locke used the claim that men are naturally free and equal as part of the justification for understanding legitimate political government as the result of a social contract where people in the state of nature conditionally transfer some of their rights to the government in order to better insure the stable, comfortable enjoyment of their lives, liberty, and property. Since governments exist by the consent of the people in order to protect the rights of the people and promote the public good, governments that fail to do so can be resisted and replaced with new governments. Locke is thus also important for his defense of the right of revolution. Locke also defends the principle of majority rule and the separation of legislative and executive powers. In the Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke denied that coercion should be used to bring people to (what the ruler believes is) the true religion and also denied that churches should have any coercive power over their members. Locke elaborated on these themes in his later political writings, such as the Second Letter on Toleration and Third Letter on Toleration

What is political obligation?

Political obligation: a moral obligation to (1) obey the laws of your state (equivalent to ‘legitimate authority’) (2) support your state in other ways. For example, by enlisting to fight when there is a voluntary conscription. Here I shall focus on (1). (some have also interpreted ‘political obligation’ to mean ‘a moral obligation to be political, to engage in the political realm in some way, not necessarily to support one’s own country e.g. to fight for global justice, but I will leave this aside here.) The ‘problem of political obligation’ is that of whether we do have such an obligation. Three clarifications:

(a) Self-interested reasons to obey the law (fear of punishment, Hobbes’s argument) vs. a moral reason to do so the latter is political obligation. So although Hobbes (1) defines one as having an obligation to the sovereign by virtue of having made a valid covenant to obey him and (2) gives an argument for why fulfilling such ‘obligations’ is required by instrumental rationality, he does not believe in political obligation in the normal sense of a moral obligation.

(b) The moral reason need not be an indefeasible one, i.e. those who claim that there is such a thing as ...

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(b) The moral reason need not be an indefeasible one, i.e. those who claim that there is such a thing as political obligation do not say that the obligation to obey the law always outweighs every other moral obligation. For example in an emergency the moral obligation to save a person’s life could outweigh the obligation to stop at a red light or obey the parking regulations.

(c) Political obligation is a moral obligation to do X just because the law requires it, independently of whether morality requires us to do X anyway.

(d) Political obligation is meant to be an obligation to obey the laws of your own state, the state of which you are a citizen, not the laws of any state you happen to be resident in or travelling through. This is called the ‘particularity requirement’ (Simmons).

Arguments for political obligation always rely on some background moral assumptions (e.g. that people have a moral obligation to keep their promises). The idea is to use moral assumptions which are so widely shared that almost no-one would dispute them. Whether the morality in question is an absolute one, grounded in God’s will or somehow written into the fabric of the universe, or whether it is just a matter of social convention, or of convictions shared between the readers and writers in a given debate, can be bracketed for the purpose of asking whether political obligation follows from certain widely accepted moral assumptions.

Locke’s argument for political obligation is a ‘consent’ argument: we have a moral obligation to obey because we have consented through some kind of act. For Locke and liberals generally (‘liberals’ are those who make individual freedom, understood as not being interfered with by other people or the state, the centrepiece of their political beliefs) this is the only way you can become obliged to obey another (the principle of self-imposition) because (in Locke’s case) humans have a natural right to liberty, and thus no-one has a natural right to tell or force anyone else to do what they do not want to. But very few people, e.g. in Britain today, have expressly consented to obey the law (e.g. by signing a statement promising to do so; only naturalised citizens have done this), and the consent of ancestors will not do (my consent only puts me under an obligation, not my children or grandchildren).

We might say that as long as someone has attitudinally consented to a state (and the majority attitudinally consent to the present kind of state) then that person has consented to this kind of state and so is obligated. But how do you know whether in a given society people do attitudinally consent in the way required? You would have to be able to look into their hearts. Also, political obligation would last only as long as the attitudinal consent so would be precarious, and would not apply at all to e.g. anarchists, since they lack the necessary attitudinal consent. Yet Locke wants to demonstrate that all citizens are under a moral obligation to obey the law, not just some. (this is a fundamental problem for all consent theories, for if consent is voluntary then there must be the possibility that some will not consent, in which case those people will not be under political obligation.)

So instead Locke argues that tacitly consented. Locke’s argument is effectively, that anyone who remains in the country tacitly consents (by omission) to the laws, because they have chosen not to emigrate.

The standard critique of Locke’s argument: the background moral assumption in the argument is that if you consent to do something then you are under a moral obligation to do it (like a promise). But this is only credible if the consent is:

(a) Conscious: the actor knows that they are consenting, and what they are consenting to, by performing the act that gives consent. For example if a foreigner walks into an auction house and scratches his head at the moment the auctioneer says ‘Am I offered £500,000 for this painting?’, not realising that scratching one’s head signifies an offer, we would not say that he is under any obligation to pay up.

(b) Voluntary: the actor could refrain from the act without excessive cost or difficulty. For example, if the chairman of the board says to the other directors ‘I propose we do X. Please raise your hand if you object,’ and the directors know that if they raise their hands then they will lose their job and their golden handshake, consent would be indicated by an omission (not raising a hand), but refraining from this omission (i.e. raising a hand) would be very costly for them. If he says ‘I propose we do X. If anyone objects please indicate by taking a triple backward somersault’ then consent would be indicated by an omission (not doing the somersault), but refraining from this omission (i.e. doing the somersault) is very difficult. (Simmons)

Tacit consent by omission is a valid idea (there can be conventions under which you signal your consent by not doing anything) but these same conditions must apply to it, and merely staying in the country does not fulfil either condition. It is not conscious because no one is told that staying in the country counts as consenting to obey the law, so they are not aware that their omission has this significance. And it is not voluntary because for most people it would be both very difficult and very costly to emigrate (example of a man who cannot swim being drugged and dragged onto a ship, then waking up when it is at sea; Hume says ‘No one would say that because he does not jump overboard he thereby consents to obey the captain’; it would be so difficult and costly to do this that refraining from doing it cannot count as a voluntary act.) (Hardimon, Michael (1994). “Role Obligations,” Journal of Philosophy)

The dilemma of man outside civil society is constituted, in Hobbes's theory, not by the absence of a moral law, but by the total or partial frustration of that law. This frustration arises from the fact that moral principles must perforce be left to the interpretation of the individual conscience, and may be suspended or partially suspended as far as external action in accordance with them is concerned, through the prevalence of insecurity. Hobbes was led, therefore, to assert that in the State of Nature, notwithstanding the laws of nature, which every one hath then kept, when he has the will to keep them, when he can do it safely, if there be no power erected, or not great enough for our security; every man will, and may lawfully rely on his own strength and art, for caution against all other men. Hence there obtains Hobbes's famous 'state of war', with every man's hand against every man.

John Locke and Thomas Hobbes both agreed that a ruler of some sort appeared absolutely necessary for a country to thrive and flourish. Without a leader, the country would fall away into nothing. In the political sense, the two philosophers agreed only on this subject. However, they each believed that a different type of power should reside as supreme. Hobbes thought that only one man, a king, should have the right to govern the people. One king should make the decisions, write the laws, and control the masses. Locke, on the other hand, felt that the people should somewhat run the government. He believed that the people should have a say in everything the government decided, including who ruled over the country. This philosopher also believed that if the government did not uphold its end of the bargain, then the people had the right and responsibility to overthrow the government.

Though both of these two men became known as philosophers, they had their own ideas of how a human worked and lived. Hobbes supposed that every human being needed to have a master by Hobbes’ point of view, the king and he likened humans to animals, both fearful and predatory. To survive, humans must obey the commands of a ruler in religious and government matters. People, Hobbes thought, had an inner motivation revolving around pleasure and hurt. In contrast, Locke assumed that people could not come up with new ideas out of nothing each human could only understand things which he or she had experienced. Locke also believed that all humans come into the world as good, independent, and equal. Both of the two men’s philosophies included religion Hobbes and Locke both acknowledged the existence of God. Beyond this, both agreed that God played only a small part in the foundation of their philosophies.

Each of these men had an impact on the world around them, and the people to come later on in the world. Hobbes influenced the people of his own time by refuting England’s parliament and France’s papal system. In the same way, Locke affected the revolutionists of the United States. Locke’s idea of a people run government held a great influence over the United States Declaration of Independence, Federalist Papers, and Constitution. Both philosophers impacted others, but the way in which they impacted them varied.

Although these two philosophers disagreed upon certain subjects, they did occasionally agree with one another. Locke believed that government should base itself on the people, while Hobbes said that only a king should reign; yet they agreed that someone should rule over a country. Philosophically, Hobbes suggested that people needed controlling like animals in order to survive, while Locke thought that people had to experience something in order to understand it; yet again, they both believed in God, but they had little use for Him. Hobbes influenced the people in and around his time period, while Locke influenced people a few decades later but both men did influence the political and philosophical notions of their time.