Title: "The Idea of a State of Nature in Hobbes and in Moral Theory"
Jan Narveson
Abstract:
My interest in this paper is on the normative logic of the State of Nature. I claim to show that it is indeed the right way to proceed in deriving morality from “nowhere.” Of course, that is morally nowhere. It is not normatively nowhere. Those who suppose that the project is impossible must think, I believe, that morality and normativity are coextensive - a view that seems overwhelmingly and plainly wrong, and which my explication of morality, that I take to be altogether commonsensical and in accordance with most ordinary talk of the subject, is designed to refute. And then, they might insist on some version of the Naturalistic Fallacy, and thereby insist that a derivation such as proposed is in principle impossible. That too, I think, fails when we consider that morality is a definable human institution, underpinned by the values of those whose conduct is to be subject to it. Of course it is a “constructed” institution. It is not natural in the sense in which, say, the proclivities of ants are so, nor of humans to eat some things and not others. But it is natural in the sense that, given a general characterization of humans’ practical situations, morality of a generally Hobbesian stripe is the clear rational outcome - the “Only Game in Town,” as I have elsewhere put it.