Hobbs Summary

Hobbes

Hobbes and Social Contract

Hobbes and Social Contract

One way of appreciating the importance of following cooperative strategies and rules is through prisoner dilemma situations, quite common in real life and business. In these cases cooperative strategies actually optimize the benefit for all individuals.

Another way of understanding the nature and justification of social rules of cooperation is Thomas Hobbes' derivation of social contract. Hobbes (15881679) was a British philosopher, perhaps most known for his work Leviathan. Historically Britain was involved in various wars and conflicts, so one way of understanding Hobbes is as an attempt to show the rationality and sense of social contract and peace, rather than war.

Reading Hobbes one notices a rather minimalist set of assumptions about the "nature of man." His science of man may not be entirely correct. Recent studies, for example, show a possible biological or genetic basis for cooperation. But Hobbes assumed the very least about humans, namely that they are self-interested and rational, similar to assumptions about prisoner dilemma problems. Hobbes assumed we want to survive and we hope to satisfy our desires. We might simplify Hobbes' view of the condition of humans as a set of four facts of nature.

Facts of Nature 1) Equality of Need 2) Scarcity 3) Equality of Power 4) Limited Altruism

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Hobbes

Equality of need can be understood as the fact that we all have the same basic needs. There are individual differences in terms of needs, but as members of the same species we have essentially the same fundamental needs. Scarcity is obvious but a critical fact of the human condition. Leaving open the question of whether there are enough resources to satisfy all basic needs, his point is that there are not enough resources to satisfy all individual desires. Indeed,...