Ethics

Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes is an outstanding example of the independence of mind that became possible in Protestant countries after the Reformation. To be sure, God does play an honourable role in Hobbes’s philosophy, but it is a dispensable role. The philosophical edifice he constructed stands on its own foundations; God merely crowns the apex. Hobbes was the equal of the Greek philosophers in his readiness to develop an ethical position based only on the facts of human nature and the circumstances in which humans live, and he surpassed even Plato and Aristotle in the extent to which he sought to do this by systematic deduction from clearly stated premises.

Hobbes started with a severe view of human nature: all of man’s voluntary acts are aimed at pleasure or self-preservation. This position is known as psychological hedonism, because it asserts that the fundamental motivation of all human action is the desire for pleasure. Like later psychological hedonists, Hobbes was confronted with the objection that people often seem to act altruistically. According to a story told about him, Hobbes was once seen giving alms to a beggar outside St. Paul’s ... (200 of 43,721 words)