Unleashing The Leviathan: Against Common Interpretations And A Contemporary Decision-Theoretic Reconstruction Of Hobbes'S Moral And Political Philosophy

Abstract

My dissertation consists of two parts. Part I "Unleashing the Leviathan" attempts to free Hobbes's moral and political philosophy from three commonly held interpretations. In chapter 1, I free Hobbes from the preference-satisfaction theory of the good. The preferencesatisfaction theory of the good claims that what is good for each individual is simply to satisfy his or her current preferences or desires. I show that this is not the case for Hobbes, since the entire system of Hobbes entirely rests on the assumption that self-preservation is objectively each and every individual's greatest good. In chapter 2, I free Hobbes from the Humean conception of instrumental rationality. This purely instrumental conception of rationality assumes that no preferences or desires can properly be said to be irrational in themselves, and that the role of reason or rationality can only be confined to: (a) informing the agent with true beliefs about the world, and (b) revealing the most effective means that could satisfy the current ends (whatever they are) that the agent happens to have. I show that this is not the case for Hobbes, since, for Hobbes, self-preservation is the very aim of iii rationality. In chapter 3, I free Hobbes from psychological egoism. Psychological egoism is a theory of human psychology that claims that all human beings are motivated solely by their own self-interest. I argue that not only was Hobbes not committed to psychological egoism in any of its plausible formulations, I also argue that, unlike what people commonly think, psychological egoism is not even needed for Hobbes's political philosophy. In Part II "Reinvigorating the Leviathan", I provide a contemporary reconstruction of Hobbes's moral and political philosophy in the lights of formal decision theory and modern game theory. In chapter 4, I reinterpret Hobbes's theory of the good as a version of what is, now, known as an ideal-advisor theory of the good. An ideal-advisor theory of the good maintains that what is really good for a given individual is to satisfy the type of preferences that his/her fully-rational self would form on behalf of his/her actual self. In chapter 5, I provide a formal representation of Hobbes's theory of the good in terms of contemporary utility theory. In Chapter 6, I analyze Hobbes's state of nature. There, I argue against conventional attempts to understand Hobbes's state of nature as a game of Prisoner's Dilemma. As an alternative, I provide three game-theoretic models that utilize the tools of modern Bayesian game-theory. Not only do these three Bayesian game-theoretic models respect what is actually written in Hobbes's original text, but they also show how universal conflict can inevitably emerge as a stable equilibrium due to uncertainty, without assuming psychological egoism. i