The State of Nature & Social Contract, Part II: Individual Against the World

In Part I we laid out the stakes: in the interest of understanding the moral divisions in American society and how to overcome them, the question we’re interested in is:

On what terms did humans agree to start living together and what are the key implications for the foundations of human morality?

Today, we’re going to examine those thinkers who believe the State of Nature—the idea that people were dispersed individuals entirely governing themselves—is key to understanding the terms under which people agreed to live together. As we will see, those thinkers, like Thomas Hobbes, who take the State of Nature seriously, are arguing for a basic recognition of the individual. A recognition of the individual’s agency, danger, power, and/or sacredness. Only if we accept the idea of a State of Nature, they argue, can we appreciate that free individuals are one of the fundamentals (if not necessarily part of the beginnings) of human morality.

No Law and Government

Mozi, a scholar writing in the 5^th century BCE China, wrote that:

“In the beginning of human life, when there was yet no law and government, the custom was ‘everybody according to his rule.’”

Mozi

Similarly, Thomas Hobbes, writing in 17th century England, believed that all men believe themselves to be “equal in the faculties of body, and mind” to other men and subject to no other man’s will unless they want to. They maintain an “equality of hope in the attaining” of their own goals. So, they may live outside of society in a state of nature, a state of “Warre” where “every man is Enemy to every man” and lives in “continuall feare, and danger of violent death.” Such is “the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”