The Moral Philosophy of a Political Refugee

The technicality of contemporary ethical theories, whether phenomenological or analytical, could give the impression that it would no longer be of any use to us to turn to the history of moral philosophy: our moral dilemmas would have found their adequate instruments of analysis, and there would be nothing more to learn from Aristotle or Montaigne. The first virtue of the book by Arash Abizadeh, professor at McGill University in Montreal, is to contribute to curing us of this illusion by showing us that the most recent conceptual contributions of normative theory, placed at the service of the history of moral philosophy, allow us to measure the importance of the latter. Its second virtue is to apply this methodology to Hobbes and to help us understand how this author, whose moral philosophy has long been forgotten in favor of his political philosophy alone, proposes a moral theory adapted to certain aspects of our contemporary world. The thesis of the book is, however, that the morality of Leviathan has two dimensions, the search for individual happiness and the respect of our obligations to others, and that these two dimensions are, despite an appearance to the contrary, perfectly compatible.

Between the Romans and the Greeks

Talking about Hobbes’ moral philosophy is both easy and complicated. It is easy because his ethical vocabulary is familiar to us: in use since Greek and Roman antiquity, it is the same, with few exceptions, as that of Aristotle, Cicero and their medieval exegetes. Doesn’t Hobbes talk about the good life, which is not reduced to survival but presupposes a happy life? Doesn’t he devote two chapters of his Leviathanchapters 14 and 15, to a methodical exposition of the laws of nature? Even virtue is part of his philosophical lexicon. However, the impression of familiarity that the reader feels when opening the Leviathan quickly gives way to a feeling of strangeness. Forgetting, or pretending to forget, that, for Aristotle and his Christian interpreters, the good of the individual also resides in the pursuit of the common good, Hobbes is no longer concerned with anything but the individual good; moral laws, which had the function of advising the individual with a view to achieving the sovereign good, become under his pen theorems of reason charged with indicating the peaceful paths to individual happiness; the notion of justice, which until then had been part of the eudaemonist project, acquires in the Leviathan an independent normative status (p. 5).

In fact, A. Abizadeh chooses to characterize the moral transformation of modernity as the affirmation, alongside an ethics of happiness that retains its followers, of a moral philosophy of voluntary obligation to others. The Jesuit Suarez was a precursor, he who insisted on the importance of the notion of juice in moral philosophy, but it is Grotius, the Dutch philosopher exiled in Louis’ France XIIIwho made the real break by proposing to think in two distinct ways about what being obliged means. If the first version of the obligation is turned towards ourselves, since it tells us what we must do to live happily, the second version is turned towards others, since it is what reason prescribes us to do once we have entered into a contractual relationship. This distinction is found in Hobbes, A. Abizadeh tells us, but with a major difference: like the author of From Cive considers that human beings are asocial by nature and appreciate the company of their fellow men only if it contributes to their individual happiness, the basis of our obligation to others can no longer be our inclination towards sociability (p. 7). The first chapter of the From Cive powerfully illustrates this change in the register of moral philosophy: we learn, among other things, that it is our self-esteem which makes us enjoy the company of others.

This exercise in disenchantment, which is not without evoking the lesson of the learned libertines, is interpreted philosophically by A. Abizadeh. Hobbes’ originality does not lie in the abandonment of the eudaemonistic tradition, since he persists in making happiness the ultimate end of human life; nor does it lie in the affirmation of the legal nature of the obligations that one voluntarily contracts with respect to others, since Grotius had already taken the path of legal morality before him; it lies in a new way of thinking about the relationship between concern for oneself, which is expressed by the advice of reason, and concern for others, which is expressed by contractual obligations.

Meta-ethics of Leviathan

But Hobbes and the two faces of ethics also interests us because it exposes the foundations of Hobbes’ moral reflection to a particularly rigorous examination using the concepts of contemporary meta-ethics. If the Fool, in the famous passage of the chapter XV of Leviathanis wrong to want to conclude from his desire for happiness that there is no obligation to respect his commitments, it is because he does not understand that a contractual obligation is based on reasons different from those which push us to live happily. He does not understand, in particular, that the “reasons of good”, those which guide the search for the good life, are not the foundation of the “reasons of justice”, those which oblige us with regard to others (chap. 6). However, the fact that there are two types of reasons does not lead to an incoherent ethics.

The proof of this is given by the theory of resistance: if one is not obliged to undergo the violence of the State, even when one has been justly condemned for a proven offence, if one has no obligation to deliver one’s father to his executioner, it is because the obligation of happiness forbids us from doing so – an infamous life, in this case that of parricide, is contrary to the obligation of the laws of nature, which, although it is not of a legal nature, constitutes a principle of limitation of our obligations towards others. In other words, we cannot commit, because we have contractually obliged ourselves to the State, an act that would make our life unhappy for the rest of our days. This is a face of Hobbes that is too often ignored, that of a philosopher of happiness who extends ancient eudaemonism into times when a morality inspired by law, combining contractual responsibility and justification of oneself to others, is in the process of becoming the dominant norm.

Happiness according to Hobbes: an anticipation of pleasure

It remains to agree on the nature of happiness according to Hobbes, since we are asked to read him as a heterodox heir to Epicurus: this happiness resides, not in the pleasures of actual satisfaction, but in the pleasures of anticipation (chap. 4). If we can agree fairly quickly on the first point, since Hobbes’ texts are formal on the unsatisfactory nature of enjoyment, the solution chosen is subtle because it makes our ability to anticipate the realization of our desires the driving force behind our capacity to be happy. In other words, although we are never totally satisfied, this continued dissatisfaction is the mark of our happiness. Our happiness would thus reside in the fact that we never run out of desire, and if this incessant activity is not at all restful – against the Epicurean thesis of ataraxia –, it is nonetheless a figure of the quest for happiness. Unlike most interpreters, A. Abizadeh attributes to Hobbes a theory of the supreme good and the ultimate end: the pleasure of a life spent in anticipation of the realization of our desires is our supreme good. The idea that Hobbes would have criticized for themselves summum bonum And ultimus finish would therefore be nothing less than a misinterpretation: he only rejects the conception of the supreme good “which is discussed in the works of the ancient moral philosophers”. More precisely, he rejects the Epicurean conception which reduces happiness to the realization of desires. Against Epicurus: “He whose desires have reached their end can no more live than he in whom sensations and imaginations are arrested”. Happiness thus remains, in the Leviathanthe cardinal value of human ethics.

From naturalism to morality

The art of the detour through meta-ethics, a trademark of the work, finds its most remarkable illustration in the description of the relationship, in Hobbes, between naturalism and moral theory. We read this analysis in the first chapter of the work, which is both the most demanding and the most enlightening – if we take the trouble to read it carefully. In order to understand how a normativism could be combined with a radical materialism, A. Abizadeh first emphasizes that Hobbes is a “projectivist”, since the sensible qualities that we perceive are projected by our psychic apparatus onto objects that are in reality only bodies in motion. However, he adds, this projection should not be considered a source of error: contrary to what Richard Tuck thinks, Hobbes is not a “theorist of error” (J. Mackie), since he considers that ethical propositions are capable of truth, although they are not properties of moral beings. In a very in-depth study of the lexical register of rationality, which seeks to show how the plural use of the word (” of the reasons”) is as important as its use to designate a faculty (“reason”), the author shows us that, to read Hobbes today, it is preferable to have read Tim Scanlon. If we cannot say with the “descriptivist reductivists” (pp. 39-46) that Hobbesian normativity is reduced to representations or assertions concerning what agents believe, desire or do, it is because Hobbes recognized “the existence of reasons in their irreducibly normative sense » (p. 61, our italics). This discovery is the strength of Hobbes’ philosophy, capable of articulating a consistent naturalism with an independent moral theory, since there is a specific normative dimension, the one we enter when we give each other reasons to believe, desire or act.

A political exile in Paris

Hobbes’ moral thought is, in the strong sense of the term, the thought of an exile: we too often forget that the From Cive and the Leviathan were written in Paris, where Hobbes had fled from persecution by the English parliamentarians in November 1640. It is also forgotten that the philosopher’s exile did not end on his return to England, but continued, despite claims to the contrary, with an internal exile in the Commonwealth of Cromwell, then when the men of the Restoration accused his Leviathan of treason to the monarchist cause. If this is not enough to make him a French philosopher, taking into account what we could call the context of exile seems to us likely to shed light on certain aspects of Hobbes’ moral theory, and to complete A. Abizadeh’s approach. Isn’t exile, from a moral point of view, this existential situation in which one must continue to live as happily as possible even though the possibility of the common good has vanished with the political conditions of its realization? Taking into account Hobbes’ condition of exile could thus provide a historical context for the thesis of A. Abizadeh’s book: thinking of modern ethics as a bifrons ethic is indeed to ask the question of the possibility of overcoming the disagreement between the ethics of the self and concern for others, which is one of the facets of exile. This situation, A. Abizadeh, whose family had to flee Iran with the arrival of the Mullahs, allows us to take the measure of it, not historically, but conceptually. The question he poses will undoubtedly retain the attention of all those, wherever they live, who today consider themselves internal exiles.