ABSTRACT This article aspires to make two original contributions to the vast literature on Hobbes’s account of the nature and person of the commonwealth: (1) I provide the first systematic analysis of his changing conception of ‘person’; and (2) use it to show that those who claim that the Hobbesian commonwealth is created by personation by fiction misconstrue his theory of the state. Whereas Elements/de Cive advance a metaphysics-based distinction between individuals (‘natural persons’) and corporations (‘civil persons’), from Leviathan onwards (...) Hobbes contrasts individuals acting in their own name (‘natural persons’) with representatives (‘artificial persons’). These changes notwithstanding, Hobbes retains the same corporate conception of the state throughout. On the prevailing ‘fictionalist’ interpretation, the sovereign brings the commonwealth into existence by representing it. I argue, rather, that as an incorporation of natural persons, the commonwealth becomes one person through the authorized (i.e. non-fictitious) representation of each constituent member singly by one common representative (‘the sovereign’). (shrink)

The Black antislavery theorist Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (c.1757–c.1791) is increasingly recognized as a noteworthy figure in the history of philosophy. Born in present-day Ghana, Cugoano was enslaved at the age of 13 and shipped to Grenada, before being taken onwards to England, where the 1772 Somerset court ruling in effect freed him. His Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery [1787/1791] broke new ground by demanding the immediate end of the slave-trade and of slavery itself, without any compensation to (...) slaveholders. Notwithstanding this, Cugoano endorsed the legitimacy of penal enslavement on principled grounds – like many other abolitionists writing in late eighteenth-century Britain. “Every free community might keep slaves, or criminal prisoners in bondage” – and even sell them. Amidst the growing literature exploring Cugoano’s abolitionism, his paradoxical justification of penal slavery has bewildered commentators. Far from an offhand inconsistency, I argue that this justification is deeply embedded within his moral and legal philosophy; constraining his antislavery arguments while simultaneously serving retaliatory aims. His two-pronged principle of just punishment – the lex talionis (‘eye for an eye, bondage for bondage’) as tempered by mercy – sometimes demands penally enslaving colonial slaveholders and slave-traders in turn. Throughout, I compare Cugoano’s justification of penal enslavement with those of other early modern philosophers, especially Locke and Kant. This helps me position Cugoano within the history of philosophy, thus making his views more accessible to a wider philosophical audience. It also indicates just how deeply theories of punishment shaped philosophical thinking about penal bondage in the period. (shrink)

hugo grotius was lavishly praised by his successors in the protestant natural law tradition for having been the first to make “any great Progress in the Knowledge of the true fundamental Principles of the Law of Nature, and the right Method of explaining that Science.”1 Wildly influential in his own time, historians of philosophy have found it difficult to determine what, if anything, is innovative in Grotius’s moral theory.2 Scholarly assessments of Grotius’s place in the history of ethics have been (...) hampered by pervasive disagreement about what his views on natural law actually are.This article provides new ammunition to those who hold that Grotius was an innovative and systematic moral thinker in his... (shrink)

:This essay explores the meaning and normative significance of Locke’s depiction of individuals as proprietors of their own person. I begin by reconsidering the long-standing puzzle concerning Locke’s simultaneous endorsement of divine proprietorship and self-ownership. Befuddlement vanishes, I contend, once we reject concurrent ownership in the same object: while God fully owns our lives, humans are initially sole proprietors of their own person. Locke employs two conceptions of “personhood”: as expressing legal independence vis-à-vis humans and moral accountability vis-à-vis God. Humans (...) own their person in the first sense. As original proprietors of their own person, individuals are entitled to subject themselves to self-chosen authorities, thereby incurring obligations of obedience. But they may not choose just any authority. Divine ownership of human life delimits personal self-ownership by restricting the ways in which humans can dispose of their persons: we cannot possibly consensually subject ourselves to absolute and arbitrary power. Locke’s rights-forfeiture theory for crime makes slavery and despotism nonetheless potentially rightful conditions. I argue that, paradoxically, divine dominium of human life underpins both the impermissibility of voluntary enslavement and the justifiability of penal slavery. My analysis helps explain why modern Lockean theories of self-ownership that reject Locke’s theological premises have adopted an ambiguous stance toward despotic rule. (shrink)

It is morally impossible, Locke argued, for individuals to consensually establish absolute rule over themselves. That would be to transfer to rulers a power that is not ours, but God’s alone: owner...

(2013). Hobbes's Account of Distributive Justice as Equity. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 13-33. doi: 10.1080/09608788.2012.689749.

This article reassesses Hobbes’s place in the history of ethics based on the first systematic analysis of his various classifications of formal goodness. The good was traditionally divided into three: profitably good, pleasurably good, and morally good. Across his works, Hobbes replaced the last with pulchrum—a decidedly non-moral form of goodness on his account. I argue that Hobbes’s dismissal of moral goodness was informed by his hedonist conception of the good and accompanied by reinterpretations of right reason and natural law. (...) By dispensing moral goodness and insisting on the hedonist and relational nature of the good, Hobbes moreover recast and rendered more urgent the question of why we should be moral. Hobbes is commonly thought to have raised this question so starkly because of his general insensitivity to the demands of justice. My analysis suggests that it may also, or rather, have been due to his restrictive conception of the good. A comparison with other moral philosophers from the period—including Suárez, Gassendi, Locke, and Pufendorf—indicates how unusual Hobbes’s jettisoning of moral goodness was. (shrink)

Despite the signpost prominence of Hobbesian positions in theories of international relations and global justice, the ground and nature of Hobbes’s claim that justice and injustice are non-existent outside the State are poorly understood. This paper aims to provide the first comprehensive explanation of this doctrine . I argue that Hobbes offers two distinct arguments for Justicial Statism: the Covenant and the Propriety Argument. Each argument is premised on a different conception of justice and stresses different implications of the natural (...) right to all things. The Propriety Argument is based on distributive justice. First introduced in Leviathan, this argument has received little scholarly attention, although it is no trivial addition: the Covenant Argument alone cannot establish Justicial Statism. My reconstruction highlights two further, hitherto ignored presuppositions of Hobbes’s Justicial Statism: his rejection of natural rights governed by justice and his claim that violations of natural law do not wrong non-divine agents. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs the conceptual foundations of Locke’s unilateralist theory of original appropriation through a critical comparison with the rival compact theories of Grotius and Pufendorf. Much of the normative and conceptual framework of Locke’s theory is common to theirs. Integrating his innovative doctrines on labour and natural self-proprietorship into this received theoretical framework logically required Locke to make several conceptual amendments. I highlight three all but overlooked revisions: (i) an unusually broad conception oflabour; (ii) a reduction of mere use-rights (...) toproperty rights; and (iii) a novel non-self-preservationist interpretation of thedivine authorizationto use natural resources in common. The reconceptualization of ‘labour’ is theoretically the most fundamental, underpinning the other two. My contextual reconstruction enhances our grasp of the structure of Locke’s theory of original appropriation. It also reveals Locke’s main objection to compact theories to be an external one, hinging on idiosyncratic conceptualizations of key notions. (shrink)

It is morally impossible, Locke argued, for individuals to consensually establish absolute rule over themselves. That would be to transfer to rulers a power that is not ours, but God’s alone: ownership of our lives. This article analyses the conceptual presuppositions of Locke’s argument for the moral impossibility of self-enslavement through a comparison with other classical social contract theorists, including Grotius, Hobbes and Pufendorf. Despite notoriously defending the permissibility of voluntary enslavement of individuals and even entire peoples, Grotius similarly endorsed (...) divine ownership of human life. He could do so coherently, we show, because he denied that despotic power gives rulers rights in the lives of their subjects. Masters do not own slaves in the way we own material things. Reworking received Roman law categories, Grotius maintained that ‘perfect slavery’ consists in masters having a personal right to the slave’s perpetual service; a condition equivalent to what Locke called ‘drudgery’ and deemed permissible. Our analysis of this unpalatable set of ideas reveals that Locke’s argument is premised upon idiosyncratic conceptions of slavery and absolutism, disavowed by prominent defenders of absolutism in the classical social contract tradition. It is hence less powerful than commonly believed. (shrink)

This is the first book-length study in English of Thomas Hobbes's On the Citizen. It aims to show that On the Citizen is a valuable and distinctive philosophical work in its own right, and not merely a stepping-stone toward the more famous Leviathan. The volume comprises twelve original essays, written by leading Hobbes scholars, which explore the most important themes of the text: Hobbes's accounts of human nature, moral motivation, and political obligation; his theories of property, sovereignty, and the state; (...) and, finally, his ideas on the relation between secular and ecclesiastical authority, and the politics behind his religious ideas. Taken together, the essays bring to light many distinctive aspects of Hobbes's thought that are often concealed by the prevailing focus on Leviathan, making for a richer and more nuanced picture of his moral, legal, and political philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter explores the character and normative foundations of Hobbes's international ethics. In Hobbes's case, international ethics is composed of three distinct sets of norms: natural rights, the laws of nature, and justice. In Leviathan, Hobbes's international ethics are informed by sovereign duties of care to national subjects – not unlike the tacit ethical assumptions of some modern realist theories of international relations. Commonwealths and pre‐statist individuals face different empirical conditions, making the international state of war a less wretched condition (...) for subjects than the prestatist war of all against all. Scholars have hitherto overlooked Hobbes's concomitant naturalistic conception of rights of war – justifying both preventive attacks and outright conquest. Both the English and Latin Leviathan reiterate the earlier equation of jus gentium with natural law. Hobbes thereby effectively made having a right intention the sole criterion for permissible resort to armed force. (shrink)

This article explores the conceptual relations Hobbes perceived between justice, law, and property rights. I argue that Hobbes developed three distinct arguments for the State-dependency of property over time: the Security, Precision and Creation Argument. On the last and most radical argument, the sovereign creates all property rights ex nihilo through distributive civil laws. Hobbes did not achieve this radically conventionalist position easily: it was not defended consistently until the redefinition of distributive justice as a virtue of arbitrators in Leviathan. (...) The argument is partly advanced as a critique of C.B. Macpherson’s possessive individualist reading of Hobbes. (shrink)

Enforcing Global Justice: War, Necessity and Rights of Armed Resistance of the World’s Poor Global justice theorists have long focused on the nature and grounds of duties of the affluent to alleviate the plight of the global poor and to realize justice worldwide. The last few years has seen a flurry of work that shifts perspective to the agency and remedial rights of the global poor. Suppose due assistance is not forthcoming. Could this give the severely deprived a just cause (...) to secure their basic rights by armed force? If so, under which conditions is it all-things-considered morally permissible for them to resort to violence? This article contrasts two possible ways of grounding and conceptualizing remedial rights of armed resistance against economic injustice. Some modern global justice-based accounts endow the global poor with limited rights to wage defensive war to force the affluent to comply with duties of global justice. The old right of necessity conditionally entitles the severely deprived to use armed force to secure access to privately-owned resources and spaces to meet urgent needs. While lethal force will on both accounts be seldom all-things-considered morally permissible in practice, my analysis reveals that the old right of necessity is, for better or worse, a more capacious ground for armed resistance than modern human rights of subsistence, as it sidesteps the issues of indeterminate and underdetermined moral liability. (shrink)

This article offers a rejoinder to Felix Waldmann. In a critical note published in Locke Studies, Waldmann challenges our recent reconstruction of Locke’s thesis, developed across the Second Treatise of Government, that humans cannot possibly agree to subject themselves to absolute rule. Call this thesis No Contractual Absolutism. Our reconstruction, Waldmann objects, “neglects a basic datum of scholarship”: i.e., that Locke’s Second Treatise intended to counter Filmer’s political theory. Our reply is two-pronged. First, we argue that No Contractual Absolutism cannot (...) plausibly be construed as an attack on Filmer, since it challenges a thesis that he did not hold. Indeed, as for him no form of government can be contractual in origin, Filmer would have agreed with Locke that absolute rule cannot be instituted by agreement. As our initial article suggested, the standard view about whom the polemical target is of the Second Treatise requires qualification with respect to No Contractual Absolutism. Second, we contend that Waldmann’s concerns rest on discipline-specific methodological assumptions, which are unhelpful for the kind of analytical reconstruction we advanced. We conclude with a plea for methodological pluralism in the study of Locke’s thought. (shrink)