At the end of Leviathan, Hobbes seems to concede this point, saying, "There is hardly a community in the world whose beginnings can be justified by conscience" (Review and Conclusion, 8). In other words, governments have invariably been imposed on people through violence and fraud, not through collective agreements. But hobbes means defending any government existing powerful enough to ensure peace among its subjects—not just a mythical government created by a peaceful treaty from a state of nature. Its fundamental claim is that we should behave as if we had voluntarily entered into such a contract with all the other members of our society – with all the others, that is, with the exception of the sovereign authority. The result is that Hobbes does not think we are fundamentally or reliably selfish; And he doesn`t believe that we are fundamentally or reliably rational in our ideas about what is in our interest. He is rarely surprised to find people who do things that go against our personal interests: we will cut our noses to hurt our faces, we will torture others for their eternal salvation, we will storm our deaths for the sake of the country. In fact, according to Hobbes, many of the problems people face result from not caring enough about their self-interest. Too often, he thinks, we are too preoccupied with what others think of us, or inflamed by religious doctrines or carried away by the inflammatory words of others. This weakness in our self-interest has even led some to think that Hobbes espouses a theory known as ethical egoism. This means affirming that Hobbe`s morality is based on self-interest and asserts that we should do what is most in our interest. But we will see that this would oversimplify the conclusions that Hobbes draws from his account of human nature. Although he established nineteen laws of nature, it was the first two that were politically decisive.
A third, which emphasizes the importance of respecting the treaties we make, is important in Hobbes` moral justifications for obedience to the sovereign. (The remaining sixteen can easily be encapsulated in the formula, do whatever you want. While the details are important to Hobbes scholars, they do not affect the overall theory and are ignored here.) Such points can reasonably be disagreed: are there not fundamental duties to respond fairly and to behave in a trustworthy manner? Even if there is no government that provides a framework for law, judgment, and punishment, don`t most people have a reasonable idea of what is right and wrong, which will prevent the kind of breach of contract and general uncertainty that Hobbes is concerned about? Shouldn`t our basic sense of morality prevent much of the greed, preemptive attacks, and reputation-seeking that Hobbes focused on in the first place? This is the crux of Hobbes` argument, and here (if anything) Hobbes can be accused of pessimism. He makes two allegations. The first concerns our duties in the state of nature (i.e. the so-called "law of nature"). The second follows from this and is less often noticed: it concerns the danger posed by our different and variable judgments about what is right and wrong. Hobbes` moral thought is difficult to detach from his politics.
In his view, what we should do depends heavily on the situation in which we find ourselves. Where political authority is lacking (as in its famous natural state of humanity), our fundamental right seems to be to save our skin by whatever means we deem appropriate. Where political authority exists, our duty seems simple: to obey those in power. General legal theories must be abstract because they seek to interpret the main point and structure of legal practice, not a particular part or department of it. But for all their abstraction, they are constructive interpretations: they seek to show legal practice as a whole in its best light, to find a balance between legal practice as they find it and the best justification for that practice. Thus, there is no fixed line separating case law from case law or any other aspect of legal practice (Dworkin 1986, p. 90). According to Hart`s view of the social fact thesis, a sentence P is legally valid in an undertaking S only if it meets the validity criteria contained in a binding recognition rule in S.
As we have seen, the conventional argument implies that an S-recognition rule is binding only if there is a social agreement between civil servants to treat them as defining standards of official conduct. According to Hart, "[t]he rules of recognition, which establish the criteria for validity and their rules for modification and jurisprudence, must therefore be effectively accepted as common public standards for the official conduct of their public servants" (Hart, 1994, p. 113). According to the thesis of conventionality, it is a conceptual legal truth that legal validity can ultimately be explained on the basis of criteria that are decisive on the basis of some kind of social convention. For example, H.L.A. Hart (1996) argues that the criteria for legal validity are contained in a recognition rule that establishes rules for the creation, amendment, and jurisdiction of the law. According to Hart, the recognition rule based on an agreement between public servants is decisive in considering their criteria as standards governing their conduct as civil servants. Although Joseph Raz does not seem to support Hart`s view of a primary recognition rule that includes validity criteria, he also believes that validity criteria are authoritative only because of an agreement between officials. If men and women try to create a society in which there is no fundamental agreement on right and wrong, they will fail; If the agreement, after being based on a joint agreement, leaves, the company will disintegrate. For society is not something that is physically held together; It is bound by the invisible bonds of common thought. If the ties were too loose, the members would drift apart. A common morality is part of slavery.
Serfdom is part of the price of society; And humanity, which needs society, must pay the price. (Devlin, 1965, p. 10). In judging Hobbes` political philosophy, our key questions may be: What did Hobbes write that was so important? How could he develop a way of thinking about politics and power that is still crucial nearly four centuries later? We can get some clues on this second question by looking at the life and times of Hobbes. Hobbes is the founding father of modern political philosophy. Directly or indirectly, he placed the conditions for debate on the foundations of the political life of our time. Few people liked his thesis that the problems of political life mean that a society should accept an irresponsible ruler as its sole political authority. Nevertheless, we still live in the world to which Hobbes directly addressed: a world where human authority is something that needs to be justified and is automatically accepted by a few; a world in which social and political inequalities also seem questionable; and a world in which religious authority faces considerable controversy. We can relate the question to the concern for equality and rights that Hobbes` thought announced: we live in a world where all peoples should have rights, that is, moral claims that protect their fundamental interests. But what determines or determines what these rights are? And who will enforce it? In other words, who will wield the most important political powers if the basic assumption is that we all have the same rights? Traditionally, the main purpose of analytical jurisprudence has been to explain what distinguishes law as a system of norms from other systems of norms, such as ethical norms.
As John Austin describes the project, analytical jurisprudence seeks "the essence or nature common to all laws that are rightly so called" (Austin 1995, p. 11). Consequently, analytical jurisprudence is concerned with the creation of the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a right that distinguishes law from non-law. At the heart of CLS`s critique of liberal jurisprudence is the idea that radical indeterminacy is incompatible with liberal notions of legitimacy.