European Hobbes Society

Pink, Thomas (2023): Hobbes against Bramhall. Moral responsibility, free will, and mechanistic determination in Kiener, M. (Ed.): The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Responsibility (1st ed.). Routledge.

Description

Hobbes addressed a debate about free will and responsibility hitherto conducted within the framework of Aristotelian scholasticism. The debate assumed that our responsibility was for our exercise of a power of self-determination. The main issue was whether this power of self-determination must be exercised contingently.

Contingency in the exercise of power was further linked to a generally accepted theory of rationality as involving susceptibility to the force of reason – to various forms of normative power, forces of truth and of goodness, operating on the mind through objects of thought. Hobbes denied that power could ever be exercised contingently. The very idea of self-determination was viciously regressive. All action was necessitated by prior causes from within material nature.

Hobbes further attacked the theory that rationality involved the operation on us of normative power – of a force of reason.

Robin Douglass, Rousseau and Hobbes: Nature, Free Will and the Passions (Oxford University Press, 2015)

About this Book: Robin Douglass presents the first comprehensive study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s engagement with Thomas Hobbes. He reconstructs the intellectual context of this engagement to reveal the deeply polemical character of Rousseau’s critique of Hobbes and to show how Rousseau sought to expose that much modern natural law and doux commerce theory was, despite its protestations to the contrary, indebted to a Hobbesian account of human nature and the origins of society. Throughout the book Douglass explores the reasons why Rousseau both followed and departed from Hobbes in different places, while resisting the temptation to present him as either a straightforwardly Hobbesian or anti-Hobbesian thinker. On the one hand, Douglass reveals the extent to which Rousseau was occupied with problems of a fundamentally Hobbesian nature and the importance, to both thinkers, of appealing to the citizens’ passions in order to secure political unity. On the other hand, Douglass argues that certain ideas at the heart of Rousseau’s philosophy—free will and the natural goodness of man—were set out to distance him from positions associated with Hobbes. Douglass advances an original interpretation of Rousseau’s political philosophy, emerging from this encounter with Hobbesian ideas, which focuses on the interrelated themes of nature, free will, and the passions. Douglass distances his interpretation from those who have read Rousseau as a proto-Kantian and instead argues that his vision of a well-ordered republic was based on cultivating man’s naturally good passions to render the life of the virtuous citizen in accordance with nature.