Minerva's Owl: The Tradition of Western Political Thought by Jeffrey Abramson

Author:Jeffrey Abramson [Abramson, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, History & Theory, Political Science, History, Political, Politics
ISBN: 9780674057029
Google: r0cpEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 8405436
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2009-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

Contracts and Fear

Hobbes is what we may call a “contractual enthusiast,” insistent on enforcing contracts even in situations in which most of us would balk. Take the example of a kidnap victim’s family agreeing to pay a ransom for the person’s release. Lawyers today would consider such a contract null and void, given the obvious fear and duress under which it was made. But for Hobbes, “Covenants entred into by fear . . . are obligatory”; he could hardly conclude otherwise since it is the great fear of death that motivates persons into the social contract in the first place.34

From the lawyer’s point of view, a contract made under fear and duress is an involuntary act and hence no contract at all. From the Hobbist point of view, “Feare and Liberty are consistent; as when a man throweth his goods into the Sea for feare the ship should sink, he doth it neverthelesse very willingly.”35

Needless to say, this is a cramped view of “voluntary” action. The coercion in the kidnap example is so grave as to rob my “volunteering” or “consenting” to pay a ransom of any moral significance. But Hobbes’s system requires him to offer a flat and formulaic distinction between “voluntary” and “involuntary” action. Recall that we are but machines programmed to behave in ways determined by our desires. Thus even when we act voluntarily, we act out of necessity for Hobbes. The ransom case is but an extreme example of the way human beings always calculate: we add up the pleasures and pains, fears and joys, and act to maximize pleasure and to minimize fear.

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