Trust Between Enemies?

But before we ditch our qualms and adapt ourselves to the possibility of a world of mutual distrust, cunning, and brutality, we should first consider another, much more attractive response to Machiavelli’s conclusion. For, enlightened about human nature by the example of Gyges and disturbed by its Machiavellian possibilities, it would surely be better if human beings could agree a truce, as a guard against the escalation of mutual distrust and attack.

Thomas Hobbes recognises the attraction of this response. His experience of the collapse of the English state into civil war had made him well aware of the Machiavellian possibilities of human nature, and in his Leviathan, he considers what human life would be like without a state. Without a state, we would live in a ‘state of nature’, with no authority to tell us what to do, and no agencies to detect and punish us if we do not do it. This again raises the crucial question of trust: in a state of nature, could we trust others not to harm or steal from us? And if we could not, could we avoid the dangerous escalation of distrust and attack by agreeing a truce?

In considering human life in a state of nature, Hobbes understands human nature in essentially the same way as do Glaucon and Machiavelli. Hobbes assumes, firstly, that a human being is moved only by his own ‘passions’, his particular desires for, and aversions to, particular things. Secondly, Hobbes assumes that no human being is strong enough to be entirely secure from harm by others. (He calls this our natural ‘equality’!) It follows from this that we do not curb our desire for something just because someone else has it. Thirdly, Hobbes assumes that the things we want are generally either scarce (so that we cannot all get what we want) or relative (so that my getting more of a thing effectively means that you have less of it). For example, food might be scarce, while power can be relative. It follows from this that in pursuing the things we want, we must view each other with distrust, as enemies. And the best way to prevent others from getting the things I want is, of course, to attack them before they attack me. As Hobbes puts it, ‘there is no way for any man to secure himself so reasonable as anticipation, that is, by force or wiles to master the persons of all men he can’. From this, mutual suspicions and attacks will spiral, and Hobbes reaches his famous conclusion: in a state of nature, there would be ‘war…of every man against every man’, and life would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.

Hobbes thus draws the same conclusion from Glaucon’s picture of human nature as Machiavelli does: that if the fear of detection and punishment is not sufficient to dissuade people from harming and stealing from me, I should be prepared to attack them before they attack me. However, Machiavelli simply sings the praises of those most successful in their attacks on others, while Hobbes sees this war as a ‘miserable condition’, and understands that we would wish to avoid it. In particular, he recognises that we might wish to agree a truce amongst ourselves, an agreement to restrain the pursuit of our self-interest when necessary to avoid war.

This wish reveals a second important feature of trust: that trust is a means of making our social life simpler and safer, and of making possible cooperative activities which each of us could not undertake alone. Indeed, trust is required for many cooperative activities which seem to make human life both liveable and worth living, such as friendship and love, the growing of food, and the raising of children.

However, Hobbes argues that ...