Wishful Thinking

However, Hobbes argues that for anyone actually to act on the wish to agree a truce in a state of nature would be disastrous for them, and therefore foolish. Consider, first, a very modest agreement: we agree not to attack each other during a specific period - say, tomorrow. If we all keep to this agreement, our lives will be a little less solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and shorter than they would otherwise have been. But consider how I reason when deciding whether to keep to the agreement. If I think others will not keep to it, then it would be foolish for me to keep to it, since I would thereby make myself vulnerable to attack from them tomorrow, and lose valuable attacking time of my own. On the other hand, if I think that others will keep to the agreement, then it will be better for me to exploit this by attacking them, when their guard is down, than for me to keep to the agreement too. Thus it is always better for me not to keep to the agreement, whether or not others will. Since they will also reason like this, we will all behave as if we had not made the agreement at all, and we will all remain in our ‘miserable condition’. As Hobbes puts it, ‘covenants [i.e., agreements] without the sword are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all’.

Perhaps it is not surprising that we are tempted to break such a modest agreement for the sake of our self-interest, and one might think that a less modest agreement would be more robust. Imagine, then, that we agree not to attack each other for a week, and threaten to give up the agreement and return to attacking each other if any one of us breaks it during the week. Then it seems that each of us will have an interest in keeping to the agreement, since keeping to it on one day ensures that we will benefit from it on the remaining days of the week. Assuming that we are sufficiently concerned with this future benefit, then, it seems that each of us should keep to this less modest agreement.

But consider how I reason on the last day of the week. Then, there are no benefits from later days to consider, and so I will reason exactly as I did about the modest, one-day agreement. Others will also reason like this, and so we will all be prepared to attack each other on the last day, despite our agreement. But now consider how knowing this affects my reasoning on the penultimate day. Knowing that we will not keep to the agreement on the last day, I also have no reason to keep to the agreement on the penultimate day. Others will also have no reason to keep to it, and we will all not keep to the agreement on the penultimate day either. Knowing this, in turn, ensures that we will not keep to the agreement on the day before the penultimate day, which ensures that we will not keep to it on the day before that, and so on, until the whole week of proposed peace unravels.

The obvious way to prevent this unravelling is to make an even less modest agreement: namely, an agreement not to attack each other indefinitely, again with the threat that we will all return to attacking each other if any one of us breaks the agreement. In this case, there would always be future benefits to consider, but there would be no specific last day from which our destructive backwards reasoning could begin. If successful, this agreement would also establish a lasting, possibly everlasting peace, rather than just a day or a week of it.

But Hobbes doubts that even such an agreement would work. His reason for this is simply that not every human being acts rationally all of the time. We often reason badly, fail to consider the future, or are carried away by our feelings. In particular, Hobbes notes that some of us pursue things obsessively, beyond their actual use to us. He also notes that we often respond excessively when we think that others are not treating us with the respect we think we deserve. Thus, even when it is in the interest of each of us to keep to the agreement, some of us may fail to recognise this. And even those rational enough to recognise it may not be confident enough in others’ rationality to keep to it themselves. Given the prevalence of irrationality among human beings, the uncertainty of knowing who might act irrationally and when, and the huge risks involved in keeping to the agreement, Hobbes concludes that even those rational enough to wish that the agreement be kept would be foolish to keep to it. As he puts it, ‘it is a precept, or general rule, of reason that every man ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of attaining it, and when he cannot attain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war’.

This is a profoundly depressing conclusion. It means that if each human being acts rationally in his own interests, and does not have sufficient fear of detection and punishment, he must pass up certain crucial opportunities to cooperate with others. Furthermore, he must do this even when he knows that, if others are rational, they will do the same and the outcome will be worse for everyone than if they had cooperated. Rationality thus demands that he make himself an exception to such cooperation in the hope that others are not rational enough to do the same, so that he may exploit their gullibility. In other words, it demands that a human being be Machiavellian. And this applies as much to friendship and love, the growing of food, and the raising of children as it does to truces in a state of nature. It is conclusions like this that lead some philosophers to give up their faith in rationality, since it seems to demand that human life should become neither liveable nor worth living.

In desperation, or perhaps irritation ...