A More Humane Human Nature

In desperation, or perhaps irritation, one might respond by suggesting that Glaucon, Machiavelli, and Hobbes have all simply misunderstood human nature. For, one might insist, Gyges is not a good example of human nature, since he manifests nothing of our natural concern for others. David Hume, an Enlightenment philosopher of much more optimistic and genial temperament than Machiavelli and Hobbes, suggests this. He recognises that human beings naturally care for their loved ones and sympathise with others’ feelings, including those of complete strangers. In his A Treatise of Human Nature, he writes that sympathy makes human beings ‘mirrors’ of each other, and that this give them ‘a remarkable desire of company, which associates them together, without any advantages they can ever propose to reap from their union’. Love and sympathy of this kind would ensure that there would be more trust, and therefore more cooperation and peace, in a state of nature, or between princes, than Hobbes and Machiavelli claim. For example, I may be able to trust the members of my family not to attack me in a state of nature, simply because I know that they love me.

But unfortunately, even among human beings who love and sympathise with others, there is still much scope for distrust and war. Firstly, there is the sad fact that human beings’ care for their loved ones makes them badly disposed to enemies of their loved ones. Think of the Fowlers and the Mitchells in Eastenders, or the Capulets and the Montegues in Romeo and Juliet. Hume rightly accepts this. He also recognises that, although sympathy for others can make us more impartial, neither this nor love necessarily overcomes our more egoistic interests. If Hume had seen Eastenders, he would not have been surprised to see Phil Mitchell having an affair with his brother’s wife, despite the bond between the brothers. In a state of nature, such trumping of love or sympathy by self-interest might be particularly crucial: for example, you might sympathise with my hunger, or even love me, but not enough to give me your food. Finally, note that even a saintly human being, whose sympathy for others provides him with his most important interests, must compete with the less saintly (and, perhaps, other saints with different sympathies) for the things he cares about. This is what makes Superman films (barely) watchable.

However, one might still try to resist the Machiavellian conclusion. One might, for example, put one’s faith in education and civilization to improve and spread our sympathy for others, and thus reduce the likelihood of distrust and war. This is Hume’s hope, and that of many other Enlightenment figures. Many of them, like John Locke, Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx, even go so far as to presuppose a shared sense of morality, which might be cultivated to overcome the partiality of our self-interest, love, and sympathy. (Socrates responds to Glaucon’s argument by making a similar claim.) But if we had sufficient sympathy for others, or really shared a sufficiently strong sense of morality, we would not seem to need to trust each other at all. Even assuming that such improvements are possible, then, putting our faith in them does not give us much guidance for living and trusting in our present, vulnerable condition, in which we must live until such improvements are made.

Alternatively, of course, we might follow Glaucon, Hobbes, and numerous Home Secretaries in turning to detection and punishment to dissuade us from harming and stealing from each other. The possibility of being found out by the police and punished with a prison sentence, for instance, might dissuade some potential wrongdoers from crime. Those particularly afraid of their fellows might even think that a very coercive state is a price worth paying for security. But detection and punishment can be effective only if the vast majority of human beings do not even think of harming or stealing from each other, and if we already have a certain trust in the agencies of detection and punishment themselves. To emphasise detection and punishment therefore seems, at best, to be a very limited solution, and, at worst, to miss the point entirely.

Our last hope of avoiding the Machiavellian conclusion, then, would seem to lie in human irrationality. Like those philosophers who have given up their faith in rationality, we could simply hope that human irrationality will somehow keep our most essential cooperative activities afloat. But this is a largely blind and decidedly risky strategy, and, indeed, seems paradoxical: how can we rationally persuade ourselves to be irrational? This strategy should therefore be attempted only if all else fails.

As at the end of every bad film ...