Harvard University The State of Nature Summary
500 words summary of Blackburn's text
The state of nature
If our capacity for ethical behaviour is not immediately given by our nature as human beings, nor by an inescapable birthright of reason, where does it come from? Perhaps it is a social construction? In the modern world one of the earliest and most influential attempts to answer the question this way was that of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Hobbes imagined a pre-social world in which individuals bent on their own survival lived in competition for resources. Famously he described this as the war of all against all, ‘No Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual Fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ How could people pull themselves out of this fearful state? Hobbes makes two moves. First he supposes that his agents can get together and contract into a common policy. And second he thinks that their common policy could or should be one of submitting to a sovereign, or in other words voluntarily handing a monopoly of power to one agent, who, it is then assumed, will hold the ring, using the monopoly so granted for the benefit of all. John Locke’s comment on this second stage is well known, but good enough to repeat:
As if when men, quitting the state of Nature, entered into society, they agreed that all of them but one should be under the restraint of laws; but that he should still retain all the liberty of the state of Nature, increased with power, and made licentious by impunity. This is to think that men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done them by polecats or foxes, but are content, nay, think it safety, to be devoured by lions.
But philosophically the more interesting problems already arise at the first stage. How are Hobbesian agents supposed to enter into a contract or binding agreement? Hobbes saw the problem clearly enough:
If a covenant be made…in the condition of mere nature, (which is a condition of war of every man against every man,) upon any reasonable suspicion it is void…for he that performeth first, has no assurance the other will perform after, because the bonds of words are too weak to bridle men’s ambition, avarice, anger, and other passions…and therefore he which performeth first, does but betray himself to his enemy.
It takes a precondition of minimal trust for me to enter an agreement to lay down my arms on your say-so that you will also do so, or to do a job for you on your say-so that you will return the favour later, and this trust does not exist in the imagined state of nature.
If we postulate a state of nature like that of Hobbes, and a ruthlessly self-interested human animal, then apparently the problem of getting more than minimal social relations up and running is insoluble. The minimal social relations that might exist would be those of reciprocity, where I temporarily sacrifice some of my own interests, doing something for another, but only on the expectation that he does something at least equivalent for me. Even reciprocity however needs assurance. I am just a patsy if I spend my morning getting fleas out of your hide unless I can expect you to return the favour, and in Hobbes’s world there is no way to give that assurance. Someone once quipped that a verbal promise is not worth the paper it is written on. But in Hobbes’s world, even written promises are not worth anything either.
Some writers have complained that Hobbes’s problem is not, so far as we know, one that human beings ever had to face. There never was a state of nature, and we are not the egoistical monsters that Hobbes assumed. But we come to understand our concepts better if we can understand the way they might have developed from a previous state. This does not need to be a matter of providing an actual history with dated events and times. It can start with a type of state that we can imagine to have existed, and a plausible series of changes that would have ended up with us as we are.
From an evolutionary perspective the emergence of conventions of restraint and cooperation is a problem as long as we suppose that animals that sacrifice their own fitness for others must surely lose in the Darwinian struggle for reproductive success. So it is all very well saying that the human being is a social animal, but if biological theory appears to deny that any such animal can exist, we are still left with a problem.
The emergence of something better is usually modelled by means of simple games, of which the best known is the famous ‘prisoner’s dilemma’. In such a situation it is socially best if we come to some cooperative arrangement. But each of us can look after our own interests best by defecting from this arrangement. In the original story, a prosecutor has two suspects, Adam and Eve, who are charged with a crime. But he needs a confession. So he gives each of them, independently, a choice to confess or not. If you confess, he says to each, then if the other confesses too you will be convicted, and serve two years each. But if you confess and the other does not you will get off scot free, for having helped the court, although the other who does not confess will be convicted and hammered as a hard case, serving three years. But if the other does not confess either, you will each serve one year on the lesser charge of wasting police time. It is easy to verify that each prisoner has a decisive argument from self-interest for confessing: you do better by confessing whatever the other does. If the other confesses you had better do so as well, so serving two years instead of three and if the other sits tight you can confess and get off scot free. Yet if each follows this policy the social outcome is worst of all (four person-years in prison, when by each staying silent they could have accumulated only two person-years in prison; one each). It is as if instead of the invisible hand imagined by Adam Smith, whereby an atomistic society of self-interested individuals unintentionally improved the social world for everyone, there is an invisible boot whereby the same individuals unintentionally drive society towards the worst outcome.
Of course, the prisoners’ situation is highly unusual. But many real life situations can be modelled as (multi-person) prisoners’ dilemmas, in which self-interested reasoning will lead to a non-cooperative, worse, situation, yet the self-interested argument is good enough to tempt us. If there is a water shortage, the best social result is that we each restrain our usage. But if the others restrain their usage, my self-interest is better served by using as much water as I wish (one person’s usage does not make much difference to the overall supply). Whilst if the others do not restrain their usage, my self-interest means that I had better not do so either: the water is going to run out anyhow, and I need to have watered my garden and taken my showers before it does so. It is similar with the temptation to fish to an unsustainable level, to go in for aggressive wage rises, to keep guns, and so on.
Other social problems are better mirrored by a closely related structure, the so-called assurance game. The classic example of this is the stag hunt, described by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We have to join together to hunt a stag: perhaps we each need to stop one of the exits from the wood, and if one is left unstopped the stag will escape. If we do catch one then we will each share the result and that is best of all individually (unlike in the prisoners’ dilemma, where confessing is individually better). Unfortunately each of us has a temptation to leave our post: there are hares about, and one can catch a hare all by oneself. Hares are good to eat: much better than nothing, even if not quite so good as a portion of stag. But now each of us needs assurance that nobody else will be tempted to chase a hare. If someone does, any of us who stand by our post ends up with nothing. Too great a risk, we might think, in which case we all chase hares, and end up with the second-best outcome all round. Too bad, but nice guys finish last, say the more ruthless beasts in the jungle. Cooperation is for losers. Greed is good. A landscape of trust and cooperation is always ready to be invaded by free-loaders who can exploit it for their own benefit, and these are the ones who will win out in the end. Or are they?
Fortunately, no. We need to imagine repeated interactions of these kinds and suppose that in the mix there are examples of cooperation, for instance in families and kin groups, or in groups that can only survive through cooperative endeavours, such as together driving dangerous predators off their prey in order to profit from the food this makes available. Then it would not be long before it began to be noticed that these are the people doing better. If success is measured by number of descendants, and we use the prisoners’ dilemma arithmetic in reverse (so that more is better) then the cooperative people are set to outbreed the others. They might have four descendants after a generation, whereas a group of defectors only have two. And if the trait is inherited, either by a genetic modification or by culture and upbringing, then even when a defector meets a cooperator, and has three children, they in turn will be defectors, and again set to do worse. Over a period, nice guys finish first.
13. The emergence of norms
In short an adaptive mutation in a gene may benefit individuals because it enables them to cooperate in a group, and may spread because it does so. It has recently been discovered that even trees cooperate, feeding nutrients to needy neighbours so that the forest as a whole benefits from their solidarity. And if trees can do it, it should not be surprising that we can.
The upshot is that while no plan or agreement can release us from a war of all against all, practice in cooperation and observation of its benefits can wean us from it, over time and with repeated experience. The first writer to understand this well was, once more, David Hume who saw this way the emergence of such things as conventions, whereby we do something together, each acting only on the supposition others will do their part. This can happen without any prior thought or prior signalling. It can just be something we do. In Hume’s own example, two men rowing a boat together fall into a coordination with each other. Eventually our conventions give us the whole wonderful social apparatus of property, money, language, law, and government. Hume describes the norms that make up these practices as norms of justice. When you default on a promise or an expected instance of cooperation you do an injustice to someone. He aptly writes that:
The happiness and prosperity of mankind, arising from the social virtue of benevolence and its subdivisions, may be compared to a wall, built by many hands; which still rises by each stone, that is heaped upon it, and receives encrease proportional to the diligence and care of each workman. The same happiness, raised by the social virtue of justice and its subdivisions, may be compared to the building of a vault, where each individual stone would, of itself, fall to the ground; nor is the whole fabric supported but by the mutual assistance and combination of its corresponding parts.
It is only once these developments take place in society that we find that full flowering of what philosophers describe as ‘normativity’: the arrival of norms of expected behaviour, defection from which is a social transgression. Norms give us the ‘musts’ that infuse social life. They are the cement in the vault Hume talks about. Some may be quite trivial as when children agree that if they play hide-and-seek whoever is ‘it’ must cover their eyes and count to ten, or it is agreed that when we play chess the king must only move one square at a time. Such ‘musts’ are there for our convenience, for without them activities such as hide-and-seek or chess become impossible. But the same construction underlies more serious activities and serious institutions: not games like hide-and-seek but the serious scaffoldings of life, like language, money, law, and trust.
Being governed by rules and norms may seem a hindrance to self-interest. But that is far from the truth. Norms are in fact the indispensable servants of enlightened self-interest. The rules of language determining how we must speak or write are there since without them communication becomes impossible; the fact that other people must abstain from your property is there because without it security and safety evaporate, and so on. Rights, duties, and arguably the whole notion of treating people justly, according to their deserts, here swim into view.
The boast in the popular song ‘I did it my way’ is one of the most absurd and nauseating lies ever to gain currency. You did it by sheltering under a vast arch, or if we prefer it, sitting on the top of a vast pyramid, acting in ways made possible only by the cooperative activities of countless others and countless generations. You spoke their language, ate the food they discovered, profited from the inventions they made, travelled their roads, used their money, and sheltered under their laws.
Hume saw that the conditional nature of these activities—the fact that we perform them only on the condition that others play along—implies a kind of reciprocity. As already mentioned in section 4 it is an elaboration of the idea that if you scratch my back I shall scratch yours, elevated to be a fundamental building block of the institutions of society. This raises a thorny question of justice for those who have, as it were, little or nothing to bring to the bargain. It need not be in our self-interest to bring them into the circle. Rather unappealingly Hume bites the bullet:
Were there a species of creatures, intermingled with men, which, though rational, were possessed of such inferior strength, both of body and mind, that they were incapable of all resistance, and could never, upon the highest provocation, make us feel the effects of their resentment; the necessary consequence, I think, is, that we should be bound, by the laws of humanity, to give gentle usage to these creatures, but should not, properly speaking, lie under any restraint of justice with regard to them…
There is a whiff here of might being right, whereby issues of justice do not arise when one party has all the power over another. The weaker can only rely on the benevolence of the stronger party, which is likely to be a fairly unreliable matter. The problem was well known in classical times. The historian Thucydides relates a chilling dialogue in which the stronger Athenians try to compel the weaker Melians to their will, threatening them with destruction, and dismissing contemptuously any appeal to justice in their dealings, claiming instead that it is a law amongst both gods and men that ‘the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer as they must’.
Interestingly enough the philosopher Nietzsche, usually thought of as an opponent of normal morality, later came (perhaps unwittingly) to Hume’s rescue. He thought that once justice was elevated to an ideal it would, as it were, spread its glow over ever greater areas of human interaction:
Since, in accordance with their intellectual habit, men have forgotten the original purpose of so-called just and fair actions, and especially because children have for millennia been trained to admire and imitate such actions, it has gradually come to appear that a just action is an unegoistic one: but it is on this appearance that the high value accorded it depends; and this high value is, moreover, continually increasing, as all valuations do: for something highly valued is striven for, imitated, multiplied through sacrifice, and grows as the worth of the toil and zeal expended by each individual is added to the worth of the valued thing.—How little moral would the world appear without forgetfulness! A poet could say that God has placed forgetfulness as a doorkeeper on the threshold of the temple of human dignity.
The suggestion is that any pride in our ability to care about justice requires forgetting its egoistic basis in interactions in which we exchange benefits with reciprocal partners, although it has spread from there to embrace much wider circles of our interactions. As beneficiaries of these centuries of change, good people—not all of us, and unfortunately not many governments—naturally feel uneasy about unfair dealings with weaker partners. We find it natural to take them into the sphere of justice, and good for us.
If Nietzsche’s suggestion seems a little speculative we might want to compare it with this case. Most of us feel uncomfortable if we hear that people are trashing our reputations. Rightly so since a loss of reputation is dangerous; it may precede all kinds of loss and difficulty. Enlightened self-interest demands concern about it. But we would also be uncomfortable to know that future generations will say nothing but bad things about us (as well they might, given that we are busy squandering the world’s resources). Why, when we can’t suffer a single jot from anything they may say? The answer parallels Nietzsche’s. We have internalized the value of a clear reputation to a point beyond its original connection with self-interest. Adam Smith’s impartial spectator, the man within the breast, can act as trustee for any complaints of future generations, powerless to deal with us as they are. And this is all that Nietzsche is suggesting about justice.
Hume and Smith, sociable 18th-century gentlemen, start with a picture of human beings as reasonably benevolent, self-interested, capable of foresight, interested in each others’ sentiments, and willing to take up a common point of view with others. Hume especially refused to take sides over what he called the dignity or meanness of human nature, although this was a hot topic at the time. He thought his genealogy required only that there should be ‘some particle of the dove, kneaded in our nature, alongside elements of the wolf and the serpent’. There is not much talk at the earliest stage of cooperation of duty, rights, obligations, or rules. But these all swim into view under the heading of justice. Once institutions such as promise-giving and promise-taking, or property or law, are in place then we have rules or ‘normativity’. We begin to think in terms of things we must do, or things we may demand from others.
Things stop being just a question of sympathy or concern, which admit of graduations, but of who has rights, or what justice requires or what our duty is; it is a question of what is permissible and what is wrong. These are called ‘deontological’ notions, after the Greek deontos, meaning duty. They have a coercive edge. They take us beyond what we admire, or regret, or prefer, or even what we want other people to prefer. They take us to thoughts about what the rules or norms require. Some writers see these notions as introducing polar opposites to ideas of things we happen to want, such as happiness, security, or liberty. But by seeing normativity as a natural outgrowth of our attempts to achieve these things together, Hume and Smith soften the contrast. We cannot have the pleasures that tennis gives without the rules of tennis, the shelter of the laws without the rule of law, and we cannot have the pleasures society opens to us without the conventions that make society possible.
