Page:The ethics of Hobbes (IA ethicsofhobbes00hobb).pdf/52

nature is morally right. This is undoubtedly what Hobbes means when he says that in a state of nature there is no right or wrong, justice or injustice. He means, not that there is no moral law for the individual with reference to himself. As a being whose chief good is self-preservation, he is under obligation to his rational nature to use the best means, so far as his knowledge goes, to realize this good. But he owes nothing to anybody else. Others have no moral claims upon him. He may use any man in any manner possible to attain his own end, – self-preservation. Indeed, reason obliges him to do so. In such an endeavor to realize the end one cannot do wrong, or be unjust to another. This is the ethics of reason which is man's sole guide in a state of nature. But the ethics of reason involves something more. Man's rational nature dictates that the good which is his chief end cannot be attained in a state of nature; for such a state is one of continual war in which man's chief good is threatened. It can best be attained in a society organized under government, – in a commonwealth where men surrender their right to all things (the exercise of which on the part of all men endangers the safety of each) to a sovereign whose office is to secure them this good. Hence, reason dictates that men should take upon themselves the government of themselves according to the dictates of political morality, the nature of which consists in submission to the sovereign's will as the measure of all things, even of right and wrong, good and evil, to the extent indicated by the covenant by which the commonwealth was founded, because in this way they can best realize the end to which they are ordained by nature. In other words, the morality of reason binds man to "put on" the institutional morality, because the morality of reason has to do with the means of man's self-preservation, and reason points out that existence in a commonwealth, with all the surrender that this implies, is a better means