Liberty, or freedom according to Hobbes
Please access the reading using this link; https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XXsZJH-9V7I3p5swgHLmqR6V7ns-Ogt-/view?usp=sharing
Read the reading Chap 21 section 1 to 4 and answer the 2 questions below. (300 to 400 words max in total)
1. According to Hobbes, what is liberty, or freedom, and how is it different from power? Using this Hobbesian picture, give me an example of a person’s liberty being constrained and a person’s power being constrained. [Discussed in Leviathan, Part 2, Ch. 21, Sects. 1-3]
2. According to Hobbes, human actions, like other things in nature, proceed from causes that are part of a long causal chain. For example, Ball A hits and moves ball B, which hits and moves ball C, which hits and moves ball D, etc. If we focus on ball D, we notice that it was a part of a causal chain, and hence, we can say that it necessarily moved. Humans are like this ball (specifically when viewed from the point of view of God). And yet, Hobbes also says that humans have liberty. How does this make sense? How is it that all human actions are necessary, and yet some of these actions can be deemed free? (Hint: focus on Hobbes’ specific definition of liberty, necessity, and his example of water in the beginning of section 4.) What do you think of Hobbes’ resolution to this liberty-necessity puzzle? [Discussed in Leviathan, Part 2, Ch. 21, Sect. 4].
Sample Solution
Liberty, or freedom according to Hobbes
No one has written with greater influence on the topic of liberty or freedom than Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan 1651). Freedom, according to Hobbes, signifies “the absence of opposition” or “external impediments” to motion. Hobbes clearly distinguishes freedom from power. When the impediments to motion are external, then an entity is said to lack freedom. But when the impediments to motion are internal, an entity is said to lack power. Hobbes contends that by nature people are sufficiently unsocial that if they had to live without an effective government to check them, they would find themselves in a “war of all against all.” But people are also sufficiently dependent on one another that in such a war everyone`s life would be, in the book`s most famous phrase, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” This alternative is so horrible that life under any effective government would be preferable to it, no matter what the form of that government.
