I have not set the background for this post, which would involve a rather lengthy treatment of Sharon Lloyd’s analysis of Hobbes’s methods in Leviathan (which cohere with other and earlier works), in this instance, his “compositive reconstruction” of religion (Judeo-Christianity), a “redescription of transcendent interests,” and the “resolutive analysis” that takes place in Part 4 of Leviathan. I should note, however, Hobbes’s argument that more than a few beliefs, doctrines and practices found in Christianity were imported into this “true religion” from elsewhere: from the Greeks (Gentiles whose beliefs and practices were spread by colonization and conquest, including, ultimately, to the Jews) and the Jews, most notably, and these acted alone and in concert to pervert original (so to speak) articles of Christian faith and doctrine. Thus, for example, demonology (which provides ‘an account of evil, illness, madness, and prophecy as possession by good or evils spirits,’ and is responsible for the practice of exorcism as well as healing and speaking in tongues), with its origins among the Greeks, ultimately infected the religion of the Jews (being ‘carried into Christianity with the conversion of the Jews’). In addition, demonology lends its support to a pernicious interpretation of Scripture that finds us with immortal immaterial souls (as Hobbes says, ‘The soule in Scripture signifieth always, either the life, or the living creature and the body and soule jointly, the body alive,’ which sounds rather like what Wittgenstein later said!). Moreover, idolatry “came into Christianity with the conversion of the Gentiles.” Thus one sees here some of the more significant deleterious effects on the interpretation of Scripture which Hobbes causally traced back to worldviews that were subject to (largely successful) missionary activity.
All the same, this picture gets a bit fuzzy when we understand how Christianity emerged (or evolved, etc.) out of Judaism, Jesus and his disciples being of course Jews and Jesus himself explaining his teaching and preaching as grounded in the Judaic tradition (hence his proclamation that he did not want to abolish the law but to fulfill it). But the missionizing that leads to conversion of Gentiles clearly bothered Hobbes and perhaps an appreciation of this renders our example below of Hobbes’s application of his “reciprocity theorem” to practical reasoning and the doctrines and practices of Christianity more palatable or plausible or even persuasive (bear in mind that, along with Lloyd, and against not a few scholarly interpreters of Hobbes, I do not think Hobbes was an atheist but rather a devout Christian; evidence for this proposition is amply provided in Lloyd’s two books on his moral and political philosophy).
What follows is but one—and surprising—application of Hobbes’s “reciprocity theorem” (in essence, the Golden Rule) at the core of his Laws of Nature (at the same time God’s ‘natural law’), which we can arrive through exercise of our natural reason. Despite the fact that this is at once “God’s Law” (thus found in Scripture) and a Law of Nature, it is discoverable in principle by all of us as human beings distinguishable from other animals by our capacity for rational agency [thus atheists, agnostics, and non-theists are not excluded]. This reciprocity theorem serves as both a guide for and constraint upon moral reasoning. Without going into more analytical and explanatory detail here, I just want to note but one intriguing application of this moral and rational principle of reciprocity introduced by S.A. (Sharon) Lloyd in the second of her two works on Hobbes’s moral and political philosophy, Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: Cases in the Laws of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2009). “For instance,”
“[Hobbes] insists that the efforts of missionaries to alter religion in another country are prohibited by the Law of Nature, and this despite the fact that the proselytizer believes he is doing good by his action. Why? Because ‘he does that which he would not approve in another, namely, that coming, from hence, he should endeavor to alter the religion there.’ This application of reciprocity is striking, because it resists the parochial description of the agent’s action as one of teaching ‘true religion’ [which Hobbes himself believed was in fact Christianity] or ‘saving souls,’ in favor of the least abstract description of the action that members of both societies, disagreeing over the value of the proposed missionary work, might be expected to converge upon, namely that it is an instance of coming from one place and trying to alter the religion in another place. We will not approve the efforts of foreigners to alter our religious beliefs, not least because of the civil strife any effective such effort would surely cause among defenders of the former religion and advocates for the new. In this case Hobbes applies his reciprocity theorem to the action under the least abstract description of it—endeavouring to alter the religion—that all affected by the very action may be expected to accept as correct. Men disagree about which religious teachings are true. They disagree about what conversions are salvationary. But they can agree at least that the action under assessment is one of attempted religious conversion.”
The reciprocity theorem is a normative rationality constraint on moral principles derived from the laws of nature which entail a psychological experiment or test [this is where it functions as a ‘guide’ in addition to serving as a constraint] inasmuch as it asks us to perform an imaginative act of empathy* [this is my characterization of the ‘test,’ not Lloyd’s, as she does not invoke the concept of empathy]: “Reciprocity suggests a test for discerning whether one’s actions comport with the Law of Nature, namely that the agent imagine herself on the receiving end of the action she proposes to perform and consider whether from that vantage point she would fault the action as unreasonable:
‘[T]here is an easy rule to know upon a sudden, whether the action I be to do, be against the law of nature or not … [namely], [t]hat a man imagine himself in the place of the party with whom he hath to do, and reciprocally him in his. Which is no more but a changing, as it were, of the scales. [….]
[For a man in a quiet mind] there is nothing easier for him to know, though he never be so rude and unlearned, than this only rule, that when he doubts whether what he is now doing to another may be done by the law of nature or not, he conceive himself to be in that other’s stead. [….] And this rule is not only easy, but is anciently celebrated in these words, quod tibi fieri no vis, alteri ne feceris: do not that to others, you would not have done to yourself.’” [Hobbes uses both positive and negative formulations of the Golden Rule.]
Hobbes might be said to have retroactively identified with those Jewish followers of Jesus who vigorously but unsuccessfully argued against proselytizing to Gentiles after the death of Jesus. Looking back, we see clearly how this proselytization or missionary activity provided the tipping point for a Jewish sect that followed Jesus transforming itself into a distinctly different and thus new religion: Christianity (wherein new converts need not practice many of the traditional Jewish rites and rules or laws and, instead, only acknowledge Jesus as the messiah and savior).
* The notion of empathy, for better and worse, has now become one of those notoriously contested concepts, with recent arguments being made “against” empathy. At some point I will try to spell out the sense in which Hobbes is using this concept, while lacking the word for it, which did not emerge until long after Hobbes’s death (‘sympathy’ and ‘pity’ coming closest to what we now mean by empathy).
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