Hobbes's Leviathan muzzles Golding's Beelzebub
Why do we need morality? Pojman wants to answer: to create a stable, accountable, and flourishing society (Pojman 2011, 35-44). Before traversing there, he presents morality as a restraining force, triggered into effect via the social contract. In restraining Golding’s Beelzebub, innate evil, morality is to some extent obtained when Hobbes’s Leviathan (Hobbes 2013), the protector of the social contract, reigns. To illustrate this wickedness, he employs Golding’s allegory where castaway schoolboys are left to their own devices on an island. In a series of lost battles between impulses to brutality and proclivity to foster moral traces, the majority of the juveniles eventually lose their innocence, devolving into decadence and bloodlust. The sailor who rescues the survivors is no true savior. Though he confronts active barbarism in the wider world, his own latent capacity for vengeance remains at large. In the essay’s second half, Pojman turns to a Hobbesian explanation of this predicament, showing morality’s power to restrain chaos.
What explains the corruption in Golding’s boys? Although Pojman briefly dabbles with the Christian doctrine of Original Sin for explanation, he, rather, turns quickly to the Hobbesian conjecture on the human condition, deemed the “state of nature.” In the pre-moral phase, man is in a perpetual fear of losing the ruthless zero-sum game of survival, where foul play is a live option. This is the state of a cold war and not the wielding of arms. It is the pervasive and perpetual will of an individual to contend and sabotage. Reality is amoral, i.e., there is no good or evil, but sheer remorseless unfolding of events. Morality only obtains when the unfettered natural liberty potent with society-destabilizing force is muzzled. This stability is realized if everyone agrees to elect the sovereign and enter into a covenant with it. The Leviathan enforces the law that everyone has agreed to abide by. Apart from it, life is “solitary, brutish, and short.”
Pojman wants to conclude that the purpose of morality is to create a happy and virtuous person. He mentions this explicitly only in the last paragraph of his paper. However, his preceding reflection devotes almost the entire space to analyzing Golding’s microcosm of human evil and applying Hobbesian analysis to assess and respond to it. In effect, his argument essentially becomes, at worse a non sequitur, or at best, a proof for only one of the necessary conditions for morality’s purpose, namely negative ethics. This does not discount that he has done the latter persuasively. Indeed, society will implode under the unchecked propensity of man to do evil. And moral codes and conventions are indeed efficacious and necessary in achieving this end. However, moral codes should not be conflated with morality. It is only part of the whole.
Critique
Hobbes, a key architect of the Enlightenment, abandons Aristotelian teleology guiding ultimate explanations, embracing a reductionist-materialist worldview. Although not in the company of Rand or Nietzsche, he remains an egoist at the core. His ethics are too thin to cultivate genuine virtue. Hobbesian agents abide by the law only for prudential, pragmatic reasons. The contract merely facilitates the pursuit of one’s self-interests, without fatal collisions. The aim is not to produce virtue. Moreover, rational self-interest invites Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons”. They mistrust each other and prioritize immediate personal gain over cumulative communal benefit. Even in a perfectly realized Hobbesian society, nothing prevents cunning citizens from free-riding on the contract’s benefits while contributing minimally.
I contend that virtue cannot be obtained simply by observing negative ethics. We also need a thicker ethics that takes into account righly ordered soul that is metaphysically tethered to reality and bears virtues. Only in this context, positive ethics like proactive altruism and selfless love gains its momentum. The five purposes of morality Pojman outlines do not anticipate Bonhoeffer to execute his costly Operation 7, or the Chambonnais to rescue the Jews.