Gary Herbert

It seems that the philosophical history of rights has come to an end, replaced by the possibility of an endless construction of idealized linguistic usages, and a correlative possibility of a no less endless critique or deconstruction of those very same usages. If all rights are modes of rights talk, nothing more, we may want to retain the talk, but since it is no secret to the contemporary philosophical community (its analytical and postmodern segments) that rights have no reality beyond their linguistic employment, their invocation cannot be persuasive. Unless rights talk becomes a code word for power, rights claims will no doubt be met with an increasingly detached cynicism. The philosophical history of rights has dissolved itself into the endless polydirectional possibilities of rights activism, where rights are brought into existence and verified by the act of demanding that they be recognized and respected.

In this paper, I attempt to defend an older, non-normative approach to Hobbes's philosophy. I argue, against recent theories that maintain Hobbes's philosophy contains a normative theory of human behavior “which prescribes proper or morally permissible modes of action both within civil society and outside it”, that Hobbesian natural right and natural law are not normative postulates of a moral theory of political obligation but, rather, were considered by Hobbes to be, in the case of natural right, empirically verifiable hypotheses about human nature, and in the case of the laws of nature, nothing more than rationally consistent principles of natural self-interest, or the logic of natural right, based on the principles of Hobbes's physics and psychology