Johan Olsthoorn

This chapter argues that Hobbes altered his accounts of distributive justice, merit, and gratitude in Leviathan, and that these changes are interlinked. The merit implied by distributive justice, Leviathan emphasizes, “is rewarded of Grace onely” (L 15.14). This redefinition of merit served a twofold goal. It ensured, first, that citizens cannot possibly receive less from the sovereign than they deserve, thus defusing an explosive source of civic grievances. Distributive civil laws create rather than track merit: the sovereign first determines what is due to each – i.e., what citizens deserve to have – by freely issuing laws establishing property, rank, and civil rights. The same set of revisions enabled him to hold, secondly, that natural law obliges citizens to be grateful to the sovereign for his beneficence. Hobbes had to rethink the concept and morality of gratitude to seize this last opportunity. The early works had linked gratitude to imparted trust: ingratitude consists in betraying the trust another has freely given you in hopes of obtaining future favours. Leviathan ties gratitude to mere grace instead. Ingratitude now more generally means giving benefactors reason to regret their gift. Citizens must not give their sovereign protector “reasonable cause to repent” his goodwill – even if his donations were not intended to curry favour (L 15.16). Along the way, my analysis clarifies the meaning of trust in Hobbes’s political theory. It has hitherto gone unnoticed that Hobbes recognizes two types of trust. Fides is the trust central to covenants (promises obliging to future performance). Fiducia, or trust in another’s goodwill, involves no pacts. Fides is key to justice and covenants; fiducia to gratitude and free gifts.

This article examines an overlooked but highly influential contribution of Grotius to theories of just war and self-defence: his doctrine that justice allows us to protect ourselves from injury with unlimited force (in infinitum) if necessary. We may do so even if the threatened rights pale in value, morally, to the defensive harm done: proportionality is no requirement of just defensive force. Fleeing thieves, for example, can be killed without injustice if larceny cannot be prevented otherwise. Indeed, justice licences defensive killing to avoid being punched (even as charity forbids the same). Grotius endorsed this doctrine – labelled Infinite Right – on markedly different grounds, this article shows, than his successors, including Pufendorf and Locke. Since perfect rights are essentially enforceable in court and by war, Grotius reasoned, forcibly resisting violations of these rights must be possible without injustice to the aggressor – even as other moral norms prohibit exercising rights of self-defence.

Spinoza’s views of justice are heavily shaped by his wider moral and metaphysical commitments. The TTP defines justice as “a constancy of mind in apportioning to each person what belongs to him according to civil law” (TTP16.42; also TP2.23). This definition seems at first traditional enough. It brings to mind the Roman law maxim in Digest 1.1.10: “Justice is a steady and enduring will to render unto everyone his right [suum cuique tribuere].” That maxim was considered summative of justice across the medieval and early modern period. In fact, Spinoza thoroughly reinterpreted the meaning of “justice,” to reconcile it with his startlingly innovative metaphysics of right, power, and virtue. He did so in two ways: (1) by insisting that the sole rights that justice regulates are civil ones, introduced by human lawgiving; (2) by altering the standards of “constancy of mind” required by the virtue of justice.

During the seventeenth century, natural law theory became institutionalised as the leading approach to moral philosophy in Protestant Europe. Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and Samuel Pufendorf (1632–94) were undoubtedly the most influential natural law theorists of the period. Their books went through hundreds of editions and were translated into most European languages. This chapter will reconstruct the structure and philosophical presuppositions of the natural law ethics of Grotius and Pufendorf. Their natural law theories are often discussed in tandem; indeed, Pufendorf is frequently portrayed as further developing and amending Grotius’ basic ideas. The two thinkers indeed strikingly employed the same juridical language in their moral and political philosophy. Moreover, they shared key methodological assumptions, including concerning the importance of divorcing natural law from revealed theology. Both held that natural law is based on human nature and that its precepts require sociality above all: humans ought to perform those acts conducive to a peaceful society and omit those that undermine one. By highlighting and analysing their disagreements, I hope to give some impression of the richness and diversity of ethical thinking in the early modern natural law tradition. This chapter discusses how Grotius and Pufendorf conceived of the interrelations of natural law with, in turn, theology; human nature; natural morality; and rights and justice.

Inspired by Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), Mathias Risse has recently argued forcefully that any property or territorial arrangement that fails to provide the global population with an equal opportunity to satisfy basic needs is unjust: it violates natural rights of common ownership. This chapter argues that Grotius and Risse theorize Collective Ownership of the Earth in rival ways. Risse develops a theory of justice: COE generates moral rights that restrain the acceptability of exclusionary regimes. Grotius, by contrast, advances a theory of property: what shape should we give to conventionally instituted individual property rights, given that the earth originally belongs to everyone? This chapter focuses on the right of necessity to illustrate the differences between these approaches. Grotius conceptualizes retained rights of common ownership, including rights of necessity, as partly definitive of individual property and territorial rights. These retained rights therefore bind each and every property-holder. Risse declares any pattern of holdings that fails to realize natural rights of common ownership ‘unjust’, while insisting that the duty to bring about just distributions is incumbent upon states alone. I conclude that Grotius’s model resolves theoretically more parsimoniously the question of who are bound by the obligations corresponding to rights of common ownership.

This chapter analyses Pufendorf’s doctrine that natural rights of war and violent self-defence are “infinite”. Nothing that victims do to avert an unjust attack can wrong their assailants or leave them with standing to complain. This doctrine – call it Infinite Right – makes it rightful to kill a thief to protect one’s property. The chapter contrasts Pufendorf’s interpretation and justification of Infinite Right with those of Grotius and Kant. For Grotius, the in bello requirement of necessity (‘minimum-force’) is internal to Infinite Right. Pufendorf and Kant, by contrast, posited a natural right to kill in self-defence even if less harmful ways of avoiding the unjust threat are available. Grotius and Kant upheld Infinite Right by reasoning that it must be morally possible for victims of unjust aggression to enforce their rights. Pufendorf argued instead that natural law duties are owed only towards those who reciprocally act peacefully and sociably.

This paper argues that Francesco Suarez (1548-1617) and Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) grappled with the same conundrum: how to incorporate a conception of 'subjective' rights as moral powers into the received Aristotelian typology of justice; and, this having been achieved, how to understand the difference between various types of justice? Both thinkers maintained innovatively that distributive justice essentially differs from other forms of justice in exclusively governing 'imperfect' rights-- while disagreeing over the meaning of the latter notion. My analysis suggests that the widespread early modern association and even identification of distributive justice with imperfect duties like charity and liberality is best regarded as inspired by Grotius' conceptual innovations.

What made colonial slavery wrongful? This article reconstructs the answer given by a radical Black antislavery theorist writing in late eighteenth-century Britain: Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (c.1757–c.1791). His answer drew on lived experience. Born in present-day Ghana, Cugoano was enslaved aged 13 and trafficked to Grenada, before being taken onwards to England where he reclaimed his freedom. His Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery [1787/1791] highlights two central injustices blighting colonial slavery – robbery (‘theft of rights’) and dehumanization. On my interpretation, enslaved Black people are dehumanized in three ways: through instrumentalization; commodification; and racial inferiorization. A specific type of violence accompanies each. Significantly, unfreedom and exploitation per se are not among the injustices of slavery. Both feature in a condition Cugoano calls “lawful servitude” – part of his overlooked vision for post-abolition transitional justice. After abolition, enslaved persons should continue to work for their ex-owners, “without torture or oppression” – until they completed seven years in total, nominally to compensate “for the expences attending their education” (98-99). Biblical laws of bondage provide the blueprint for post-abolition lawful servitude. Parsing its meaning and legitimating conditions allows me to clarify what in Cugoano’s view the injustice of colonial slavery exactly consists in.

The legal rights of a person within a state depend in part on their migration status. Many states across the world deny non-citizen residents or ‘denizens’ certain political, socio-economic, and cultural rights granted to every citizen alike. This book tackles pressing moral questions raised by legal rights-differentiation by citizenship status by drawing on the ethics of migration, citizenship, multiculturalism, refuge as well as on normative theories of law, territory, and settler colonialism. Egalitarian values, at the heart of liberal democracy, ground a presumption against legal rights-differentiation. Any deviation from legal equality stands in need of justification. What, if anything, could justify legal rights-differentiations along the lines of citizenship? When, if ever, is it morally permissible for states to deny denizens certain legal rights granted to every citizen alike? This book scrutinizes these politically increasingly salient questions from a wide range of perspectives and drawing on recent literature. This book will be of great interest to philosophers, legal and political theorists, and researchers studying migration studies, philosophy, human rights, law and politics. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) is widely regarded as one of the most important political thinkers in the western tradition. Justice is one of the main political concepts today. This is the first book-length analysis of Hobbes’s ideas on justice. Hobbes made many startling claims about justice. Norms of justice have no place outside the commonwealth, the civil law determines what is just and unjust, and nothing sovereigns do is unjust to their citizens. But what exactly did Hobbes mean by justice? And how did he convince his audience that he was speaking about justice when advancing such controversial views, and not about something else? In Hobbes on Justice, Olsthoorn traces the place of justice in Hobbes’s moral, legal, political, and international thought as developed over time. The book reconstructs his idiosyncratic glosses on notions like justice, rights, injury, obligation, and law; proposes new solutions to some long-standing interpretive puzzles; and provides in-depth discussions of property, slavery, treason, just war, and other neglected aspects of Hobbes’s thought. Olsthoorn shows that Hobbes’s theory of justice doubled as a civil theodicy: it aimed to morally empower sovereign rulers by vindicating them from all stains of injustice, no matter how horrid their rule. Combining analytic philosophy, intellectual history, and political theory, this major new study of Thomas Hobbes will be of wide and cross-disciplinary interest to scholars of philosophy, law, politics, and history. This is an open access title. It is available to read and download as a free PDF version on Oxford Academic and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International licence.

Under which conditions, if any, is it morally permissible for states to grant non-citizen residents (‘denizens’) different political, socio-economic, and cultural rights than citizens? What, if anything, could justify legal rights-differentiations along the lines of citizenship? This special issue scrutinizes these politically increasingly salient questions from a wide range of perspectives, drawing on recent literature in the ethics of migration, citizenship, multiculturalism, and refuge, as well as on normative theories of law, territory, and settler colonialism. In this introduction to the volume, I sketch a conceptual map of the emerging debate on justice for denizens, making explicit some underlying theoretical assumptions common to each of the three key domains of legal rights-differentiations (political, socio-economic, and cultural rights). I distinguish the question of what is owed to denizens as a matter of justice, from that of what justice permits and requires in respect to denizens generally. And I outline four models, implicit in the literature, for theorizing the moral rights different types of denizens have and lack – to help determine which forms of unequal treatment wrong them. I conclude by providing brief summaries of the seven contributing articles, pinpointing them on my conceptual map.

This paper reconstructs the conceptual foundations of Locke’s unilateralist theory of original appropriation through a critical comparison with the rival compact theories of Grotius and Pufendorf. Much of the normative and conceptual framework of Locke’s theory is common to theirs. Integrating his innovative doctrines on labour and natural self-proprietorship into this received theoretical framework logically required Locke to make several conceptual amendments. I highlight three all but overlooked revisions: (i) an unusually broad conception of labour; (ii) a reduction of mere use-rights to property rights; and (iii) a novel non-self-preservationist interpretation of the divine authorization to use natural resources in common. The reconceptualization of ‘labour’ is theoretically the most fundamental, underpinning the other two. My contextual reconstruction enhances our grasp of the structure of Locke’s theory of original appropriation. It also reveals Locke’s main objection to compact theories to be an external one, hinging on idiosyncratic conceptualizations of key notions.

The Black antislavery theorist Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (c.1757–c.1791) is increasingly recognized as a noteworthy figure in the history of philosophy. Born in present-day Ghana, Cugoano was enslaved at the age of 13 and shipped to Grenada, before being taken onwards to England, where the 1772 Somerset court ruling in effect freed him. His Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery [1787/1791] broke new ground by demanding the immediate end of the slave-trade and of slavery itself, without any compensation to slaveholders. Notwithstanding this, Cugoano endorsed the legitimacy of penal enslavement on principled grounds – like many other abolitionists writing in late eighteenth-century Britain. “Every free community might keep slaves, or criminal prisoners in bondage” – and even sell them. Amidst the growing literature exploring Cugoano’s abolitionism, his paradoxical justification of penal slavery has bewildered commentators. Far from an offhand inconsistency, I argue that this justification is deeply embedded within his moral and legal philosophy; constraining his antislavery arguments while simultaneously serving retaliatory aims. His two-pronged principle of just punishment – the lex talionis (eye for an eye, bondage for bondage) as tempered by mercy – sometimes demands penally enslaving colonial slaveholders and slave-traders in turn. Throughout, I compare Cugoano’s justification of penal enslavement with those of other early modern philosophers, especially Locke and Kant. This helps me position Cugoano within the history of philosophy, thus making his views more accessible to a wider philosophical audience. It also indicates how deeply theories of punishment shaped philosophical thinking about penal bondage in the period.

This chapter explores the character and normative foundations of Hobbes's international ethics. In Hobbes's case, international ethics is composed of three distinct sets of norms: natural rights, the laws of nature, and justice. In Leviathan, Hobbes's international ethics are informed by sovereign duties of care to national subjects – not unlike the tacit ethical assumptions of some modern realist theories of international relations. Commonwealths and pre‐statist individuals face different empirical conditions, making the international state of war a less wretched condition for subjects than the prestatist war of all against all. Scholars have hitherto overlooked Hobbes's concomitant naturalistic conception of rights of war – justifying both preventive attacks and outright conquest. Both the English and Latin Leviathan reiterate the earlier equation of jus gentium with natural law. Hobbes thereby effectively made having a right intention the sole criterion for permissible resort to armed force.

This article offers a rejoinder to Felix Waldmann. In a critical note published in Locke Studies, Waldmann challenges our recent reconstruction of Locke’s thesis, developed across the Second Treatise of Government, that humans cannot possibly agree to subject themselves to absolute rule. Call this thesis No Contractual Absolutism. Our reconstruction, Waldmann objects, “neglects a basic datum of scholarship”: i.e., that Locke’s Second Treatise intended to counter Filmer’s political theory. Our reply is two-pronged. First, we argue that No Contractual Absolutism cannot plausibly be construed as an attack on Filmer, since it challenges a thesis that he did not hold. Indeed, as for him no form of government can be contractual in origin, Filmer would have agreed with Locke that absolute rule cannot be instituted by agreement. As our initial article suggested, the standard view about whom the polemical target is of the Second Treatise requires qualification with respect to No Contractual Absolutism. Second, we contend that Waldmann’s concerns rest on discipline-specific methodological assumptions, which are unhelpful for the kind of analytical reconstruction we advanced. We conclude with a plea for methodological pluralism in the study of Locke’s thought.

Hobbes’s views on church–state relations go well beyond Erastianism. Rather than claiming that the state holds supremacy _over_ the church, Hobbes argued that church and state are _identical_ in Christian commonwealths. This chapter shows that Hobbes advanced two distinct arguments for the church–state identity thesis over time. Both arguments are of considerable interest. The argument found in _De Cive_ explains how the sovereign unifies a multitude of Christians into one personified church—without, intriguingly, any appeal to representation. _Leviathan_’s argument is premised on the sovereign’s authorized representation of Christian subjects. Authorization explains why, from _Leviathan_ onwards, full sacerdotal powers are _ex officio_ attributed to the sovereign. In Hobbes’s mature theory, every clerical power, including baptism and consecration, derives from the sovereign—now labelled ‘the Supreme Pastor’. Developments in Hobbes’s account of church personation thus explain _Leviathan_’s theocratic turn.

It is morally impossible, Locke argued, for individuals to consensually establish absolute rule over themselves. That would be to transfer to rulers a power that is not ours, but God’s alone: ownership of our lives. This article analyses the conceptual presuppositions of Locke’s argument for the moral impossibility of self-enslavement through a comparison with other classical social contract theorists, including Grotius, Hobbes and Pufendorf. Despite notoriously defending the permissibility of voluntary enslavement of individuals and even entire peoples, Grotius similarly endorsed divine ownership of human life. He could do so coherently, we show, because he denied that despotic power gives rulers rights in the lives of their subjects. Masters do not own slaves in the way we own material things (which we may destroy at will). Reworking received Roman law categories, Grotius maintained that ‘perfect slavery’ consists in masters having a personal right to the slave’s perpetual service; a condition equivalent to what Locke called ‘drudgery’ and deemed permissible. Our analysis of this unpalatable set of ideas reveals that Locke’s argument is premised upon idiosyncratic conceptions of slavery and absolutism, disavowed by prominent defenders of absolutism in the classical social contract tradition. It is hence less powerful than commonly believed.

:This essay explores the meaning and normative significance of Locke’s depiction of individuals as proprietors of their own person. I begin by reconsidering the long-standing puzzle concerning Locke’s simultaneous endorsement of divine proprietorship and self-ownership. Befuddlement vanishes, I contend, once we reject concurrent ownership in the same object: while God fully owns our lives, humans are initially sole proprietors of their own person. Locke employs two conceptions of “personhood”: as expressing legal independence vis-à-vis humans and moral accountability vis-à-vis God. Humans own their person in the first sense. As original proprietors of their own person, individuals are entitled to subject themselves to self-chosen authorities, thereby incurring obligations of obedience. But they may not choose just any authority. Divine ownership of human life delimits personal self-ownership by restricting the ways in which humans can dispose of their persons: we cannot possibly consensually subject ourselves to absolute and arbitrary power. Locke’s rights-forfeiture theory for crime makes slavery and despotism nonetheless potentially rightful conditions. I argue that, paradoxically, divine dominium of human life underpins both the impermissibility of voluntary enslavement and the justifiability of penal slavery. My analysis helps explain why modern Lockean theories of self-ownership that reject Locke’s theological premises have adopted an ambiguous stance toward despotic rule.

This article aspires to make two original contributions to the vast literature on Hobbes’s account of the nature and person of the commonwealth: (1) I provide the first systematic analysis of his changing conception of ‘person’; and (2) use it to show that those who claim that the Hobbesian commonwealth is created by personation by fiction misconstrue his theory of the state. Whereas Elements/de Cive advance a metaphysics-based distinction between individuals (‘natural persons’) and corporations (‘civil persons’), from Leviathan onwards Hobbes contrasts individuals acting in their own name (‘natural persons’) with representatives (‘artificial persons’). These changes notwithstanding, Hobbes retains the same corporate conception of the state throughout. On the prevailing ‘fictionalist’ interpretation, the sovereign brings the commonwealth into existence by representing it. I argue, rather, that as an incorporation of natural persons, the commonwealth becomes one person through the authorized (i.e. non-fictitious) representation of each constituent member singly by one common representative (‘the sovereign’).

This article explores the conceptual relations Hobbes perceived between justice, law, and property rights. I argue that Hobbes developed three distinct arguments for the State-dependency of property over time: the Security, Precision and Creation Argument. On the last and most radical argument, the sovereign creates all property rights ex nihilo through distributive civil laws. Hobbes did not achieve this radically conventionalist position easily: it was not defended consistently until the redefinition of distributive justice as a virtue of arbitrators in Leviathan. The argument is partly advanced as a critique of C.B. Macpherson’s possessive individualist reading of Hobbes.

This article reassesses Hobbes’s place in the history of ethics based on the first systematic analysis of his various classifications of formal goodness. The good was traditionally divided into three: profitably good, pleasurably good, and morally good. Across his works, Hobbes replaced the last with pulchrum—a decidedly non-moral form of goodness on his account. I argue that Hobbes’s dismissal of moral goodness was informed by his hedonist conception of the good and accompanied by reinterpretations of right reason and natural law. By dispensing moral goodness and insisting on the hedonist and relational nature of the good, Hobbes moreover recast and rendered more urgent the question of why we should be moral. Hobbes is commonly thought to have raised this question so starkly because of his general insensitivity to the demands of justice. My analysis suggests that it may also, or rather, have been due to his restrictive conception of the good. A comparison with other moral philosophers from the period—including Suárez, Gassendi, Locke, and Pufendorf—indicates how unusual Hobbes’s jettisoning of moral goodness was.