Johan Olsthoorn

This is the first book-length study in English of Thomas Hobbes's On the Citizen. It aims to show that On the Citizen is a valuable and distinctive philosophical work in its own right, and not merely a stepping-stone toward the more famous Leviathan. The volume comprises twelve original essays, written by leading Hobbes scholars, which explore the most important themes of the text: Hobbes's accounts of human nature, moral motivation, and political obligation; his theories of property, sovereignty, and the state; and, finally, his ideas on the relation between secular and ecclesiastical authority, and the politics behind his religious ideas. Taken together, the essays bring to light many distinctive aspects of Hobbes's thought that are often concealed by the prevailing focus on Leviathan, making for a richer and more nuanced picture of his moral, legal, and political philosophy.

This article provides a novel interpretation of Grotius’s conception of natural law. Prior interpretations have overlooked Grotius’s doctrine of supererogation and have hence misrepresented, in varying ways, the content of his law of nature and its relation to justice and individual rights. Grotius, I contend, created logical space for supererogation by making natural obligation rather than natural morality determinative of natural law. Natural law regulates only those actions that are obligatory or illicit by their nature (i.e. without human or divine command). Acting in accordance with virtues other than justice is intrinsically morally good but not usually morally required. However, circumstances may fall out such that otherwise supererogatory actions cannot be omitted without committing a moral wrong: natural law is then rendering their performance mandatory.

Enforcing Global Justice: War, Necessity and Rights of Armed Resistance of the World’s Poor Global justice theorists have long focused on the nature and grounds of duties of the affluent to alleviate the plight of the global poor and to realize justice worldwide. The last few years has seen a flurry of work that shifts perspective to the agency and remedial rights of the global poor. Suppose due assistance is not forthcoming. Could this give the severely deprived a just cause to secure their basic rights by armed force? If so, under which conditions is it all-things-considered morally permissible for them to resort to violence? This article contrasts two possible ways of grounding and conceptualizing remedial rights of armed resistance against economic injustice. Some modern global justice-based accounts endow the global poor with limited rights to wage defensive war to force the affluent to comply with duties of global justice. The old right of necessity conditionally entitles the severely deprived to use armed force to secure access to privately-owned resources and spaces to meet urgent needs. While lethal force will on both accounts be seldom all-things-considered morally permissible in practice, my analysis reveals that the old right of necessity is, for better or worse, a more capacious ground for armed resistance than modern human rights of subsistence, as it sidesteps the issues of indeterminate and underdetermined moral liability.

This article challenges the orthodoxy that Hobbes’s laws of nature, considered as dictates of reason, ceaselessly oblige agents in virtue of the general desire for self-preservation. Hobbes is an internalist about reasons, who refuses reason independent motivational efficacy. The universal prescriptive force of natural law is instead grounded in some desire (or set of desires) which all rational agents share. On the Orthodox Interpretation, this is the desire for self-preservation, as death is considered the worst possible evil that can befall Hobbesian agents. I argue that this interpretation is untenable. A plethora of passages attests that at least one thing is worse than death: loss of eternal life. It is therefore rational, according to Hobbes, to choose to die if doing so is necessary to procure salvation. This article sketches a non-preservationist reading of the psychological underpinnings of Hobbes’s moral philosophy which can account for (but does not presuppose) the superior disvalue of damnation. Three psychological laws, I submit, structure Hobbesian deliberation and desire-formation. The third and perhaps most controversial law states that humans cannot help caring about their own welfare. My contention is that the inescapable desire for bonum sibi better explains the universal normativity of natural law than self-preservation does.

Despite the signpost prominence of Hobbesian positions in theories of international relations and global justice, the ground and nature of Hobbes’s claim that justice and injustice are non-existent outside the State are poorly understood. This paper aims to provide the first comprehensive explanation of this doctrine . I argue that Hobbes offers two distinct arguments for Justicial Statism: the Covenant and the Propriety Argument. Each argument is premised on a different conception of justice and stresses different implications of the natural right to all things. The Propriety Argument is based on distributive justice. First introduced in Leviathan, this argument has received little scholarly attention, although it is no trivial addition: the Covenant Argument alone cannot establish Justicial Statism. My reconstruction highlights two further, hitherto ignored presuppositions of Hobbes’s Justicial Statism: his rejection of natural rights governed by justice and his claim that violations of natural law do not wrong non-divine agents

This article examines the rationale for and grounds and implications of Hobbes’s redefinition of distributive justice as equity. I argue that this unprecedented reformulation served to ensure the justness of distributive laws. Hobbes acknowledges that the sovereign can distribute rights and goods iniquitously by failing to treat citizens as equals. However, he insists that improper allocations are not unjust, properly speaking – they do not ‘wrong’ citizens. To support this claim, Hobbes puts forth the un-Aristotelian maxim that merit in distributive justice is due by grace alone. You deserve what the sovereign gives you: there is no desert prior to and independent of his allocation of rights. For Hobbes, distributive justice does not track but create merit. It follows that distributive laws cannot fail to give what is due (which would be unjust). The article proceeds to analyse the nature of the limits equity sets to the apportionment of goods. I argue that these limits are moral and purely procedural: citizens cannot invoke equity to claim a fair share of the goods distributed. Thanks to Hobbes’s redefinition of distributive justice, the justness of the sovereign’s conduct, and hence his legal immunity, remains intact.