The Laws of Nature and Morality

Abstract

Although a case can be made that Hobbes had a legitimate right to use natural law concepts, it is true, as Mintz says, that his interpretation appears not to be typical of the seventeenth century. The difference can be seen without quoting his more religious critics. We need only refer again to Grotius who, after including ‘a quality of moral baseness or moral necessity’ in his definition added: ‘and that, in consequence, such an act is either forbidden or enjoined by the author of nature, God’ (38-39). Allusions to morality and to God would be a normal part of any contemporary view of natural law but they are missing in Hobbes’s definition. A law of nature is, to quote Leviathan again, ‘a precept or general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same; and to omit that, by which he thinketh it may best be preserved’ (116, 189).