Hobbes

Hobbes thinks that situation faced by people in the state of nature is most accurately described as what is called a prisoner’s dilemma. The name comes from a case used to illustrate it. A prosecutor offers two suspects a deal. “If you give me enough evidence to convict the other guy, he will get an eight year sentence and you will go free. If neither of you give me any evidence, I will be able to convict both of you on a lesser charge that carries a two year sentence. But if both of you give me enough evidence to convict each other, you will each get five year sentences.” (The payoffs are row / column).

When people are in a prisoner’s dilemma, there is only one stable solution: the northwest (upper left) one. This reflects the fact that they have a dominant strategy, namely, a choice that is better no matter what the other one does. In this case, the dominant strategy is to talk. Since both are better off talking than staying quiet, no matter what the other one does, they will wind up in the northwest box even though they would obviously be better off in the southeast box.

You can see this pattern in Hobbes’s analysis of anticipatory violence. People in the state of nature have to ask themselves whether to attack one another. When they ask that question, according to Hobbes, this is what they will see. (As before, the payoffs are row / column).

If this is the structure of life in the state of nature each person’s best option is to attack and that explains why the state of nature is a state of war.

People in the state of nature also have to decide whether to take the material goods that others have. According to Hobbes, their options can be described in exactly the same way as before. Here, “take” means “take what another person has” while “leave” means “leave what the other person has alone.” Again, the first number is the value for the row player and the second number is the value for the column player.

Hobbes thinks this means that no one will have secure possession of material goods in the state of nature. Even if there were property rights, they would not be respected. (He also combines this factual claim with a moral premise about the right of nature to argue that there are no property rights in the state of nature: see the notes for our discussion of the right to all things.)

Hobbes believes that people in a situation like this need the state to change the incentives they face and lock them into the southeast (lower right) box: waiting to use violence against others and leaving others’ goods alone. Suppose the state will punish theft. Then the payoffs will look like this.

Your incentives change if the state will punish you for taking someone else’s goods. It is best for both sides to leave one another’s things alone, second best to lose your things, and worst to take someone else’s things and suffer punishment. In this way, the state locks people in to the southeast box, by making the alternatives less attractive.

Hume

Hume has a different analysis of the situation. He thinks that interactions in the state of nature are structured like this.

People in the state of nature, as Hume sees it, do not have a dominant strategy. Rather, what it makes sense for one person to do depends on what others do. There is no sense in respecting property rights if others do not do the same; so the northwest box is one possible outcome. But Hume, unlike Hobbes, thinks that the southeast box could be a stable outcome too, even without external coercion. Once people generally respect property rights, each individual will be better off respecting property rights also. So no one has any incentive to leave the southeast box. That is why it is a stable outcome. He calls the coordinated behavior that puts the players in the southeast box a convention. In this case, the convention is to leave one another’s possessions alone.

Hume thinks that conventions arise in these conditions.

1. People’s interests are best served by coordinating their behavior.
2. What makes sense for each of them to do depends on what the others do.
3. Successful coordination will be self-sustaining because everyone’s interests will best be served by continuing to coordinate with the others.

Why does Hume believe that property rights are conventions? He thinks the solution to the problem posed by the “instability” of possessions (3.2.2, ¶7) is as obvious as the solution to the problem faced by two people who need to cooperate in order to row a boat across a river (3.2.2, ¶10).

The guys who want to get to the other side of the river do not need the state to force them to row. They can form a convention of rowing and, once each one is doing their part in the convention, neither will have an incentive to stop.

Similarly, the obvious solution to the problem of maintaining the stability of material goods in the state of nature is to agree to rules establishing property rights. Once those rules are established, Hume thinks, no one will have any incentive to stop respecting them.

Bullies

Jack noted that some people might not need the cooperation of others. Bullies can take things from others without being vulnerable to others in turn: they take your lunch money and keep it. Bullies face a situation like this. (The bully is the row player; the left column is blank because the column player, by hypothesis is incapable of taking things from the bully.)

Obviously, there are no conventions with bullies. Does that pose a problem? It depends on whether there are bullies or not, that is, people who do not need the cooperation of others.

Extreme scarcity

Audrey noted that extreme scarcity, where the available resources will not support everyone, would pose a challenge for Hume. Suppose, for instance, that there is not eough food and water for every member of the group to survive. In cases like that, there is no cooperative solution as whoever leaves the resource in someone else’s hands dies and so does not reap the benefits of the convention of property rights down the road.

Be careful with the term “scarcity.” Hume counts moderate scarcity as a necessary condition for the development of property rights. We only need the convention of property rights if goods are scarce. If we could just replace anything that other people take with minimal effort, there would be no need to have property rights (see 3.2.2, ¶7 and ¶14–17).

Slavery and killing

Will noted that Hobbes’s case of anticipatory violence might not fit Hume’s scheme either. A successful pre-emptive attack eliminates the other person, making the need for cooperation unnecessary. I said “might” because I don’t know if there could be a convention to solve this problem or not.

I wish Hume had tried to address that problem. When he was setting up his theory, he said that “the external advantages of our body … may be ravished from us, but can be of no advantage to him who deprives us of them.” That is why he chose to focus solely on “possessions” that “may be transferred without suffering any loss or alteration” (3.2.2, ¶7).

But Hume was just wrong (I almost never say that). You can “ravish” the external advantages of a person’s body. That is what slavery is. And that is what Hobbes says you have to do in order to stay alive in the state of nature. You have to kill the other guy before he kills you and killing the other guy requires doing something pretty drastic to his body.

Public goods

Finally, there is a point that Hume himself acknowledged. Once societies reach a certain size, the connection between individual behavior and the continuation of the convention breaks down. In a large society, the rules governing property continue whether you are a thief or not. If they are going to break down, your respecting the rules will not prop them up. The more normal situation is that individual violations do not cause the rules to collapse: there is a theft happening right now, for instance, but our society’s conventions of property rights will chug along.

In these cases, the benefits of the convention of property rights are a public good (also known as a collective good; the terms are interchangeable). Public goods must be produced by some portion of a group but those who do nothing to produce the public goods cannot be excluded from enjoying them. Given the individual incentives involved, the provision of public goods poses a familiar problem. Here “cooperate” means do what is needed to produce the public good and “defect” means not doing what is needed. The row player is an individual, the column player is the group. Because the difference that an individual’s cooperation makes to the production of a public good is usually unnoticeable, I will only include payoffs for the individual (row) player.

If the members of the group cooperate to produce the public good, the individual is better off defecting. After all, individuals get the public good whether they cooperate or not. If the members of the group do not cooperate to produce the public good, the individual is also better off defecting. There is no point in making a sacrifice for the sake of a non-existent public good. But, of course, there is no “group,” there are just lots of individuals. The obvious conclusion is that public goods will not be produced in the way that conventions arise, namely, by coordination among self-interested individuals.

So when the benefits of conventional rules become too “remote,” Hume thinks the state has to step in to do the thing Hobbes said it has to do: lock us in to the southeast box (see 3.2.7).