Factibilidad de la propuesta

For Hobbes, ‘justice’ concerns relations between individuals. That is, the actions that we evaluate as just or unjust are those that concern individuals with respect to one another. Hobbes asserts this feature of justice, contrasting it with actions that can be evaluated in solitude, writing:

Justice and injustice are none of the faculties neither of the body nor mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his senses and passions. They are qualities that relate to men in society, not in solitude. 68

Not only does Hobbes hold that justice concerns the relationship between individuals in society, he holds that it requires common principles or public rules. In order to judge something as just or unjust we need a common metric to evaluate the actions. This metric cannot be merely in the minds of the individuals, as there is no common way of knowing or evaluating these private judgments about what ought to be done.

Moreover, not only does justice require a common, public standard of evaluation, this common standard must be backed by the power to enforce the rules or principles. Thus, justice requires a common power over the individuals in a society. Hobbes expresses this feature of justice by identifying its absence in the state of war:

To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent: that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice.69

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Further explaining the need for a common power and the identification of a common power of a certain kind with the existence of justice:

before the names of just and unjust can have place, there must be some coercive power to compel men equally to the performance of their covenants, by the terror of some punishment greater than the benefit they expect by the breach of their covenant, and to make good that propriety which by mutual contract men acquire in recompense of the universal right they abandon: and such power there is none before the erection of a Commonwealth.70

The common power necessary for justice takes the form of a Commonwealth. This is most commonly understood as a domestic level governing body or institution.

This familiar account of the nature of justice from Hobbes is an important starting point as it puts on the table two important points of discussion going forward. The first is that it makes explicit the relationship between justice and public, articulated and enforced rules. This political or legal conception of justice may not include all judgments of what is just. For example, one may use the term ‘just’ in a moral sense, free of political claims. However, it sets an important relationship on the table that I will adopt. When discussing law or political conceptions of justice we are discussing common rules, backed by some power of enforcement.71

The second point from this brief discussion of Hobbes is that it draws attention to two ways in which the term ‘sovereign’ can be used.72 The first is as a judgment about the authority of some person or body with respect to the subjects of the political community. This is the sense of sovereignty that Hobbes is primarily concerned with in the Leviathan – the internal or domestic political authority of the sovereign. This is a vertical relationship

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Hobbes, Chapter 15. 71

This is not to say that I adopt the strong position often attributed to Hobbes that this conception of political justice does not allow for actual laws being unjust.

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This dual reference to the internal and the external domains will appear again in Walzer’s discussion of two kinds of judgments of legitimacy below.

between the subjects and rule-maker and enforcer. This use of ‘sovereignty’ can be contrasted with the notion of sovereignty from the Westphalia Model that emphasizes the horizontal relationship between these different governing bodies. This second sense of sovereignty is the one of interest in this discussion.73

Hobbes says little about this horizontal relationship between these domestic level sovereigns or how to extend the principles he develops in the domestic context into the international arena. Rather than attempt to do so on his behalf, trying to arbitrate textual interpretations and the use of Hobbesian resources in international relations,74 I will turn now to Kant’s account of international justice. Kant’s model builds on the account of political or legal justice above, but explicitly addresses the nature of international justice (and, at the same time, is critical of Hobbes’ theory even for domestic justice), and thus, provides a more robust picture to work with moving forward.

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This is not to say that they are unrelated or wholly independent. Just that the one we are after in this discussion is the second.

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A thorough extension of Hobbes’ argument to the international case would take us quite far a field at this point. Much has been made of the Hobbes’ theory of justice in international relations, and arbitrating and evaluating this literature is a project unto itself. I will, however, note that the passage from Leviathan, Chapter 13, often taken as evidence that Hobbes’ himself argued against the possibility of international justice does not seem to imply such a strong claim. There he writes:

in all times kings and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies, and in the state and posture of gladiators, having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their forts, garrisons, and guns upon the frontiers of their kingdoms, and continual spies upon their neighbours, which is a posture of war. But because they uphold thereby the industry of their subjects, there does not follow from it that misery which accompanies the liberty of particular men.

Rather than an argument against the possibility of international justice, this passage seems to imply that Hobbes thinks that because sovereigns are able to provide sufficiently stable conditions for the security and industry of their members while remaining in a state of war with other sovereigns, the reasons to pursue a global sovereign are not as strong as the reasons we have for pursuing domestic sovereigns. Of course, the political authority of the domestic governments would not be exclusive under a global sovereign. A global sovereign could not be a sovereign over other (proper) sovereigns. Notice, that even this initial sketch of the options seemingly available

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