The State of Nature is a State of War

To understand Hobbes’s argument for why the State of Nature is a State of War it is important to understand Hobbes’s meanings of the terms State of Nature and State of War. The State of Nature is the condition where mankind is forced in contact with one another in a society where there is no authority to enforce power or laws. In this state, the lack of authority encompasses the lack of political institutions and the connotations associated with them: no national allegiances and no punishment. All men in this state have the right to any actions, even to harm one another and none of these actions are unjust. The resulting atmosphere created by this Sate of Nature is the State of War where all rational people live in constant fear of violent and brutish attacks. The State of War is a state of uncertainty and insecurity. It does not always necessarily consist of actual fighting but instead consists of the constant awareness that everyone is ready to fight everyone else. To substantiate his argument that the State of Nature is a Sate of War he relies on three assumptions.

The first assumption is that nature has created man to be equal in their capacity to use their body and mind. With equal capacities in body, every man is vulnerable to attack from every other man and no single man has a superior advantage. For Hobbes this bolsters his claim that there is no man in the State of Nature with the power to maintain authority. Hobbes’s second assumption is that man has three principal desires, which drive conflict. These desires are competition, diffidence, and glory. All three of these desires involve man being involved in situations where only one man can come out victorious. For Hobbes these desires perpetuate the cycle of fear and v...

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...s to act on the basis of power and self-interest. This is false because states actually have the ability to freely choose between alternative courses of actions. War is not the only option. As Walzer says, rarely is a state credibly threatened with extinction, this means that states are free in a very clear sense, to choose to act on the basis of moral commitments and conceptions of justice as well as upon considerations of their own national interests. This can be seen in practice in democratic regimes where both national interests and moral commitments are based upon the moral beliefs of a nation’s people. Since war is an intentional human activity, states choose whether or not to take the dramatic step of embarking into war. Therefore, any intentional human activity is one that is subjected to moral scrutiny and humans are more complex than the realist picture.