Thomas Hobbes: What Is Our True Identity?

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What is our true identity?
Whether human nature is fundamentally selfish or altruistic is a question that challenge lots of researchers back in the time, and even today. Some people, such as Thomas Hobbes, claimed that man 's nature is basically evil and selfish. However, Joseph Butler, a philosopher, disagreed with this idea. For him, goodness consists in having what he calls the ‘principle of reflection’ govern and control our passions. People always want to know the true, but there is no answer for this question, so we have to find it out base on our knowledge and beliefs. It is important to know what is our true identity when we were born. In my mind, no one is perfect, everyone has the dark-side in themselves. People cannot deny that there is no mistake have …show more content…

Thomas Hobbes is one of these people support this idea. Hobbes, in the book Leviathan, suggests that human beings are primarily selfish since they are driven by their passions (appetites and fears) and that what is good is nothing but the satisfaction of one’s passions, which is often attained when reason is employed merely as a tool or as an instrument to satisfy our passions. To support his claim, the classic game theory match-up known as the Prisoner 's Dilemma, is show the selfish strategies in human. When playing this game, if both players cooperate, they both receive an equal payoff. But if one cooperates and the other does not, the cooperating player receives the smallest possible payoff, and the defecting player the largest. If both players do not cooperate, they both receive a payoff, but it is less than what they would gain if both had cooperated. In general it pays to cooperate, but it can pay even more to be selfish. (express.co.uk.) However, the experiment claims that when they give more time, the player will be more selfish. It is doesn’t mean that human born selfish because they have lots of time to think, and chose what’s best for them. How about let them make a

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