Class 2.2: Conflicting Goals

The topic for today’s class (and the next two classes next week) is conflicting goals. All conflicts start with opposition of some kind, and the simplest place that opposition can come from is that people simply have different, and often incompatible, goals, which is what puts us in competition with one another.

Hobbes

The ur-philosopher of conflict is the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who tried to build a theory of ethics, political philosophy, and human nature on an a set of underlying assumptions about what pits our goals against one another.

Hobbes lived and wrote during the English Civil War, a time of great instability in England caused by war over the leadership of the country and uncertainty over the political future. He was very concerned in his work with explaining the underlying causes of political uncertainty and articulating its costs.

Leviathan

The main work in which Hobbes lays out his arguments in English is Leviathan, originally published in 1651. English spelling in 1651 had still not been regularized, and so you may find the selection that we are reading from Leviathan to be a little bit frustrating. Take a deep breath and keep going. You’re a big kid and you can do it. Your whole life you are going to be relying on other people to summarize things for you, but in order to be able to trust others to summarize, you have to be able to work out for yourself which kinds of summaries to trust. So we’re going to read and try to think about the original text from Hobbes.

The passage that we are reading from Leviathan is one of its most famous and important passages, from Part I, chapters 13 and 14 (there are 47 total chapters split across four ‘parts’, and the famous chapter 13 is actually one of the shortest, so we are barely peeking at this historically important work).

Quiz #2

As always, once you complete the reading you are required to take a Daily Quiz before the start of class. This is to ensure that you come to class having completed the reading, and so each Daily Quiz closes at the start of class at 2pm and cannot be retaken or made up, though I will reduce the denominator of your quiz score appropriately if you are seriously sick or have some other appropriate emergency.