Social Philosophy - PHIL-3325 Group 2 Presentation Draft

1. By Jamie Chase, Manuel Alonzo,
Mario Carrasco and Greg Bartley

2.  In what ways is Rousseau diametrically opposed to
Hobbes?
 How accurate is his statement that “Man was born
free, but everywhere is in chains? Were we really “born
free? Have we ever been “free”?
 Is it accurate to describe “society” (a general term
indeed) as nothing but a system of oppression?

3.  The first part of the topics addresses the different
stances of two great thinkers on the basis of their
published work. This is a quantifiable… a direct
comparison that can have (at least relatively) correct
answers. The second and third portions of the topic,
however are not as simple. These are subjects that are
at the center of a centuries-long debate. Even in out
relatively small group, the answers are not always the
same. So we strove in this presentation to offer a
continuation of this debate, including our humble
perspectives on the subject.

4.  Hobbes and Rousseau both used the idea of the
“savage” man in a state of nature in an attempt to
analyze human nature.
 Each tried to hypothetically separate man from the
influences of culture, religion, government and
society … imagining what life would be like without
externally imposed values.
 The conclusions they made based on their flights of
fancy are very different, however.

5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Thomas Hobbes:
 Man in a state of nature is Man in a state of nature is
essentially peaceful; selfish; sovereign keeps
society is the corrupting man from war of all
influence. against all.

6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Thomas Hobbes:
 To unite populace under To prevent the state of war
the “General Will”. by enforcing law and order.
 Government concerned Government protects the
with the best interests of people from themselves.
the citizens.
 Sovereign only does what Sovereign has absolute
benefits the people. power, not subject to laws.

7.  Rousseau and Hobbes took things to unnecessary
extremes. Humans are more complex than either of
them accounted for in their theories.
 “The two most basic purposes of life are to live and to
reproduce, it should do everything it can to avoid
dying through a lack of resources.” (Tafflinger)
Instinct causes animals to fight and compete against
one another. They cannot consciously react in a less
savage way.
 Humans also have such instincts.

8.  Humans have Reason in addition to instinct, the
ability to think rationally.
 Theoretically reason should be able to overcome
instincts, but that isn't always what happens.
 Instinct and Reason do not always agree, and
sometimes greed and power get the better of us.
 Hobbes and Rousseau were both right and both
wrong. Humans are never consistently one way or the
other but a mix of both.

9.  Humans are a mix of both good and bad, instinct and
reason, avarice and empathy. The amount of each
varies from person to person and in the individual can
vary from moment to moment.
 Societies are human creations. They are a reflection of
the people who create them and so are also mixed.
 Society and government can either moderate our bad
behavior or encourage it. Which it does is dependent
on both the type of organization and the qualities of
the people from which it is made.

10.  Good people do not need a state to tell them how to act
and the bad ones will do as they wish. So what is the point
of having a government?
 Hobbes believed it was for the protection of those that are
good. People who want to do “bad” things may ignore the
laws, which is why a government must have the power and
strength to enforce them.
 But how much power should they have? What form of
government is best?
 Democracy, monarchy, socialism, communism … it’s a
matter of how much human rights you’re willing to give up.

11.  There is no perfect, universal form of government.
 Rousseau states in “Social Contract” that “all forms of
government do not suit all countries.”
 Hobbes points out the weakness of democracies,
aristocracies AND monarchies in “Leviathan.”
 The popular variant on a quote attributed to Abraham
Lincoln fits the theory of government;
"You can please all the people some of the time,
and some of the people all the time,
but you cannot please all the people all the time.”

12.  “Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and
the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of
the most extreme liberty.” - Plato
 “At his best, man is the noblest of all animals;
separated from law and justice he is the worst.” –
Aristotle
 "It is dangerous to be right when the government is
wrong." – Voltaire
 "Every decent man is ashamed of the government he
lives under." - H.L. Mencken

13.  “Government can easily exist without laws, but law
cannot exist without government.” - Bertrand Russell
 “Each person possesses an inviolability founded on
justice that even the welfare of society as a whole
cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the
loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater
good shared by others”. – John Rawls
 "So what is government?... Very simply, it is an agency
of coercion. Of course, there are other agencies of
coercion … such as the Mafia. So to be more precise,
government is the agency of coercion that has flags in
front of its offices." - Harry Browne, Libertarian

14.  "Both of our political parties, at least the honest portion of them,
agree conscientiously in the same object: the public good; but
they differ essentially in what they deem the means of promoting
that good. One side believes it best done by one composition of
the governing powers, the other by a different one. One fears
most the ignorance of the people; the other the selfishness of
rulers independent of them. Which is right, time and experience
will prove." - Thomas Jefferson
 “If the average man had had his way there would probably never
have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes death with
taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least. If he
asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor
needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and
thinks laws in his own case superfluous. In the simplest societies
there is hardly any government.” - Will Durant

15.  "Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social
instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or
conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become
as well developed . . . as in man." —Charles Darwin,
“Descent of Man”
 “Although humans are animals, we also have something
that no other animal has: the most complex social
structure on Earth. […] The combination of biology and
society is what makes us what we are and do what we do.” -
Richard F. Taflinger
 “We are all civilized people, which means that we are all
savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized
behavior.” - Tennessee Williams

17.  If we are going to determine whether man
is ever free, we must first understand …
What does free really mean?

18.  Merriam-Webster defines the word, as it pertains to
the state of being for a person, as:
a : having the legal and political rights of a citizen
b : enjoying civil and political liberty
c : enjoying political independence
or freedom from outside domination
d : enjoying personal freedom:
not subject to the control or domination of another

19.  We have a birth certificate issued by the government.
We are given a social security number and many other
governmental controls and laws are placed upon us,
such as being required to attend school, laws on
drinking, and smoking. Where I live there are
weekends, especially holiday weekends that, when
pulled over, if you are suspected of drinking and
driving you are required to give a blood sample. How is
that being free? – Gregory Bartley

20.  Part of the definition is ‘not subject to the control or
domination of another’ and by that definition I would say
that man is never free. As children, we are dependent on
our parents to protect and provide, but this means we are
subject to their control, susceptible to their influence. As
parents, we are not free either because we are obligated to
care for our children. When you add in all of the things that
Rousseau tried to remove in hypothesizing about a state of
nature ... social conventions, religious dogma, government
... all inform the way we think and feel about the world we
live in, so even if they were removed from our lives they
would still be a part of us … from birth we are the property
of our society. – Jamie Chase

21.  I don't think we were ever born free. We have the
natural instinct to survive as a species and take care of
our own. In order to be able to survive, we need order
in society. – Manuel Alonzo

22.  I think that Rousseau meant that we are born free, not
slaves or servants. We are born with a right to choose
who we are, what we become, where we go and with
who we go with. We are born free to make such
choices. However, we remain chained and not totally
free because we can only be that person that is
accepted, we can only go where we are allowed to go,
we can only choose those friends that choose to be
with us. So at the end we remain chained to the
society and constraints that we as human created. We
have set our own limits and now we must live by and
within them. – Mario Carrasco

23.  “Our thoughts are free.” - Cicero
 “Freedom is a possession of inestimable value.” – Cicero
 “No man is free who depends on his government for his
sustenance, job, home, or hope.” - John Perkins
 "Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone
else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a
quotation." - Oscar Wilde
 “If you want to love you must serve, if you want freedom
you must die.” - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
 “When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to
observe whether it is not really the assertion of private
interests which is thereby designated.” - Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel

25.  1 : companionship or association with one's fellows : friendly
or intimate intercourse
 2 : a voluntary association of individuals for common ends;
especially an organized group working together or periodically
meeting because of common interests, beliefs, or profession
 3 a: an enduring and cooperating social group whose
members have developed organized patterns of relationships
through interaction with one another
b : a community, nation, or broad grouping of people
having common traditions, institutions, and collective activities
and interests
 4 a: a part of a community that is a unit distinguishable by
particular aims or standards of living or conduct : a social circle
or a group of social circles having a clearly marked identity
b : a part of the community that sets itself apart as a leisure
class and that regards itself as the arbiter of fashion and manners

26.  1 a : unjust or cruel exercise of authority or power
b : something that oppresses especially in being
an unjust or excessive exercise of power
 2 : a sense of being weighed down in body or mind

27.  When looking at society as American society, with
government and laws, that it is oppressive. However
most people are willing to give up some of their rights
as a means of protection . – Greg Bartley

28.  I feel that no matter what kind of government you
have, there will always be someone dictating your
mannerisms/life. Don’t do this, don’t do that. It’s never
going to end. Society is will always be oppressive in
that way ... but if that is the norm, can we really call it
oppression? – Manuel Alonzo

29.  Society is a system of oppression in some ways but I
think it an over exaggeration to say that it is "nothing
more than" that. People are social by nature, we want
to be loved, accepted, to belong ... so we create
divisions between us so that we have a place to call our
own, we set standards for ourselves in order to meet
our personal needs then judge others who do not
conform. But like children who are dependent on
parents, we need the support of our created societies. –
Jamie Chase

30.  I really think that society is nothing but a system of
oppression. Although it is through the formations of
societies that we can say that human kind has advance
it is also through the formation that it has been
oppressed. I would have to agree with Hobbes when
he say that a society is nothing more that the powerful
convincing those of less power to unite for the greater
good, when in reality it is to assist those in power to
remain in power. – Mario Carrasco

31.  “Biology guides our responses to stimuli, based on
thousands of generations of ancestors surviving
because of their responses. Our social structures
dictate restrictions on and alterations in how we carry
out our biological responses.
Neither biology nor society stands without the other.
For some people, this is a contradiction -- either nature
(biology) controls people, or nurture (society) does.
But in fact we filter everything through both to
determine how we react to stimuli.” - Richard F.
Taflinger

32.  “Society is not really made to be a purely competitive
operation. […] There is dominance, hierarchy. They
sometimes fight. They sometimes even kill each other. But
they stick together because they survive together much
better than alone.” - Frans De Waal
 “Society is inside of man and man is inside society, and you
cannot even create a truthfully drawn psychological entity
on the stage until you understand his social relations and
their power to make him what he is and to prevent him
from being what he is not. The fish is in the water and the
water is in the fish.” – Arthur Miller
 “The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of
thought.” – Emma Goldman

33.  “Man seeketh in society comfort, use, and protection.” –
Francis Bacon
 “Hitherto, every form of society has been based ... on the
antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.” – Karl
Marx
 “Just as there is no society or group that is not a collective
view of persons, so there is no individual who may not be
regarded as a particular view of social groups. He has no
separate existence; through both the hereditary and the
social factors in his life a man is bound into the whole of
which he is a member, and to consider him apart from it is
quite as artificial as to consider society apart from
individuals.” – Charles Horton Cooley

34.  “The citizen's life is made possible only by due performance
of his function in the place he fills; and he cannot wholly
free himself from the beliefs and sentiments generated by
the vital connections hence arising between himself and
his society.... To cut himself off in thought from all his
relationships of race, and country, and citizenship -- to get
rid of all those interests, prejudices, likings, superstitions,
generated in him by the life of his own society and his own
time -- to look on all the changes societies have undergone
and are undergoing, without reference to nationality, or
creed, or personal welfare; is what the average man cannot
do at all, and what the exceptional man can do very
imperfectly.” – Herbert Spencer