4

Imagine that you and your neighbor Abel live in the state of nature. You are trying to decide whether it would be a good idea to attack Abel. Abel happens to have some tasty apples. The prospect of getting some food without having to work for it would be one potential advantage of attacking him. On the other hand, there is the disadvantage that the attack may lead to your being seriously injured or killed. There are three main reasons for this:

a) Abel will almost certainly attempt to defend himself. Being, as Hobbes says, of roughly equal mental and physical abilities to yourself, Abel would have a substantial chance of seriously injuring or killing you in the ensuing combat. Perhaps you might hope to catch Abel by surprise and thus kill him before he has a chance to kill you. It is unlikely, however, that you could devise a plan of this kind that would be without significant risk to yourself. Plans often go wrong, and one who makes a habit of plotting the deaths of others will most likely slip up before long and end up dead himself. You might hope that Abel, being anxious to avoid injury, would flee from your attack rather than fight back. But Abel is not likely to simply let your theft pass. If he allows your theft to pass without retaliation, he invites both you and any other predators who learn of the event to attack and rob him in the future. If Abel flees the scene, therefore, it will most likely be only to plot his revenge at a more opportune moment.

b) One or more of Abel’s family members or friends may decide to avenge his death. One reason for this would be that they are angry about your psychopathic murder (pace Hobbes, people care about their family and friends). Another reason is that they may wish to send a message to other potential predators: our family may not be attacked with impunity. Abel’s avengers may attack you at a time and place of their choosing, and there may be more than one of them. Therefore, again, it is likely that you will be seriously injured or killed.

C) Recall that, on Hobbes’s view, one of the three main sources of violence in the state of nature is preemptive attack (due to ‘diffidence’). People interested in preemptive attacks are most likely to target those who pose the greatest threat. And those who have already engaged in unprovoked attacks against their neighbors are likely to be perceived as the greatest threats. So by attacking Abel, you mark yourself out for attack by diffident neighbors.

For these reasons, the risks of attacking your neighbors will normally greatly outweigh the potential benefits. Only if you were in danger of starvation and had no safe options for seeking food might it be prudent to attempt to rob Abel. You would naturally take precautions to avoid ever being in that situation.

What if, instead of attacking Abel on your own, you band together with a few like-minded predators to rob Abel and divide his property among yourselves? In this case, you are much less likely to be killed in the course of committing the crime. Nevertheless, this plan is fraught with danger. If you leave Abel alive, he may decide to take his revenge later, when you are alone. If necessary, he may bring his own gang to help. If you kill Abel, his family or friends may decide to avenge him. In either case, diffident other neighbors may decide that you are a threat that needs to be eliminated, and nothing prevents them from banding together just as you and your fellow thieves have done. Finally, there is the disadvantage that in order to carry out this plan, you must associate with a gang of thieves and (possibly) murderers. People of this sort are not known for their trustworthiness, so there is a fair chance that one or more of the others will at some point attempt to cheat you and/or kill you.

So far, I have been appealing to your rational self-interest. But as noted in the previous chapter, human beings are only approximately rational and only approximately egoistic. Does this alter our conclusions?

No, it does not. First, note that the kinds of cases in which we typically observe failures of rationality do not affect the foregoing reasoning. The reasoning for avoiding predatory behavior in the state of nature is not too complex, unfamiliar, or abstract for an ordinary person to follow. Nor is it hindered by any of the heuristics and biases that psychologists have discovered; it does not matter, for example, if a person regularly falls prey to the conjunction fallacy, ignores base rates, and attempts to recover sunk costs.4 None of those cognitive failings prevent one from grasping the straightforward argument against predation in the state of nature: if you attack your neighbors, your neighbors may attack you in turn.

Nor do any of the exceptions to the rule of human selfishness speak against our conclusion. Pace Hobbes, most human beings are not sociopaths. Most care about others, particularly their family and friends. Most have both strong moral objections and strong negative feelings about violence and theft. These facts could only strengthen the conclusion of this section. When both prudence and morality point in the same direction, almost everyone will choose that course. In a later chapter (Chapters 10), I will discuss institutions designed to deal with the few imprudent individuals who commit aggression despite the foolishness of doing so.

The general game-theoretic principle is this: Equality of power breeds respect. No rational person wishes to enter violent conflict with others who are of equal strength to himself. The chances of losing the conflict are too great. Even the nominal victor is likely to end up worse off than before the conflict, because the damage caused by fighting is almost always greater than the value of the resources that are in dispute. For these reasons, rational individuals fight only defensive battles.

Social conditions affecting the prevalence of violence The broad game-theoretic considerations canvassed in the preceding subsection help to explain why most normal adults never partake of physical combat. However, interpersonal violence was much more common in earlier centuries than it is today.2 Why? Were our ancestors less rational than we? Did they face different circumstances, such that the preceding game-theoretic arguments somehow did not apply to them?

At least three broad social factors may help to explain the decline in violence. One is a matter of social values. Members of modern, Western societies harbor far more liberal beliefs and attitudes, particularly on the subject of violence, than those that have held sway in most cultures for most of human history.2 Historically, physical combat was often seen as honorable, whereas we today generally view it as horrible. Civilized eyes look back with horror at such practices as gladiatorial combat, public beheadings, and medieval torture chambers. And one need only peruse traditional religious texts to be shocked at the range of crimes for which earlier generations of humans considered death or dismemberment to be appropriate punishments.22

A second important factor is economics. The game- theoretic argument for peaceful coexistence presupposes that the goods one needs for survival are available through peaceful means. In primitive societies, however, conditions of life-threatening scarcity were far more common than they are today; thus, people had less to lose by engaging in theft and violence. As human beings become more prosperous, the notion of fighting over resources becomes increasingly irrational.

The third factor is weapons technology. The argument of the preceding subsection assumes that individuals pose approximately equal physical threats to one another, such that violent conflict between two individuals poses grave risks to both. But in earlier centuries, the capacity to defend oneself depended upon strength and skill with a sword or similar weapon, neither of which was evenly distributed among the population. Today, effective self-defense is available through modern firearms, requiring minimal strength and skill and only modest economic means. It was in view of this change that in the nineteenth century the popular Colt revolver came to be called ‘the Equalizer’.

The main reasons for expecting the state of nature to bea state of peace do not apply with equal force in all social conditions. In a society with very scarce resources, limited weapons technology, and complacent attitudes toward violence, we should expect violent conflict to be much more common than in one characterized by prosperity, advanced technology, and a liberal culture.

A Hobbesian might argue that, if one begins with a primitive society in a state of nature, constant violent conflict will prevent the society from ever evolving into an advanced, prosperous society, unless the society first establishes a government. Be that as it may, once one has an advanced, prosperous, liberal society, the continuing need for government is far from clear, regardless of what role government may have played in bringing about that state of society. Game-theoretic arguments do not establish such a need. To defend a need for government, one would have to posit a high degree of irrationality and imprudence.