What Difference Does the Sovereign Make?

VENEZIA, LUCIANO

Filadelfia

Congreso; International Hobbes Association, American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division Annual Meeting; 2014

American Philosophical Association

There seem to be two different ways to construe the characteristic inequality that sovereign power introduces in the commonwealth. According to the non-normative view, the key feature of sovereign power is its causal or empirical capacity to force subjects to follow the laws of nature and so act in ways that are already reasonable. For its part, the normative view states that the sovereign?s main characteristic is its normative capacity to impose morally binding obligations on subjects, which as such do not have a direct link with the natural duties imposed by natural laws. The evidence in which Hobbes explicitly mentions the characteristic inequality of the commonwealth can be plausibly construed as involving either non-normative as well as normative differences between the sovereign and his subjects. Even so, there are strong considerations for the normative interpretation. First, Hobbes stresses the strict normativity of contractual obligations in an important set of passages, in such way that textually grounds the idea that there are genuine normative differences in the commonwealth. There are also conceptual reasons to prefer this account. Hobbes?s analysis of law states that law is not any command, but only a command that subjects have an antecedent obligation to obey. Also, the view according to which there are only causal or empirical differences in the commonwealth is poorly related to a genuine contractarian theory of political obligation; actually, this account does not get a theory of political obligation off the ground. Finally, sanctions for non-compliance give inadequate reasons to obey the law.