Hobbes on Equity and Justice

Abstract

Most contemporary readers of Hobbes's works are shocked by his reduction of justice to mere legality. If we want to know if we have acted justly we need merely ask, `have we obeyed the law'? This is shocking because it implies (and Hobbes elsewhere states explicitly) that there can be no unjust laws. If such a statement were made today we would be inclined to view the person making the statement as an absolute legal positivist, namely, someone who believed that morality did not overlap with legality. I shall argue that Hobbes is not such an absolute legal positivist because he had a much narrower conception of justice than we have, but also a wide notion of equity or fairness which did provide for a moral basis of criticizing the law, and is perhaps closer to our notion of justice than what Hobbes called justice.