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Arash Abizadeh on Thomas Hobbes' Ethics

Philosophy Bites

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What's Hobbes's Account of Ethics?

For the ancient greeks, ethics was what is called a udimonistic theory. Udimoni is a greek word which often is translated as happiness, human flourishing. For example, when aquinas says that we are by nature social that's partly what it means other people's good, the common good, is constituentive part of my own individual good. And hobbs rejects that fundamentally. He's rejecting this classical idea that there's a harmony of interests that's kind of caked into the fabric of the universe and he starts out just with the individual's isolated well being.

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