

Hobbes - The philosophy behind governments... - jwomers
http://www.philosophybro.com/2010/12/hobbes-leviathan-books-i-and-ii-summary.html

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entangld
I disagree. We keep having disagreements on the "nature of man" brutish v.
noble savages. Maybe there is no single type.

Maybe its our population that has two natures and a static percentage of us
are brutish (37%) and short and the rest are noble (63% or vice versa). I
think the nature of man has probably been ill-defined since it was conceived
so long before statistics and psychology. Surveys and statistics are already
attacking the concept of us as rational humans. Can't we just test for range
of altruism v. jerkiness in the general population?

So I'm getting philosophical on Hacker News... whatever.

~~~
pnathan
Sure. The above post summarizes Hobbes's approach.

There are a lot of disagreements I think - I don't know of many governments
that embrace Hobbes' ideas wholly. But in a way, it's the "Dictator For Life"
approach taken for Python and the Linux kernel. No?

