WorkThomas Hobbes

The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance

A bishop and a philosopher dispute free will passage by passage, in a book that exists because a private manuscript was printed behind Hobbes's back.

by Thomas Hobbes549 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1656(aged 68)
Original language: English

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Overview

A short treatise by Thomas Hobbes, Of Liberty and Necessity, was printed in London in 1654 without his knowledge. It came out of an argument about free will held in Paris in 1645 with John Bramhall, the exiled Bishop of Derry, in the rooms of William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle, after which each man put his case on paper. John Davies, a young translator asked to turn Hobbes's paper into French for a friend, kept a copy and published it with a combative preface of his own. Bramhall answered in 1655 with A Defence of True Liberty. The Questions is Hobbes's reply of 1656, and it contains the whole quarrel: Bramhall's text is reprinted passage by passage, and each passage is followed by Hobbes's answer. Bramhall holds that a will fixed by earlier causes is no will at all. If people cannot act otherwise than they do, then laws command what is impossible, punishment is unjust, praise, blame and advice are pointless, and God becomes the author of sin. Hobbes accepts the premise and denies every consequence. Everything that happens, a choice included, has causes sufficient to produce it. To will is to have a last desire at the end of deliberating, and a person is free when nothing outside them prevents them from doing what they will; to ask whether the will itself is free is, on his account, a confusion. Punishment stays just because it is a cause too: it shapes the wills of other people. Bramhall replied once more in 1658, and Hobbes did not continue the argument over free will. The position he defended, that one act can be both free and necessary, is now called compatibilism. Leibniz returned to the book half a century later and added a discussion of it as an appendix to his Theodicy of 1710.

Key concepts

What is the difference between liberty and power for Hobbes?

Liberty is the absence of outside obstacles; power is the ability an agent has in itself. A man in chains lacks the liberty to walk, since the hindrance is in his bonds. A sick or lame man lacks the power, since the hindrance is in him. Hobbes uses the distinction to say that freedom concerns what stops a person from acting on their will, and never the will’s own origin.

What does Hobbes mean by “deliberation” and “will”?

Deliberation is imagining in turn the good and bad consequences of an action, so that desire and fear follow one another. The will is whichever of these comes last, immediately before the act or before acting becomes impossible. It is therefore one desire among the others and no separate faculty. Hobbes concludes that animals and children deliberate too, and that even a sudden act counts as voluntary.

What is a “sufficient cause”?

A sufficient cause is one to which nothing needed for the effect is lacking. Hobbes argues that such a cause is also a necessary one: if it could fail to produce the effect, something was still missing, and it was not sufficient after all. Since whatever happens had a sufficient cause, whatever happens was necessary. This short argument carries most of his case, and it applies to acts of will as much as to falling stones.

What does Bishop Bramhall mean by “free will”?

For Bramhall, free will is the will’s power to determine itself: with everything required for acting in place, the agent can still act or refrain. He separates this true liberty from what is merely spontaneous, such as the doings of children and animals. Hobbes replies that a will which nothing causes cannot be understood, and that the bishop’s school terms name nothing a person could observe in themselves.

What makes someone the “author” of an action?

The author of an action, for Hobbes, is whoever commands or warrants it, and not whoever makes it necessary. He needs the distinction to answer the charge that his God is the author of sin. God is the first cause of every motion, human acts included, but sin is the breaking of a law, and God commands no one to break his law. So the cause of an act and its author can be different.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Free and Necessitated at Once

Can an act be caused through and through and still be the agent’s own free act? Hobbes says yes, and the whole dispute with Bishop Bramhall turns on whether that answer is coherent.

Liberty, as Hobbes defines it, is the absence of outside hindrances to doing what one wills. It says nothing about where the will came from. To deliberate is to imagine by turns the good and bad results of an act, and the will is the last desire before acting. That desire has causes like everything else, and a cause to which nothing is lacking cannot fail to produce its effect. Bramhall answers that a will moved from outside is no will. For Hobbes the phrase “free will” confuses two things, since a person is free and a will is not. Chance is a name for causes nobody observed.

free will
necessity
causation
deliberation
will
voluntary action
liberty
determinism
agency
choice
contingency

Enter a dialogue

Blame, Punishment and God

If nobody could have acted otherwise, what becomes of law, punishment, praise and prayer? Bramhall says they collapse and God becomes the author of sin, and Hobbes has to answer each charge in turn.

Bramhall presses four consequences: laws would command the impossible, punishment would be unjust, advice and praise useless, and God the cause of every crime. Hobbes replies that punishment looks forward. It is itself a cause that forms the will of the offender and of everyone watching, so necessity is what makes it work. Praise says only that an act is good. As for God, Hobbes separates causing an act from commanding it, and rests divine justice on power no one can resist. Piety is left standing as honour paid to that power, in prayer and thanks that God has decreed along with their occasions.

moral responsibility
punishment
divine justice
sin
law
justice
divine providence
divine foreknowledge
divine causation
theology

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 549
distinct concepts: 391
by passages held, corpus-wide: #130

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “free will” and “necessity”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 25 pairings. 79 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
free will	necessity	150
causation	free will	77
causation	necessity	77
free will	moral responsibility	51
agency	free will	45
deliberation	free will	31
moral responsibility	necessity	31
deliberation	necessity	28
divine providence	free will	21
agency	necessity	20
divine providence	necessity	20
causation	divine providence	16
causation	deliberation	13
necessity	theology	12
agency	causation	9
free will	theology	9
causation	moral responsibility	8
divine providence	moral responsibility	8
agency	deliberation	7
agency	moral responsibility	7
deliberation	moral responsibility	7
causation	theology	4
deliberation	divine providence	4
agency	theology	3
divine providence	theology	3

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1642 Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (De Cive)
Written in Latin for readers across Europe, this is the second of Hobbes's three statements of his political theory, after The Elements of Law and before Leviathan, and the one that forms a section of his larger system.
EN
1650 The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic
De Cive and Leviathan both grow out of this treatise, the first statement of Hobbes's political theory, which he wrote in English in 1640 and did not himself send to the press.
EN
1651 Leviathan
The last of Hobbes's three statements of his political theory and the one that is still read: it repeats the argument of The Elements of Law and De Cive and says far more about religion than either.
EN
1655 Elements of Philosophy: Concerning Body (De Corpore)
This is the opening section of Hobbes's Elements of Philosophy, where he sets out his logic and his theory of motion. He drafted it over ten years or more, and it reached print only in 1655, thirteen years after the section on the citizen.
EN
1656 The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance you are here EN
1682 An Answer to Bishop Bramhall’s The Catching of the Leviathan, with An Historical Narration Concerning Heresy
Two defensive pieces from the late 1660s, when Hobbes was barred from publishing on religion: one closes his quarrel with John Bramhall, which had begun over free will, and the other is his history of how heresy came to be punished.
EN

— or open another of their works