Locke’s state of nature and its epistemic deficit: a game-theoretic analysis.
Locke rejected anarchism. Locke defended the universal necessity of political governments on the grounds that the state of nature will occasionally generate the inconveniences of war. The standard interpretation of Locke identifies three main causes of war in the state of nature: the lack of a commo...
| Publicado en: | Synthese Vol. 200; no. 2; pp. 1 - 26 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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Springer Nature
Apr2022
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=156757939&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 156757939 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00397857 4LI jtl: Synthese issn: 00397857 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Apr2022 vid: 200 iid: 2 pid: 237 pub: Springer Nature artinfo: ui: 156757939 10.1007/s11229-022-03582-5 ppf: 1 ppct: 25 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 1.5MB tig: atl: Locke’s state of nature and its epistemic deficit: a game-theoretic analysis. aug: au: Chung, Hun affil: Faculty of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan sug: keyword: Game theory Hobbes Locke Locke’s epistemology Social contract theory State of nature ab: Locke rejected anarchism. Locke defended the universal necessity of political governments on the grounds that the state of nature will occasionally generate the inconveniences of war. The standard interpretation of Locke identifies three main causes of war in the state of nature: the lack of a common judge, moral disagreement over the law of nature, and self-love. In this paper, I argue that the combination of these three factors does not guarantee that war will occur in every plausible scenarios of Locke’s state of nature. Instead, in order for war to occur at least sometimes in every plausible scenario of Locke’s state of nature, there has to be some sort of epistemic deficit. In this paper, I show via the tools of modern game theory, how Locke’s state of nature may occasionally generate war by two kinds of epistemic problems implied by Locke’s own epistemology: (a) disagreements in subjective probabilities, and (b) uncertainty in other people’s moral motivation to use force to enforce the law of nature. The fact that war occurs primarily because of such epistemic problems suggests a role for a very limited form of government; namely, the ultra-ultra-minimal state, whose role is confined to solving such epistemic problems. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Synthese is a copyright of Springer, 2022. All Rights Reserved. item: Synthese holder: Springer Nature dt: @attributes: year: 2022 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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