ABSTRACT
Hobbes is a classic determinist and mechanist. He believed that every event has a cause; furthermore, all causation occurs through the contact of one moving body with another body. Since actions are events, they are caused by one moving body making contact with another body. So all actions are caused by some earlier cause. More speci cally, the immediate cause of an action, whether that of a human being or a beast, is a desire. This desire, because it is the one that causes an action, is called ‘willing’ or ‘a will’ ( EW 4: 239-40, 5: 33-5, 38-9); see the Bibliography for abbreviations). It is preceded by some event, probably an event of reasoning that causes the willing. Hobbes calls a chain of alternating desires “deliberation” ( EW 4: 272-3). Hobbes denies that “the will 1 wills” because if it did, then there could be a will 2 that wills the will 1 , ad in nitum and ad absurdum ( EW 5: “To the Reader”). For Hobbes, it is the beast or human being that acts. Being ultimately the effect of an external cause does not mean that the agent did not have liberty to act or did not act freely: “Liberty is the absence of all impediments to action that are not contained in the nature and instrinsical quality of the agent” ( EW : 4: 273; see also Leviathan , chapter 14.2). Since only bodies act, liberty applies to them; so it is incoherent to say that a will is free. And it applies as much to inanimate objects as animate ones. Water that runs downhill has as much liberty as a person who walks down a street. Also, being ultimately the effect of an external cause does not mean that either the will or the human being is compelled to act by the cause ( EW 4: 261).
