US law continues its historical trend of growing more permissive towards actors who engage in violent action in purported self-defense. We draw on some informal game theory to show why this is strategically irrational and suggest rolling back self-defense doctrines like stand your ground to earlier historical precedents like duty to retreat.

Attention has turned from Hobbes the systematic thinker to his inconsistencies, as the essays in the Hobbes symposium published in the recent volume of Political Theory suggest. Deborah Baumgold, in “The Difficulties of Hobbes Interpretation,” shifted the focus to “the history of the book,” and Hobbes’s method of serial composition and peripatetic insertion, as a major source of his inconsistency. Accepting Baumgold’s method, the author argues that the manner of composition does not necessarily determine content and that fundamental paradoxes in (...) Hobbes’s work have a different provenance, for which there are also contextual answers. Hobbes was a courtier’s client, but one committed early to a materialist ontology and epistemology, and these commitments shackled him in treating the immediate political questions with which he was required to deal, leading to systemic paradoxes in his treatment of natural law, liberty, authorization, and consent. (shrink)

O texto visa a apresentar, de modo mais sistemático, a crítica que Habermas endereça a quatro autores fundamentais da filosofia do direito: Hobbes, Kant, Weber e Rawls. O estudo se concentra em demonstrar como Habermas entende o papel da moral na argumentação de cada um deles, tendo em vista a fundamentação do direito.

RESUMO O texto acalenta a hipótese de que as razões pelas quais Hobbes justifica a desobediência e mesmo a resistência ao soberano possam ser compreendidas a partir da teoria da boa-fé contratual, tal qual apresentada por Rawls em Uma teoria da justiça. ABSTRACT The text raises the hypothesis that the reasons why Hobbes justifies disobedience and even resistance to the sovereign can be understood from the contractual good-faith theory, as presented by Rawls in A Theory of Justice.