Conclusion: Towards a Hobbesian Theory of Rights

Abstract

If Hobbes’s theory of rights is not a natural rights theory dependent on natural law premises and if it cannot be adequately analysed using the Hohfeldian definitional scheme, then how are we to define it? If we look to modern rights theory could it be defined as a will or an interest theory of rights? Will theories may look promising at first glance because of their insistence that rights are under the control of the right-holder who may exercise choice over the right and its correlative duties. Given Hobbes’s initial description of rights held under the right of nature and the process by which individuals come to transfer invasive rights to each other and take on duties, one could see this as an indication that the rights are under the control of the right-holder. Hobbes certainly says that this is a voluntary process. A will theory will quickly run into trouble however, when we consider the right to self-preservation and its status as an inalienable right. It cannot be given up by the right-holder and so this right cannot be defined as a power of the right-holder to waive the enforcement of the duty correlative to it, in the way that a will theorist would want to define it (Simmonds, 2002, p. 310). In fact as there is, for Hobbes, no duty that is directly correlated to the right to self-preservation anyway, it is even more doubtful that we can apply the will theory.