The Hobbesian Predicament: The Right of Self-Preservation and Military Conscription
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the tensions between Hobbes' arguments for self-preservation and the powers he ascribes to the Sovereign, especially the authority to call for military conscription. Does conscription contradict Hobbes’ claim about the absolute right of individual self-preservation? This paper explores the complexities of Hobbes’ position on military conscription. The first part of this paper will explore Hobbes’ arguments for the natural right of self preservation and his arguments for military conscription. Then I will examine the arguments by Leo Strauss and Gabriella Slomp that military conscription is in direct violation of the natural right of self-preservation; additionally, self-preservation is an expression of Hobbesian rationality, virtue and justice. Finally, returning to the text of the Leviathan, I will dissect the dedicatory epistle and conclusion which both contain praise of Sidney Godolphin, and I will discuss how Hobbes’ praise of Godolphin flushes out Hobbes’ thoughts on the question of civic duty (military conscription) versus self-preservation. Ultimately, I argue that military conscription is not inconsistent with self-preservation because the commonwealth is the vehicle through which peace and self-preservation are attained.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".