홉스 자연법 이론에서 신의계약의 문제

Hobbes conceived the theory of natural law in order to theoretically justify the necessity of escaping from the state of nature, that is, the necessity of establishing commonwealth and its sovereign. Here ‘covenant’ has a core theoretical function. On the basis of the fact that ‘covenant’ has some logical difficulties even though it has an important position in Hobbes’s theory of natural law, this study reveals its logical difficulties in terms of ‘normative validity’ and ‘actual feasibility’. It first analyzes the logical process in which the natural law is derived from the natural right, the legitimacy of the establishment of commonwealth and its sovereign is proved. And then it shows that the logical difficulties of ‘covenant’ in two aspects ultimately result in the ‘fallacy of circular argument’, since the ‘common power’ as the condition of the normative validity and the actual feasibility of ‘covenant’ is absent in the state of nature in which it is concluded and should be implemented. By the way these are based on the anthropological premise that humans act well rather because of a fear of punishment given by the ‘common power’ than on a moral sense of duty or spontaneity. Therefore Hobbes’s discussion of ‘covenant’ ultimately directs at a discussion of the manner of human behaviors derived from the anthropological premise, the so-called ‘inference, made from the passions’. However this study argues that although Hobbes’s theory of natural law has some inherent logical difficulties, but it is still realistic in that it emphasizes convincingly that commonwealth should not degenerate back into the state of nature as the state of war.