Thomas Hobbes Why Be Moral

Why be moral?
In life, we’ve heard a lot of things about being moral, it is something we ought to do, and judge on how moral a person is, people can tell whether he or she is a good or bad person but think about morality, it is mostly based on society’s standard and people’s opinions; this depends on how society and the group of people are, a right action can become a wrong action and the other way around. The question is, why we should be moral if it is not a written law that we must follow. In this paper, I’m going to discuss the issue of two characters, “the fool” and “the sensible knave” and explain which one I prefer in addressing the problem and justify morality.
Thomas Hobbes, an English philosopher who is famous for his book “Leviathan”

Hobbes’s third “Law of nature” is saying, no one has the right to be unjust. Hobbes also introduces a character that he named, the fool. The reason he thinks the fool is a fool is because of what the fool claims, “there is no such thing as Justice….keep, or not keep Covenants, was not against Reason, when it conduced to ones benefit” (14). The fool is showing his objection to what Hobbes says in his third law, there is a connection between the third law and reason. If the fool has a good reason to break covenant, then why not just break it instead of keeping covenant. In Hobbes’s view of the fool, the fool is not irrational, the fool used Hobbes’s third “Law of nature” to go against him. But Hobbes disagree with the fool and says, “you are a fool” because the fool doesn’t have any “good” reason to break covenant, the only “good” reason the fool has is coming from his own self-interest to benefit, and that is not against reason. In Hobbes’s first reply, he says, “when a man doth a thing, which notwithstanding anything can be foreseen...could not expect, arriving may turne it to his benefit; yet such events do not make it reasonably or wisely done” (15). He explains