Essay: The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance

Overview
Thomas Hobbes examines the relation between liberty, necessity, and chance from a materialist, mechanistic standpoint. He treats human beings as bodies in motion whose choices and actions are the outcomes of appetites, aversions, and external causes; freedom is not conceived as uncaused spontaneity but as a condition compatible with causal determination. The essay aims to dissolve common confusions about free will and to show how moral responsibility can survive a deterministic account of human behavior.

Definitions and Key Concepts
Hobbes defines "liberty" as the absence of external impediment to motion: a person is free when nothing external prevents the motion that constitutes action. "Necessity" means that events follow from antecedent causes according to natural laws, so that given the same conditions the same outcomes will ensue. "Chance" denotes events that appear uncaused to observers, either because causes are too many or too obscure to be traced, not because they lack any cause at all.

Psychology of Choice
For Hobbes the will is a kind of bodily motion, the final appetite or aversion that immediately precedes action. Deliberation is the succession of imaginings and passions that culminate in that final inclination; it is not a supernatural faculty imposing a break in causal chains. Decisions are therefore explainable as the result of preceding mental and physical states, habits, desires, beliefs, bodily constitution, and external provocations, all of which can be described in causal terms.

Arguments against Libertarian Free Will
Hobbes rejects the idea that liberty requires absolute indeterminism, arguing that the notion of actions occurring "without cause" is unintelligible. Apparent randomness or spontaneity is better explained as ignorance of sufficient causes or complexity beyond practical calculation. He contends that declaring an act free because it is uncaused would render choice arbitrary and rob moral language of sense, since praise and blame presuppose reasons for actions.

Understanding Chance
Chance occupies a limited role in Hobbes's system: it signals the observer's inability to track causal sequences, not the presence of ontological indeterminacy. Complex systems, collisions of causes, and the limits of human knowledge produce events that seem accidental. Yet, from a thorough causal perspective, these events are no less necessary than ordinary occurrences; their classification as "chance" simply reflects epistemic limitation.

Moral and Political Implications
Hobbes preserves moral responsibility by grounding praise, blame, and obligations in the causal antecedents of behavior. People are held accountable because their actions flow from dispositions and reasons susceptible to modification through education, laws, rewards, and punishments. Political authority and social contracts remain meaningful because they shape the causes that produce cooperative behavior and restrain harmful motion.

Compatibility and Practical Freedom
The essay advances a compatibilist stance: liberty is compatible with necessity so long as actions proceed from an agent's internal states without external constraint. Practical freedom is thus the capacity to act according to one's will, even when that will is itself causally determined. This reframes debates over freedom away from metaphysical indeterminacy toward questions about agency, constraint, and the sources of motive.

Conclusion
Hobbes's analysis reframes traditional debates about free will by bringing a rigorous causal vocabulary to bear on moral and political concerns. By treating liberty as the absence of external impediment and chance as epistemic rather than metaphysical, he defends a view in which human responsibility, law, and social order remain intelligible within a deterministic natural world. The essay anticipates later compatibilist accounts and continues to influence discussions about autonomy, causation, and moral evaluation.