Abstract

The article aims at showing that moral experience, conceived as a reflexive process of self-transformation, is at the core of Hobbes's deduction of moral duties. Hobbes depicts human beings as essentially evaluative creatures conflicting for symbolic goods like honor, reputation and justice; the experience of the practical clash with reality and with other individuals teaches us to reverse our primarily subjectivist stances, and to take into account reciprocity as a moral standard of evaluation. Moral duty, in this perspective, is neither an obligation abstractly opposed to passions, nor a sheer formal instrument of self-interest; it articulates rather the educative experience by which passions acquire an individually and socially bearable shape.