Abstract

In contemporary discussions, so many moral and political controversies revolve around conflicting demands on resources that it is easy to assume that ethics simply is a means of divvying up a limited pool of coveted goods. Discussions of distributive justice, rights conflicts, environmental‐ism and international relations, for instance, are typically framed along these lines. Since Hobbes, we have been bred on the idea that moral prescriptions are a means of coping with disputes between people who have incompatible designs on finite resources. Even those who have resisted Hobbes' portrait of life as war have done so by appealing to aspects of humanity that Hobbes underestimated (such as capacities for benevolence or empathy), rather than by challenging his premise that people's appetites exceed the resources available to satisfy them.