Seventeenth-century critics held that moral sense predates government

Evidence

But the Hobbesian thesis, resting as it did on the idea of active rights, was also attacked from a very different direction. For example Mathew Hale insisted that the state of nature was neither a civil society nor a war of all against all: “Altho’ there was no instituted human government or lawes, but men were in that natural state wherein they were propagated into the world, yet even in that state there would be some things justa honesta et decora, and some things injusta inhonesta et indecora. Eveything would not be lawfull to every man; and that imaginary state of war; wherein every man might lawfully do what he thinks best without any law or controll, is but a phantasy; or if it be admitted, it must not, cannot be supposed the just state of nature, but as a disease disorder and corruption in it.” It was not necessary in this argument to prove that all humans had the same ideas of what was just, honest, and noble. What mattered was the claim that everyone had them independently of government and law— that is, in the state of nature. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 643

Categorization

• XREF: Counter-argument to Hobbes used in discussions of universal moral sense vs. socially-constructed ethics; complements Cooper thread on how liberal universalism is built on specifically Christian-natural-law foundations.