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First, it is impossible to derive reliable standards of right from the natural human desires
alone, to understand such standards as merely posited by the desires, because those desires are
various and contradictory. This understanding is implied by Strauss’s initial statement of the
crisis of natural right mentioned before: “Present day American social science, as far as it is not
Roman Catholic social science, is dedicated to the proposition that all men are endowed by the
evolutionary process or by a mysterious fate with many kinds of urges and aspirations, but
certainly with no natural right” (1953, 2). One cannot successfully derive natural right from the
“urges and aspirations” of “all men,” because those urges and aspirations are of “many kinds.”
Again, as Strauss’s exception of Catholic social science suggests, the manifold character of
human desire is not an impediment to natural right when one claims to possess knowledge of
some cosmic hierarchy in light of which to evaluate the nobility of the various desires. In the
absence of such knowledge, however, it seems impossible to reduce the variety of natural human
desires to a reliable standard of natural right.
This problem is present even in the thought of Hobbes, who, in contrast to the proponents
of Darwinian natural right, strives to avoid it by laboring to reduce human nature to one
dominant desire. Hobbes, of course, bases his natural right teaching on what he takes to be the
most common and powerful passion, the desire for comfortable self-preservation – each man’s
longing for his “conservation” and his “delectation.” Hobbes must admit, however, the existence
of human desires, especially pride, opposed to these and therefore opposed to his account of
natural right. The desires opposed to Hobbes’s natural right, however, are no less natural than
the ones underpinning it. In the state of nature, pride is present, and arguably just as active as the
desire for self-preservation. Thus, according to Strauss, for Hobbes “[f]ear and glory are both
equally natural, yet fear is the natural root of justice and glory is the natural root of injustice.
Convention