Order 898799: justice

Dear Marcos, Your paper examines what Hobbes would say about contemporary problems with police officers abusing their power. You argue that Hobbes would think our judicial system needs a sovereign, someone with absolute power who could ensure police officers follow the same set of procedures and create a common set of guidelines for judging cases involving police officers. This paper is well organized and I can tell that you put a lot of work into editing it. There is also a lot of heart in this paper; this issue is clearly important to you. Moreover, the examples you give do a good job of poignantly illustrating some of the problems with the current system. Despite these strengths, the paper needs some major work. Below are my central suggestions: 1) Focus more on Hobbes One of the biggest problems with this paper is that it’s mostly a paper about the contemporary judicial system, and not really a paper about Hobbes. On almost every page, you have a sentence or two about Hobbes, but the rest of the page is about contemporary issues. Since the point of the assignment was to reflect your understanding of Hobbes’ political thought, this is not acceptable. The examples you give are good, but the bulk of the paper should talk about Hobbes—not the contemporary judicial system. I’m afraid you have some major work to do. 2) Include textual evidence Relatedly, another big problem with the paper is that it does not use a single quotation from Hobbes’ Leviathan, or cite any page numbers in the few references it makes to Hobbes’ ideas. Again, this is supposed to be a paper about Hobbes. So, you need to bring Hobbes’ own words and ideas into the paper. Add some relevant quotations from the Leviathan. Show me that you are doing the reading and engaging with the text. Specifically, I think you will need to go more in-depth into the rights and responsibilities of Hobbes’ sovereign. His sovereign is not simply a judge, but also the maker and executer of the laws. Use his critique of separation of powers to show how he would diagnose the problem we’re facing with law enforcement abusing their power. 3) Work on avoiding sentence fragments In terms of writing style, one of the recurring problems I noticed was the use of sentence fragments. I would highly recommend spending some time reading about sentence fragments so that in future work you can avoid them. Overall, this is an okay start but it needs significant work. I look forward though to seeing how this develops. For Paper #2, I suspect Mill will provide a nice point of contrast to Hobbes. Don’t forget that for that paper you’ll not only be taking a stance on what each author’s views are on justice, but on which author you think does a better job of approaching this issue. Grade: 9.75/15 (65% D)