Right, but I wasn't talking about whether human beings are bad. It's about whether human nature is inherently bad. At the time Hobbes was writing, the idea that all human beings possessed a similar moral nature was still a relatively new concept, and even at the time there were people (like Sir Robert Filmer) who vehemently argued against it. I'm not saying that most people on earth believe that humans are inherently good, because even in societies where that is the case it is still necessary to explain immortality, but most people don't think that all humans throughout time and space have possessed a similar moral nature which leads them to behave one way or another.
I mean, the state of nature which Hobbes was writing about was not something which he thought ever actually existed, except in the brief moments when the social order breaks down and complete anarchy takes over (the English civil war was still very fresh in Hobbes' mind). The unrestrained war of all against all is too intolerable to be allowed to continue, so reason will naturally lead people to form contracts for their own protection, precisely because the alternative is so awful. Even your cavemen have made contracts with each other, otherwise there would be no society to evict people from.
For Filmer, on the other hand, people did not band together in commonwealths out of fear of anarchy, instead they had been created and would always exist within a natural hierarchy. Fathers ruled families. Kings ruled subjects. Humans existed and would always exist in the position God made them, with individual natures according to their position in the great chain of being. What I was getting at was that, for many people even today, the universe still appears more like the way Filmer saw it than the way Hobbes saw it.
Anyway, I don't mean to get all off topic. It was a silly throwaway comment.
