State of Nature

16.  When I play chess with another, we each enter into a contractual arrangement, both formal and informal -- that is to say, we each agree to pursue a self-interest in the form of checkmate (a mutually governing, if not a cooperative, intentionality).  We also agree to play by the rules, and in doing so, our acts are mutually comprehensible, if not fully transparent, each to the other.   One may still cheat, but even the cheating, as such, is still comprehensible relative to the advantage produced within the intentionality-game -- relative, that is, to the governing intentionality.  It is merely an impermissible utility, and its impermissibility is already set out, as it were, in the rules that govern play.  It is worth noting that I am using the word 'govern' in two distinct ways.  It is one thing to say that the given intentionality governs play, quite another to say a given set of restrictions on the permissible moves make governs play.  Consider: imagine a game of chess that is identical to the existing game of chess, with the exception that no desired state-of-affairs, no terminus for the game has been given.  The players each move, but they do so aimlessly.  Consider: imagine a game of chess that is identical to the existing game of chess, with the exception that no rules have been set out to govern the moves of the pieces.  With chess, the absence of rules governing moves is virtually unimaginable, but consider the activity governed by hunger, with the only rules in the competition for food being those imposed by physiological capacity of the players.  The latter, an intentionality game without rules governing the permissibility of moves, resembles a state-of-nature, and the condition of life within it would resemble, if the food were scarce and the competition for it real, the Hobbesian state-of-nature, a Darwinian survival of the fittest, red in tooth and claw.  The former, rules governing the permissibility of moves without a governing intentionality, resembles the extreme state of the modern democratic state -- that is to say, the state's governing intentionality, if it can be characterized as such, is simply to make and enforce the rules governing the permissibility of moves within the state.  There is no mutually governing intentionality, at least none prescribed by the state, and individuals within the state are each free to engage in the pursuit of happiness as they see fit insofar as they abide by the rules.  This is not to say that a state with a governing intentionality is inconceivable.  Indeed, it is imminently conceivable, and has defined the condition of life for most of history, where the state is conceived, to use Rawl's term, under a comprehensive doctrine, or to use Lilla's term, a political theocracy, that prescribes a mutual (if not always cooperative) self-interest in one form of salvation or another, as well as the various moves, both obligatory and impermissible, that govern play.