Hobbes and Natural Law

In reading chapter xiii, Of the Natural Condition of Mankind  I was struck by Hobbes’ assertion that “The desires and other passions of man are in themselves no sin. No more are the actions that proceed from those passions till they know a law that forbids them” (77).  To me this sounds like a moral relativism that doesn’t follow the logical and practical form of his other statements. In paragraph 23 of chapter vi Hobbes suggests that a desire is either to be blamed or “allowed” based on the actions by which it is attained.  This is a perspective that I can understand better than the one he lays out in xiii because it provides for the idea that an action can be wrong according to natural law and not simply state statutes. The suggestion that a thing is only wrong if there is a law to declare it so seems exceedingly ridiculous and calls into question the very idea of morality in a way that is unproductive.  After all, there are certainly laws in place which are in themselves unjust. One considers Martin Luther King, Jr.’s appeal to natural law in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail whereby he invokes an objective moral standard in order to provide for racial equality in the face of legal injustice.