ABSTRACT
Suppose a sovereign's subjects have reasonable security and enough to eat, are left free to profit from trade, and feel reasonably content. May not the price of life in the commonwealth still be too high? The transfer of right that creates the commonwealth is the laying down of liberty, and a renunciation by each person of policies of action in accordance with his own judgements about what is best for him. In submitting to the will of the sovereign one agrees to be bound by the value judgments embodied in the civil laws that declare the sovereign's will (cf. L, ch. 21, E III 198). In whatever sphere of daily life the civil laws pronounce, they make redundant the capacities for practical deliberation and judgment that are indispensable in the state of nature. Finding out what would be the right thing to do becomes no harder than finding out what the law prescribes and doing that, or finding out what the law prohibits and omitting that. Once the commonwealth is in place there is at the same time the true and certain rule of our actions that Hobbes taxes the old moral philosophers with failing to specify. Moral and practical decision become algorithmic for citizens.
