hobbes studies 29 (2016) 169-188

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Review Article

∵
Authorization and Moral Responsibility
in the Philosophy of Hobbes

Readers have been puzzling over Hobbes’s assertion that subjects “authorize”
all the actions of their sovereign ever since he introduced this language into
his theory in Leviathan. Much careful work has been done to investigate what
Hobbes could have meant by authorization, and what role it might play in his
political theory. Three recent strikingly original contributions by Michael J.
Green, A. P. Martinich, and Michael Byron provide, albeit in very different ways,
fertile resources for advancing our understanding. Pointing to the implications
of subjects’ authorization of their sovereign, Hobbes emphasizes that subjects
cannot legitimately complain that the sovereign’s action is an injustice or in-
jury to themselves because no one can be unjust to himself, and that in seeking
to punish their sovereign they would be unjustly punishing it for what they
themselves have done. Commentators, including these three innovators, have
naturally assumed that Hobbes paired moral responsibility with authorship
and ownership, as we do. Martinich writes, for example, that “the attractive-
ness of authorization… is that the acceptance of the government, and thereby
responsibility for its actions, is… properly attributed to the subjects”. Green
writes that typically, “my authorization… [has] made me responsible for the
representative’s actions”, and “what owning an action implies is that the actor
meets the conditions of responsibility”; similarly, “[Hobbes’s] theory of autho-
rization is fundamentally about responsibility”. And Byron writes that “sub-
jects authorize the sovereign, and so collectively share responsibility for their
own unjust obedience”; subjects are “responsible for the command inasmuch
as they have authorized the sovereign’s actions.”1

1 A. P. Martinich, “Authorization and Representation in Hobbes’s Leviathan” in The Oxford

Handbook of Hobbes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), edited by A. P. Martinich
and K. Hoekstra, pp. 315–338, p. 320; Michael J. Green, “Authorization and Political Authority

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/18750257-02902004

170 Lloyd

This identification of authorization with moral responsibility presents a

serious problem for Hobbes’s political theory. The most obvious obstacle to
Hobbes’s effort to persuade his readers that we are under a political obligation
to obey our sovereign is his insistence that subjects “own and authorize” all of
their sovereign’s actions. On our ordinary understanding of these notions, the
person who authorizes something is morally responsible for it, and to own an
action is to take responsibility for it. But it would be extraordinarily perilous
to authorize a sovereign if that meant that we are responsible for everything
she commands and that we do in obedience to her commands, for those may
be immoral and sinful violations of natural law and religious duty. If by au-
thorizing a sovereign we would make ourselves liable to eternal damnation
for the sovereign’s iniquitous commands, it would be supremely irrational to
authorize a sovereign.2 Hobbes agrees that it is unreasonable to require that
with stakes so great as salvation or damnation, a man should rely on the judg-
ment of someone else (who is unconcerned in his damnation) rather than on
his own judgment.3 So Hobbes cannot hope to persuade readers that they have
a general political obligation to obey the commands of their sovereign if such
obligation depends on authorizing a sovereign, and authorization entails bear-
ing moral responsibility for all the sovereign does. If Hobbes cannot persuade
readers of their obligation to obey, his political project for peace and social
stability fails.
Despite the general scholarly consensus that Hobbes’s concept of autho-
rization entails responsibility, this assumption turns out to be incorrect, as I
shall show. Hobbes detaches these ideas, giving ‘authorize’ a specific technical
meaning and implication different in his system than our ordinary language
term. Martinich correctly observes that as we use the term ‘authorize’ “it is ana-
lytic that if a person P1 authorizes a person P2 to act for him, then P1 is supe-
rior… [and so] by authorizing someone, a person does not give up any of his
rights.”4 But that is clearly not how Hobbes uses the term, because subjects are

in Hobbes”, Journal of the History of Philosophy ,Volume 53, No. 1 (January 2015), pp. 29, 30,
32; Michael Byron, Submission and Subjection in Hobbes’s Leviathan ( New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015), p. 113.
2 “If the command be such as cannot be obeyed without eternal death, then it were madness
to obey it”, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668,
edited by Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1994), chapter xliii, paragraph 2
(l xliii.2). References to Leviathan are indicated by “l” followed by chapter number and para-
graph number.
3 l xlvi.37.
4 A. P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 166.

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“inferior” to the sovereigns they authorize, and subjects do give up the unfet-
tered right of self-government they would enjoy in the state of nature. And
whereas Byron argues for “treating ‘authorize’ and ‘give up’ as synonymous” in
Hobbes’s theory, our term ‘authorize’ is not synonymous with ceding our right
to do what we authorize another to do on our behalf, as Martinich has shown.5
So both these authors recognize the fact that, unless Hobbes is denying obvi-
ous analytic truths, the Hobbesian notion of authorization must be different
from our own. Yet they both take it to implicate moral responsibility. Green
argues that Hobbes’s conception of authorization as ownership is not so dif-
ferent from one of the meanings we assign to the idea of authorization—the
idea of taking ownership without extending rights—but on that meaning au-
thorization does still imply moral responsibility. Understanding how Hobbes
justifies his position that wrongful actions done solely because commanded by
one’s legitimate political authority are the moral responsibility of that author-
ity alone requires attention to four sets of distinctions: between (a) natural and
artificial persons, (b) civil and natural will, (c) public and private conscience,
and (d) author and instrument of an action.
A natural person speaks in his own voice and acts on behalf of himself,
whereas an artificial person speaks or acts on behalf of another. A common-
wealth is an artificial person, defined by Hobbes as one person of whose acts
the others have made themselves the authors, in order that it may use their
strength and means as it judges best to achieve peace among them and com-
mon defense against outsiders.6 The sovereign “carries the person” of the
commonwealth, meaning that the sovereign decides the actions of the com-
monwealth. Hobbes maintains that “the will of the Common-wealth [is] the
will of the representative; which in a monarchy is the monarch, and in other
common-wealths the sovereign assembly”.7 The will of the artificial person of
the commonwealth can only be comprised of the will of one or more natural
persons, because will is the appetite (or aversion) that adheres to action, but
only natural persons experience appetites. Only a natural person can provide
the content of a will. So the content of the will of the commonwealth in a mon-
archy is the natural will of the monarch concerning public matters, and the
content of the will of the commonwealth in an aristocracy is the natural wills
of the assembly’s members voting in the majority.
Hobbes consistently maintains that moral responsibility for any action
belongs solely to the person or persons whose natural wills it expresses. In

5 Byron, Submission, p. 108.

6 l xvii.13.
7 l xxvi.10.

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a­ ssemblies, only those members who voted for a measure—expressing their

natural wills—are to be held responsible for it; those who voted against or were
absent are not to be held responsible.8 But in a monarchy, the natural will of
the person who is monarch supplies the content of the sovereign’s will, and so

in a monarchy, if the monarch make any decree against the laws of nature,
he sins himself; because in him the civil will and the natural are all one.9

In others, specifically in subjects, the civil will and the natural will are not “all
one”. Subjects have two wills regarding public matters: their natural wills as
private persons making their own private judgments, and their artificial “civil
will” as subjects acting on the public judgment of the commonwealth.
Members of a sovereign assembly, who are subject to the laws made by the
majority of themselves, also have two wills regarding public matters: their nat-
ural wills as private persons making their own private judgments, and their
artificial civil will as either subject to the civil will determined by a majority
vote they opposed, or as participants in the majority vote comprising the sov-
ereign’s civil will. In the latter case, their natural and civil wills happen to be
the same, but because they are not guaranteed always to converge (as they
do in a monarch, whose natural will always supplies the content of the civil
will) we cannot say generally of the individuals who are members of a sov-
ereign assembly that their civil will and natural will are all one. So whether
the assembly’s sin does or does not belong to a member depends on how she
voted. Hobbes writes that in assemblies, only those members who voted for
a measure are blameworthy for it: “they that gave not their vote are therefore
innocent”.10 The power of the representative of the commonwealth, that is,
the sovereign, has “no other bounds but such as are set out by the unwritten
law of nature”.11 When a measure violates these bounds, only those members

8 l xxii.10.
9 Thomas Hobbes, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, collected and edited by Sir Wil-
liam Molesworth, 12 vols (London: John Bohn, 1839), vol ii, “Philosophical Rudiments
concerning Government and Society”, chapter 7, paragraph 14 (DCv 7.14). References to
De Cive are indicated DCv followed by chapter number and paragraph number. Of course,
monarchs may have private wills about matters not concerning the public. “Honey, make
me a sandwich” is not a command issued as the representative of the person of the com-
monwealth. Hobbes is saying that a monarch’s will as the representative of the person of
the commonwealth, that is, as the sovereign (the civil will) takes as its content the natural
will of the monarch.
10 l xxii.10.
11 l xxii.7.

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who voted for it sin, because only in them is their natural will (to which moral
responsibility attaches) providing the content of the civil will. Hobbes writes
in De Cive,

And if a decision contrary to a natural law is made in the case of a people

[democratic assembly] or a council of optimates [aristocratic assembly],
the offender is not the commonwealth itself, i.e. the civil person, but the
citizens who voted for the decision. For an offense issues from an expres-
sion of natural will not from a political will, which is artificial; because if
it were the latter, those who voted against the decision would also be
offenders.12

As he articulates this point in Elements of Law,

When it happeneth, that the people by plurality of voices shall decree

or command any thing contrary to the law of God or nature, though the
decree and command be the act of every man… yet is not the injustice of
the decree, the injustice of every particular man, but only of those men
by whose express suffrages, the decree or command was passed. For a
body politic, as it is a fictitious body, so are the faculties and will thereof
fictitious also. But to make a particular man unjust, which consisteth of a
body and soul natural, there is required a natural and very will.13

So far we have been speaking in terms of different sorts of will, natural and
civil. These correspond to two different sorts of “conscience”, private and pub-
lic. Hobbes writes that in obeying his sovereign, a man does act “according to
his conscience and judgment, as having deposited his judgment in all contro-
versies in the hands of the sovereign power”.14 We cannot literally “deposit” our
judgment in some other person’s hands or mind; but we can defer to their judg-
ment by committing to act in accordance with it rather than with our private
judgment in case our judgments diverge. When we settle on prioritizing the
sovereign’s judgment in this way, we make his judgment our own “conscience”.
Hobbes explains:

12 DCv 7.14, emphasis added. Here I use Tuck’s and Silverthorne’s translation, On the Citizen
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 97.
13 Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law. Natural and Politic, edited by Ferdinand Toennies
(London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co, 1889), part 2, chapter 2, paragraph 4 (el ii.2.4).
­References to the Elements of Law are to part, chapter, and paragraph numbers.
14 el ii.8.5.

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For the conscience being nothing else but a man’s settled judgment and
opinion, when he hath once transferred his right of judging to another,
that which shall be commanded, is no less his judgment, than [it is] the
judgment of that other. So that in obedience to laws, a man doth still ac-
cording to his own conscience, but not his private conscience.15

In obeying the law a subject acts according to her own public conscience, and
not her private conscience. The important question is whether, when our pri-
vate conscience diverges from our public, we sin in following the dictates of
our public conscience. Hobbes answers categorically:

[W]hatsoever is done contrary to private conscience, is then a sin, when

the laws have left him to his own liberty, and never else.16

And

Though he that is subject to no law sinneth in all he does against his

conscience, because he has no other rule to follow but his private reason
[i.e., private conscience], yet it is not so with him that lives in a com-
monwealth, because the law is the public conscience, by which he hath
already undertaken to be guided.17

It is never sinful to obey the law, even a law we privately judge to be immoral.
We have already seen one explanation for this fact: The will we are acting on
when we obey the law is the civil will and not our natural will, whereas moral
responsibility attaches only to natural will. Hobbes offers a further explana-
tion: The action done by the subject in obedience to law is not the subject’s
action.
Consider Hobbes’s insistence that:

When the actor doth anything against the law of nature by command of
the author, if he be obliged by former covenant to obey him, not he, but
the author breaketh the law of nature; for though the action be against the
law of nature; yet it is not his: but contrarily, to refuse to do it, is against the
law of nature, that forbiddeth breach of covenant.18

15 el ii.6.12.
16 Ibid, emphasis added.
17 l xxix.7.
18 l xvi.7, emphasis added. The Latin Leviathan (ol) variant in Curley ed. (1994) reads “yet it
is not the actor’s but the author’s, because the actor would have violated the law if he had

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Whose action is it that is against the law of nature in the case described? Sub-
jects don’t command sovereigns to do anything, and sovereigns are not bound
by covenant to obey other men’s commands, so here “actor” cannot refer to
a sovereign; it refers to the subject who acts on the sovereign’s will, or to the
minister appointed to exercise sovereign power, who is also a subject acting on
the sovereign’s command. Sovereigns are the only ones who can command, so
“author” can only refer to a sovereign.19 Thus the action against the law of na-
ture belongs to the sovereign who commands it be done, and not to the subject
who carries out that command. Hobbes states this as a general principle: “The
author of a deed is he who commands that it be done; the cause is he through
whose powers it is done.”20 Hobbes provides a pertinent illustration of this
point, explaining that

[A] Christian, holding firmly in his heart the faith of Christ, hath the
same liberty which the prophet Elisha allowed to Naaman the Syrian
[to bow before a heathen idol thereby denying Christ by his action]….
[W]hatsoever a subject, as Naaman was, is compelled to do in obedience
to his sovereign, and doth it not in order to his own mind, but in order to
the laws of his country, that action is not his, but his sovereign’s; nor is it he
that in this case denieth Christ before men, but his governor, and the law
of his country.21

When the subject obeys the sovereign’s command “under terror of his laws” to
worship wrongly, we

not done it, since he had covenanted to do it”. “It” here refers to whatever the sovereign
commands, rather than to some specified iniquitous action.
19 Of course God can command, but in this passage Hobbes is not speaking of God. Al-
though sovereigns can be subjects of God, interpreting this passage to be about a sover-
eign’s relation to God would imply that God commands violations of the laws of nature,
and is responsible for the wrongs sovereigns do, both of which Hobbes explicitly denies
in his reply to Bramhall.
20 ol xlvi.22 In fact Hobbes implies the stronger claim that one is author of an action only
if he commands that it be done: People do many “things which God does not command,
nor is therefore author of them”. L xxi.4, emphasis added). This stronger claim implies that
in a natural person “authoring” his own actions, his will is his command, so to speak, to
himself.
21 l xlii.11, emphasis added. ol is even more explicit: “if someone is a subject, as Naaman
was, and is compelled by his king to do something, whatever it is, in such a way that he
does it not of his own accord, but in obedience to the laws of his country, it is not his act,
nor is it to be imputed to him, but to the king, i.e., it is an act of the commonwealth, and
is to be imputed to the laws; and that it is not he, but his king, who has denied Christ.”

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cannot from thence argue that he approveth it, but [only] that he doth it
for fear, and that it is not his act, but the act of his sovereign.22

Here Hobbes implies that it makes a difference whether we comply with a sov-
ereign’s command out of our private approval of the action, or because of “the
terror of death or other great corporal punishment”. If whatever is done solely
from fear of legal punishment is the sovereign’s act and not the subject’s, all ac-
tions, and not just those concerning worship, done in obedience to commands
of which we privately disapprove will be the sovereign’s. The general principle
Hobbes concludes is that

the external actions done in obedience to [laws], without the inward ap-
probation, are the actions of the sovereign, and not of the subject, which
is in that case but as an instrument, without any motion of his own at all;
because God hath commanded to obey them.23

What the obedient subject does pursuant to his duty to subordinate his con-
trary private will to the civil will is the action of the sovereign only. We see that
Hobbes slides between speaking of who bears moral responsibility for doing the
wrongful action, and speaking of whose action it is in the first place, but there
is no harm in this fluidity because Hobbes’s answer to both questions is the
same: It is the person whose natural will it is that the action shall be done.
Normally we would suppose that if we know of some action whose action it
is, we would know which person the action belongs to. This is because we nor-
mally identify a single individual with a single person. Hobbes does not iden-
tify a single individual with a single person. Instead, each individual member
of a commonwealth carries, or represents, two persons (at least). A sovereign
monarch carries both the civil person (C) of the commonwealth when she leg-
islates or commands citizens on behalf of it, and her natural person (np) when
she acts in her private capacity on behalf of herself. Hobbes writes, “every man
or assembly that hath sovereignty representeth two persons… one natural and
another politic (as a monarch hath the person not only of the­­commonwealth,
but also of a man…”.24 But also every subject also carries two persons: his
­natural person (np) when he acts on his private judgment on behalf of himself,

22 l xlv.22, emphasis added.

23 l xlii.106. This language describing the subject as an “instrument” of the civil will is impor-
tant, and we will return to it when distinguishing “actors” from “authors”.
24 l xxiii.2.

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and the civil person (C) of the commonwealth when he acts as an instrument
of the public will by obeying the sovereign’s laws or commands.
Qua civil person, the sovereign is author of the actions she commands, and
qua civil person, the subject is the actor or instrument of the civil will. The
sovereign, qua natural person providing the content of the civil will, is morally
responsible for the actions she commands. The subject, qua natural person
who is duty-bound to subordinate his private conscience to the public con-
science, is morally responsible for fidelity to that duty (and of course for any of
his actions not dictated by the law but issuing from his private will). The fact
that subjects have a moral duty to defer to the civil will (that is, to act on their
own public conscience) is part of the reason why subjects do not sin in obeying
commands that violate the law of nature:

Commands may be sometimes contrary to right reason, and therefore

sins in them who command them; yet are they not against right reason,
nor sins in subjects; whose right reason, in points of controversy, is that
which submits itself to the reason of the city.25

If someone sins at another’s command, both sin, since neither did right;
unless, by chance, the state commanded it to be done, so that the actor
ought not to refuse.26

There is a metaphysical justification for Hobbes’s position that moral respon-

sibility adheres to natural persons: moral responsibility is for what is willed,
and although artificial persons are metaphorically described as willing ac-
tions, only natural persons literally will, because will is the last appetite, and
appetites literally exist only in natural persons. But more importantly, there
is a moral justification for his stance. His moral system requires individuals to
enter commonwealths and so to become subjects or (less often) sovereigns. It
would be grossly, cosmically unfair to morally mandate that we act on some
other person’s judgment rather than our own private judgment, and then mor-
ally condemn us for doing so contrary to our private consciences. That would
constitute a tragic moral dilemma, wherein we do wrong (and may possibly
suffer divine punishment for doing wrong) no matter what we do.27

25 dcv xv. 18, p. 224, emphasis added.

26 De Homine xv.2, emphasis added, in Bernard Gert, ed., Man and Citizen, (Gloucester,
1978), p. 84.
27 I examine the dilemma that arises within Hobbes’s system if we take him to have held
subjects responsible for wrongs they do in response to commands contrary to their

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Hobbes asserts the principle that “no man ought to accuse his own fact in
another that is but his instrument”.28 Ministers appointed to do the sovereign’s
business are clearly acting as “instruments” of the civil will, but so too are ordi-
nary subjects obeying commands to pay a tax, serve on a jury, fight in a war, or
exhibit public worship contrary to their private conscience (as was Naaman).
So when Hobbes writes that when “the sovereign power commandeth a man to
do…. the doing of it is totally excused; for he ought not to condemn it himself,
because he is the author”,29 Hobbes is expressing the position that sovereigns
are the authors of the actions done by their command, or in implementation of
it. Recall that he says so explicitly in the Latin Leviathan: “The author of a deed
is he who commands that it be done; the cause is he through whose powers
it is done.”30 For example, the soldier, as an instrument of the civil will, is the
“cause” of the enemy’s death, but the sovereign is deemed author of the kill-
ing, because he commanded the war in the service of which it was permissibly
done, and a command expresses the natural will of the person commanding it,
not the natural will (which is inert) of the instrument carrying out the action.
Hobbes reinforces this idea that the sovereign provides the will that animates
the movements of subjects with his extensive analogy of the artificial person
of the commonwealth to a natural body. Subjects resemble the limbs being
used purposively, public ministers are like “the nerves and tendons that move
the several limbs of a body natural”,31 and the “sovereign is the public soul,
giving life and motion to the commonwealth, which expiring, the members are
governed by it no more than the carcass of a man by his departed (though im-
mortal) soul”.32 If subjects were perfect instruments of the sovereign will they
would be like the paralytic limbs of an individual encased in an exoskeleton the
movements of which are controlled by that individual, without, in Hobbes’s
terms “any motion of [their] own at all”. But because subjects cannot help but
retain the ability to act on private will, using them as instruments depends on
their willingness to subordinate their private will to the public’s, which cannot
be expected if they are to be held responsible for the wrongdoing that results.

­ rivate conscience in “Hobbes on the Duty Not to Act on Conscience”, Hobbes on Politics
p
and Religion, Robin Douglass and Laurens van Apeldoorn, eds. (Oxford University Press,
forthcoming).
28 l xxvii.27.
29 Ibid.
30 ol xlvi.22 For this reason, God is not the author of our sins because he does not command
us to sin: “men may do many things which God does not command, nor is therefore au-
thor of them”. l xxi.4.
31 l xxiii.3.
32 l xxix.23. Cf. l xxix.15.

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The picture that emerges is of what may be termed a “hierarchy of

responsibility”33 according to which subjects are morally responsible (and
­accountable to God) for obeying the sovereign’s commands, and the sovereign
is morally responsible (and accountable to God) for commanding conscien-
tiously in accordance with the moral requirements of natural law. Hobbes
insists that one of the two necessary conditions for salvation is obedience to
natural law,34 which requires of subjects submission to their sovereign’s civil
law, and of the sovereign a conscientious effort to rule equitably. Correspond-
ing to the allocation of responsibility is an allocation of immunity: Sovereigns
are immune from censure by their subjects because “God hath commanded
[subjects] to obey them”, and subjects are immune from censure by God for
obeying the sovereign’s commands for the same reason, that “God hath com-
manded [them] to obey [sovereigns]”. Subjects are not responsible for actions
done in mere-obedience to the laws, because they do not command those ac-
tions, and the actions are not products of their own natural wills. The sovereign
commands those actions by making the laws that mandate them; because his
natural will determines the content of those laws, actions done in accordance
with them are his actions and his responsibility.
Contrast this account with Byron’s interpretation, according to which the
commonwealth

is a single agent bearing responsibility for the coordinated behavior of its

constituents. Responsibility for that agent’s actions does not land solely
on the natural person bearing the sovereign power for the same reason
it does not land solely on the natural persons who are the subjects: the
agency is collective, not individual. Because the artificial person is one, the
idea of a hierarchy of responsibility lacks application: one person cannot
stand in asymmetrical relations to itself.35

Byron sees the sovereign and subjects as together comprising a single artificial
person (the commonwealth) that in public practice replaces all the natural
people that before existed. It bears responsibility; by which Byron means not
that none of the natural persons comprising it bear responsibility, but rather

33 This hierarchy, and its relation to Hobbes’s self-effacing natural law theory, is discussed in
S. A. Lloyd, Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: Cases in the Law of Nature (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2009) pp. 281–287.
34 l xliii.3 &5.
35 Byron, Submission, p. 114, emphases added.

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that all do.36 This is in tension with Hobbes’s stated view. Hobbes had insisted
that “the offender is not the commonwealth itself, i.e. the civil person” for it is
artificial. Were Byron’s view that there is only one person acting, the civil per-
son of the commonwealth, conjoined with Hobbes’s statement, it would follow
that no-one at all is responsible for wrongdoing. The explanation of his seeing
the commonwealth as a collective being lies in his novel idea that the relation
of political subjection is a psychological relation in which the subject takes
into herself the desires, values and wills of the sovereign while purging from
mind and heart anything in tension with those. Complete subjection would
involve complete identification of the subject with the sovereign in a single
collective agent. Whatever one thinks about the plausibility of this conception
of subjection as an account of political obligation, the implications for respon-
sibility Byron draws from it are positions Hobbes explicitly rejects. They are
flatly contradicted by the textual evidence we’ve surveyed.
We are finally in a position to consider how this constellation of relations
between natural persons/artificial persons, natural wills/civil wills, private
conscience/public conscience, and authors/instruments fits with Hobbes’s
Leviathan claim that subjects “, “warrant”, “ratify”, “own”, “authorize” all of the
sovereign’s actions. According to Martinich “the literal truth is that the indi-
vidual subjects are the authors of what the sovereign does, and own those
actions”.37 Intrepreters struggle to understand how Hobbes can make subjects
the authors of all the sovereign commands by authorizing him to act for them,
making the sovereign their actor, while at the same time being actors carrying
out commands authored by the sovereign. It is tempting to think that autho-
rization must be transitive, so that if the subject authorizes all the sovereign’s
actions, she must be the author of the actions subject actors do at the sover-
eign’s command.
Often it is because commentators assume that moral responsibility attaches
to authorization, that they infer that subjects must be morally responsible for
every immoral command the sovereign issues, and for every immoral action
subjects do in obedience to those commands, because they have authorized
the sovereign. Martinich reverses this reasoning. He insists that Hobbes “pre-
cisely wants to avoid” the possibility that “individual subjects could distance

36 Byron implies that responsibility lies partly on each party, but does not discuss whether,
on his view, all subjects and the sovereign bear equal degrees of responsibility, whether
each is wholly responsible or responsible only for 1/nth of every action depending on the
number in the population, whether the sovereign bears half and the subjects divide up
the rest, etc.
37 Martinich, “Authorization”, p. 333.

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themselves from responsibility for those actions”, and so “Hobbes insures that
the individual subjects are responsible for the sovereign’s behavior by making
the sovereign the direct representative of the individual” through authoriza-
tion.38 Yet, as we’ve seen, Hobbes denies that subjects are responsible for those
immoral actions, denies that the immoral actions are the subjects’ actions, and
denies that the subjects are the authors of those actions. It is clear then that
whatever Hobbes does mean by “authorize”, he does not mean that we assume
moral responsibility for the sovereign’s actions. And that being so, it is also clear
that Hobbes cannot mean by his terms ‘authorize’ and ‘authorization’ what we
ordinarily mean by those terms. To avoid importing into his discussion our
own understanding of authorization along with its implications for responsi-
bility, let us use the term “hauthorization” to stand for Hobbes-authorization.
When, by means of what has been termed the ‘sovereign-making formula’,39
individuals become subjects it is “as if” they were to say to one another

I [h]authorise and give up my right to governing myselfe, to this man, or

to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to
him, and [h]authorize all his actions in like manner.40

Martinich views the “sovereign making formula” as elliptical because it has

would-be subjects saying “I authorize this man” without specifying what he
is authorized to do.41 Martinich also finds the formula facially “contradictory
or incoherent” because “the verb “authorize” takes a name of a person as its
direct object… but the verb “give up” takes a name or description of some right
or rights as its direct object and a prepositional phrase that says to whom the
rights are given up”, and “a noun cannot simultaneously be a direct object and
the object of a preposition.”42 More simply put, one gives up something, but
one authorizes someone. “Authorize” and ‘give up’ cannot be synonyms be-
cause they take different objects. But they also cannot both take as their object
exercise of the subject’s right of self-governance because, as Martinich insists,

38 Ibid.
39 Martinich, “Authorization”, p. 316.
40 l xvii.13.
41 Martinich observes that the phrase “I authorize” is grammatically incomplete. He a­ dduces
an illustration from a fictional television show, but life is sometimes stranger than fiction.
The 2016 Republican Party’s presidential candidate for President of the United States of
America, Donald Trump, in response to criticism for enjoying the endorsement of white
supremacist groups (and apparently less disturbed by grammatical incompleteness than
is Martinich) said “I disavow. I disavow, ok?”
42 Martinich, “Authorization” p. 317.

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182 Lloyd

by the logic of the terms, no one can authorize another to act on a right he
has given up. (I can give up my right to sell my house (by say giving away my
house); or I can authorize you to sell my house on my behalf; but I cannot au-
thorize you to sell the house to which I have given up my right by giving away
the house.) Martinich assumes that to authorize someone is to extend to her
one of one’s own rights to act; thus one cannot authorize another to act on a
right one has given up. If this is true of our term authorization, then we should
expect that Hobbes’s hauthorization means something different.
Returning to the sovereign-making formula, setting aside the reciprocity
condition, and reorganizing punctuation, we have:

I [h]authorize, and give up my right of governing myself to, this man or

assembly…

To give up my right to govern myself is to give up my right to govern myself

according to my own private (natural) judgment. It is to give up the right to act
on my own private judgment. To give up this right to a specified person is to
give it up in favor of that person’s judgment only. In the sentence immediately
preceding the quoted formula, Hobbes had just explained that to “own and
acknowledge himself to be author” of the sovereign’s acts is “therein to submit
their wills… to his will, and their judgments, to his judgment.” I suggest that
he intends this to fix the meaning of “I [h]authorize”. To hauthorize a person
is to submit our will and judgment to the will and judgment of that person. To
submit is to commit to deferring to the other. To [h]authorize a person also
indemnifies the person hauthorized against us in the future, meaning that we
cannot rightly bring any action against them. We do not hauthorize anyone
to do anything, we do not hauthorize anything they do, nor does hauthorizing
them involve transferring anything, including any rights, to them. Hauthoriza-
tion is not a transitive relation at all.
Thus understood, we can render Hobbes’s sovereign-making formula like
this:

I commit to deferring to the will and judgment of, and give up my right of
governing myself according to my own private judgment in favor of the
judgment of, this man or assembly…

This formulation addresses Martinich’s grammatical complaint, but that is by

no means its main advantage. If we could somehow replace our private will
with the public will, forever ridding ourselves of our private will, in the way
­Byron suggests, we would not have to speak of committing to defer to the

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Authorization and Moral Responsibility 183

­ ublic will or of “giving up our right” to act on our natural will. But because
p
our natural will inexorably continues to coexist alongside, and possibly in
competition with the public will, the best we can do is commit to privileging
the public will while subordinating our private will. This commitment entails
accepting that we are blameworthy if we fail to let the public will determine
our actions. But it most certainly does not—Hobbes insists—entail taking the
blame for actions in mere compliance with the public will.
Subjects are thought of as having hauthorized, or committed to defer to “all
the actions and judgments” of the sovereign, and “all the sovereign shall do”.
They are thought of as having seated the legislative power, and committed to
treating the sovereign’s commands as their own public will and conscience. In
this sense they have “ratified the people’s [commonwealth’s] acts in general”.43
But to commit to deferring to S’s will that A be done is not to will A.44 Or, to use
Hobbes’s concepts, it is our public will that A be done, but unless it is also our
private will, A is not our action (even if we were the instruments that caused
A to happen) and we are not morally responsible for A. Hauthorization does
not transfer moral responsibility because it does not entail responsibility in
the first place. It is in this way fundamentally different from our concept of
authorization.
Another thing that has puzzled commentators is to make sense of Hobbes’s
insistence that when a man becomes subject, there is “no restriction at all”
of his former state of nature liberty. Hobbes defines liberty as the absence of
external impediments to doing what one wills. By hautorization we commit to
treating the sovereign’s will as our own. So, of course laws do not limit our lib-
erty because they express our (public) will rather than impede it. We may give
up our right of governing ourselves according to our own private judgment, but
that does not diminish our liberty because it is our settled private judgment
(conscience) that our public will should govern our actions.45 What we will to
do is conform to the public will; and that we are perfectly free to do.
Considering how much trouble this notion of hauthorization introduces
into Hobbes’s theory, Hobbes having done without it in the earlier versions

43 el ii.2.3 It would be inconsistent with this ratification of the public’s acts in general that
one “disalloweth some of them in particular”.
44 For example, one can privately will that political contributions not be protected as speech
while deferring to the u.s. Supreme Court’s decision that they are protected speech, and
willing that everyone abide by the Court’s ruling while hoping that it overturns that
ruling.
45 This idea, that the public will is our authentic will, and that in acting on it we remain as
free as before, is usually associated with Rousseau; but clearly he owes it to Hobbes.

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184 Lloyd

of the political theory, and especially considering how much work he then
has to do to disentangle it from ordinary assumptions about moral respon-
sibility, it is fair to ask why he adds it in Leviathan. From the point of view of
reassuring subjects that they are not morally responsible for the iniquitious
acts done by or on the orders of their sovereign, simply giving up the right of
self-­government according to private judgment may have been better. He must
have seen some benefit in introducing hauthorization of sufficient value to
override the contortions needed to square it with the absolute need to provide
moral ­immunity to obedient subjects. Michael J. Green provides this piece of
the puzzle, mounting a persuasive argument that Hobbes added this idea at
least in part in order to provide a basis for legal immunity for the sovereign
monarch and his ministers that would be more secure than the lawyers’ maxim
that “the king can do no wrong”. Green extensively documents the evolution of
contemporary debate over the immunity of kings and their ministers through-
out the Civil War period, making entirely plausible his thesis that Hobbes was
intending to engage that debate with his notion of hauthorization.”46
Green also provides an exceptionally lucid description of the conceptual
knot Martinich perceived Hobbes’s ideas of authorization and right renuncia-
tion to comprise, and successfully untangles it by showing that “it is possible
to authorize a person’s actions without extending rights to that person”.47 So
there is no conceptual incoherence in Hobbes’s sovereign-making formula,
even using our own ideas of authorization. Whereas Byron responds to Mar-
tinich by arguing that authorization and alienation of rights are at bottom two
ways of getting at the same idea of subjection—that the terms “authorize” and
“give up” are actually synonymous—Green responds by showing that even on
our regular understanding of authorization, we can authorize without extend-
ing rights. This is obviously true of authorization in our sense, and turns out to
be true of hauthorization as well.
Green emphasizes the need to establish sovereign immunity. Hobbes’s
argument for sovereign immunity in earlier versions of his political theory
is strengthened by the idea that subjects hauthorize all the actions of the
sovereign. Subjects, having “ratified the people’s acts in general”, grant that
“­whatsoever is commanded by the sovereign power is as to the subject (though
not so always in the sight of God) justified by the command”.48 To then disal-
low some of those judgments or protest against them when one disapproves of
them is to change during the play of a game the rules all have agreed on. But if

46 Green, “Authorization” , pp. 39–46.

47 Green, “Authorization”, p. 26.
48 l xxii.15.

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Authorization and Moral Responsibility 185

all agreed on the rules, enforcing the rules is not unjust to any, whereas defect-
ing from them would be unjust to all the others. To seek then to punish the
sovereign for actions permitted under the rules adopted by oneself is unjustifi-
able. It is doubtful that Hobbes would have added the idea of hauthorization to
his grand theory in such a central place unless he saw it as having philosophi-
cal value, and not just practical value for a contemporary dispute. Perhaps he
had been trying to convey the same idea all along. In addition to its implica-
tion for sovereign immunity, the idea that members of a political society all
commit to treating the civil will as their own controlling will underscores their
fundamental equality, makes clear the basis of their unity, and may have the
same psychological effect as patriotism of creating the fraternal sentiments
that help to stabilize political societies.
The understanding of Hobbes’s view emerging from the distinctions we’ve
explored has advantages over alternatives that see Hobbes as having attempt-
ed to eliminate the distinct perspectives of distinct natural persons. On one
such alternative, developed by Byron, Hobbes held that “not only crime and
sin are prohibited but also desires and aversions that fail to comport with
the public conscience expressed in the law”.49 Subjects’ “mere compliance
with the law is not sufficient” and natural desires to do things prohibited by
law “are still blameworthy and punishable”, because reflecting “contempt for
the sovereign”.50 What is required is to cease to have any desires to do such
things. Byron’s discussion wavers between claiming that on any matter treated
by sovereign laws or commands subjects are not to “have their own private
conscience”—they are to “extinguish” their natural judgment—and claiming
that they are to make their private judgments “comport” with or be identical
in content to the sovereign’s judgment expressed in those laws or commands.
Of course, Hobbes would agree that we are prohibited from acting on natural
desires to do things prohibited by the law, but there is no evidence that Hobbes
seeks to prohibit us from having natural desires, or from having natural desires
non-identical in content to the natural desires of the sovereign individual(s)
whose natural will(s) provides content to the public will expressed in laws and
commands, or from having private opinions about good based on those de-
sires. In fact Hobbes’s stated position is that it violates natural law to punish
people for inward attitudes that are not expressed in illegal actions, for which
reason he condemns the practice of inquisition.51 If Byron’s suggestion is that
subjects should simply stop having any natural desires or judgments of good

49 Byron, Submission, p. 79
50 Byron, Submission, pp. 80–81.
51 l xlvi.37.

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186 Lloyd

and evil reflecting them, it is strictly impossible to carry out: A natural person
cannot help having natural judgments, just as she cannot help having natural
sensory perceptions. And although she might be able to extinguish her natural
sight by gouging out her eyes (thereby forcing herself to rely on other people’s
sight), she cannot cease to have her natural judgment except by mutilation so
extreme that she would be equally disabled from making the judgment to rely
on anyone else’s judgment either.
Byron seems at least obliquely to appreciate this problem, because he notes
that the subject is “numerically distinct from [the] sovereign and not a mind
reader”52 which suggests that he allows some greater differentiation than his
talk of collective agency would suggest. He must see that it is impossible for
subjects actually to cease to be natural persons. However, it is at least possi-
ble that a subject could try to make her natural judgments, desires, and wills
identical in content to those expressed in the many civil laws and commands.
These are products of the stew of our individual experiences, education, and
bodily constitution. Byron suggests that this identification is to be achieved by
“­meditation on the law”: meditation not just on the fact that violation of law
will be punished, so it would be prudent not to want to violate it, but thinking
about what desires we might acquire that would make it easier for us to com-
ply with the law, and trying to make ourselves come to have those desires. He
terms this process the “activity of subjection” which

involves four moments: First, good subjects adopt the vcd [“value con-
forming desire” a higher-order desire about the contents and structure
of one’s lower-order desires”]. Next, they determine the content of the
value schema prescribed by the sovereign, in order that they might assess
the extent of the conformity of their own value schema to the prescribed
schema. Then, they adjust their desires and aversions in order to improve
that conformity. Finally, they resolve to monitor the satisfaction of the
vcd over time…”53

It would be one thing if meditation on the law meant only reminding our-
selves of our moral commitment to obey the law, in which we have a higher-
order interest. That we can do, and Hobbes himself recommends that subjects
be taught their moral and Christian duty to obey from the pulpit. But both
because it is difficult to bootstrap our desires, and because we would have to
acquire an enormous, endless and indeterminate set of desires depending on

52 Byron, Submission, p. 114.

53 Byron, Submission, p. 83.

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specifics of the laws and their interpretation, this suggestion is wildly imprac-
tical. Consider the number of laws applying to a subject over her lifetime and
multiply this by the number of desires or value judgments that may be em-
bedded in each law on all possible interpretations of it, supposing the subject
could even think of these. Conforming her desires and evaluative schemata
to all of those practically speaking innumerable sub-law determinants of laws
(which may well be mutually inconsistent) would be more than a full-time job.
The suggestion is also quite chilling, requiring that we become “Stepford
wives” desiring only what the sovereign desires.54 The simplest, and far less
repulsive, solution is not to require identity of judgments, but rather to argue
in support of our concluding a natural judgment that we should operation-
ally privilege the public judgment even when we privately disagree with it,
by acting on the public judgment. This, as we’ve seen, is what Hobbes argues.
When people commit to deferring to the law, as they do when they hauthorize
a s­ overeign, they express their own regulative (higher-order) private judgment
that doing so is right. This is their authentic moral judgment that they ought to
defer to the law, and that it is right that they be held accountable for failing to
do so. It is not that subjects do or should only ever will whatever specific things
the law wills, let alone that law is somehow intrinsically reason-giving, or that
it preempts all reasons. If they have accepted Hobbes’s interpretation of reli-
gious duty, they further believe that God will hold them responsible for defect-
ing from the commitment they undertake based on that judgment.55 This is
enough to count as a good subject, and it is all that can reasonably be required,
because it is the best we can do. Hobbes repeatedly insists in his debate with
Bramhall that we are not free to will what we will; our will is the product of
our appetites and opinions, and the content of these appetites and opinions is
determined not by our choice, but by our experience and natural constitution.
Byron is impressed by Hobbes’s remark that good subjects obey their sovereign
not from fear of punishment but “sincerely from the heart”. The better way to
understand that sincerity is as rooted in subjects’ principled commitment to
displaying the obedience they judge to be morally (and religiously) required.

54 The reference is to the automata that the husbands in the town of Stepford modeled after
and then substituted for their human wives (whom they killed) in order to have “perfect”
wives who wanted all and only what they wanted, and acted accordingly. The Stepford
Wives by Ira Levin (1972), film adaption directed by Bryan Forbes (1975).
55 Also, God will hold them responsible for refusing to undertake that commitment when
others are willing to do so jointly. Hobbes’s system contains not just a duty to obey gov-
ernment if one has submitted to it, but also a duty to submit to government with willing
others.

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188 Lloyd

Byron’s impulse to resolve conflict between different wills by literally trans-

forming them into a single will (the Stepford solution) would make sense if
subjects were not always ineliminably unique natural persons. It would also
work if humans were the same sort of natural persons as are drone bees or
worker ants, hardwired to will only what the Queen wills.56 But Hobbes goes
out of his way in every version of the political work to explain the difference,
indicating that Byron’s proposal to make us all desire the very same things is a
solution Hobbes explicitly considered and rejected. It is precisely because we
cannot make ourselves all think and want the same things that artificial ties of
moral obligation are necessary to maintain human societies. Hobbes devises a
political theory that demands of us only what we can reasonably be expected
to do. We may acquiesce, for duty’s sake, in the doing of particular actions we
don’t personally approve; but we cannot reasonably be expected to assume
moral responsibility for those actions. Hobbes’s theory, including its unfamil-
iar conception of authorization, respects that fact.

S. A. Lloyd
Professor of Philosophy, Law and Political Science, University of Southern
California
lloyd@usc.edu

56 Instead, in humans the individual’s private good (which reflects the individual’s desires)
differs from the public good. l xvii.8.

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