The notions of duty and obligation constitute the central focus of Rawls's account of political authority. This chapter examines Rawls's accounts of (1) the justification of political authority; (2) the essential elements of a just constitutional regime; (3) the conditions under which resistance to just institutions is permissible or required; and (4) the conditions under which institutions cease to deserve fidelity and obedience. It commences with Rawls's accounts of duty and obligation, focusing on his accounts of (...) (1) the duties and obligation of citizens; and (2) the duty to obey unjust laws. Rawls discusses two instances in which certain forms of resistance are justifiable: civil disobedience; and conscientious refusal. Rawls's account continues to be oriented by the underlying notion that the legitimate exercise of coercive political power must be justifiable on terms that persons subject to that power can affirm on due reflection. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Political AuthorityThe Two Wheels of the DharmaWhalen Lai“The twin wheels of the dharma The two wings of the dove”The twin wheels of the dharma, one of power and the other of righteousness, is the classic metaphor in the Buddhist view of the state and the saṅgha. We will first register the distinction of that metaphor by going back to its historical roots, showing how and why it is (...) more meaningful for Buddhists than for Hindus. Then we will map its structural growth sociologically, weigh its overall strengths and weaknesses, and consider other Buddhist options for civil order and interstate relationships. Finally we will examine the price of modernity and the crisis of authority that Buddhist culture faces.Toward a Genealogy of the Twin WheelsThe legend of the Buddha is by now well known. Prince Siddhārtha left family and home, and renounced the kingdom and the world. He had seen the inevitability of suffering. He vowed to find its cause to eliminate that result. After his enlightenment, he reflected upon releasing that path to the world. When the Buddha so taught the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path to his old companions at Benares, tradition then remembers that as the Buddha “turning the wheel of dharma.” The wheel (cakra) is a metaphor; it refers to the wheel of a sun chariot and is now on the national flag of India. That cosmic wheel has rolled on since time immemorial; as saṃsāra, it has been endless suffering. That is, until the Buddha so turned the sun wheel anew, marking it possible for the first time end that cycle and point the way to nirvāṇic liberation. History was so changed with that act of the Buddha at Benares. Mankind turned a corner. Christianity sees the event on the cross to be, likewise, a break in time. History as we know it had ended. The end time, the eschatological kingdom with its promise of a new heaven and a new earth, have dawned. The price of Adam’s sin was death. Christ’s resurrection turned that around.In Buddhism, the normal course of life and death (rebirth: saṃsāra) also ended [End Page 171] with the Buddha’s enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. The path to nirvāṇa was open. The city of nirvāṇa is in sight. Or as a Buddhist miracle would tell it, the water of the Ganges flowed backward in response to an act of truth (satyāgraha).The event at Benares when the Buddha turned the wheel of dharma anew may be a major inspiration for the ideology of the twin wheels. In general, Hinduism needs only to presume one wheel; it does not count a second. Although Hinduism knows its share of renunciation and liberation (mokṣa), the Brahmanical system set down by the Vedas is committed to safeguarding the sanctity of the caste system. It can absorb mokṣa under the larger law for its varṇāśramadharma. The renunciation is ideally the last station in life, coming after formal retirement from active household duties, and well approaching old age and a good time for learning how to transcend it. Buddhism challenged the caste system by setting up the saṅgha, a new Buddhist community. Hinduism lacks that call for reconstituting society. It does not know the “saṅgha and state” tension that Buddhists know like Christians would the tension between church and state. In the end, the Vedānta philosophy in Hinduism does not postulate that tension. The ātman-brahman identity of self and universe is inherently monistic.This is not to say Hindus do not face a basic conflict between two contrary worlds. It does but it solves it differently. The tragic dilemma in the Bhagavadgītā is that Arjuna, who came to embrace nonviolence like a Buddhist or a Jain would, was eventually persuaded to fight, namely, to perform his caste duty of being a warrior, ready to kill and be killed. That, in a Greek tragic term, is the dike of some cosmic dharma wheel. Oedipus Rex, in the end, must bow to his fate and lot... (shrink)

Legitimate political authority is often said to involve a “right to rule,” which is most plausibly understood as a Hohfeldian moral power on the part of the state to impose obligations on its subjects (or otherwise to change their normative situation). Many writers have taken the state’s moral power (if and when it exists) to be a correlate, in some sense, of an obligation on the part of the state’s subjects to obey its directives. Thus legitimate political (...) authority is said to entail a general obligation to obey the law, and a general obligation to obey the law is said to entail legitimate political authority. With some version of this idea in mind, many writers attempt to establish full (or partial) legitimate political authority by first arguing for the intermediate conclusion that there exists a general (or partial) obligation to obey the law. This article argues that such a strategy is fundamentally mistaken, because while legitimate authority does indeed entail an obligation to obey the law, an obligation to obey the law does not, in and of itself, entail legitimate authority. This can be referred to as “the reverse entailment problem.” To avoid this problem, a theory of political authority must argue directly for the existence of the appropriate kind of moral power on the part of the state. This article argues for the “value-based” conception of a moral power, which states, very roughly, that one person holds a power over another if there is sufficient value in the former possessing the capacity intentionally to impose an obligation on the latter (or otherwise to change her normative situation). This seemingly simple understanding of a moral power gives rise to surprisingly strong adequacy conditions on what can count as an acceptable theory of legitimate political authority, and these conditions decisively rule out most of the standard theories in the literature. (shrink)

This article examines the impact of the growth of multilateral and transnational governance on sovereignty and the diffusion of political authority. It begins by exploring the legacy of World War II and the building of the UN system. The rise of intergovernmentalism and transnational governance arrangements is examined followed by an assessment of some of the leading changes in the postwar global politics landscape. These issues are explored in greater depth across two cases: security and the environment. The (...) article then examines a set of trends which can be characterized as a gridlock in leading institutions, and highlights the political uncertainty ahead at the global level. (shrink)

Besides commanding coercive power, a political authority is supposed to offer directives which ought to exclude private judgment. Any defense of inalienable rights or limited rights of resistance suggests some legitimate residual private judgment. Such retained rights threaten to undermine the binding force of authoritative directives. ;The case of Hobbesian sovereignty typifies this problem. Hobbes claims agents must establish permanent and absolute political authorities, and they can do so only by completely submitting themselves to a sovereign power (...) whose public will stand for their own. Hobbesian political obligation consists in being bound not to act on one's own judgment, but even Hobbes allows for limited rights of resistance. ;Building on the work of Joseph Raz, I show how political authority binds our conduct by providing special reasons not to act on our private judgment. I explain how there can be scope and jurisdictional limitations on political authority, indeed, Hobbesian political authority. Any given subject might not completely authorize political power, but such power can still be absolute. Since private judgment endures in a civil society, subjects are in some position to evaluate the legitimacy of authoritative directives. To the extent authority binds and neither merely advises nor merely coerces, subjects must have reasons why they should not act on their private judgments. (shrink)

Robert Nozick and Eric Mack have tried to show that a minimal state could be just. A minimal state, they claim, could help to protect people’s moral rights without violating moral rights itself. In this article, I will discuss two challenges for defenders of a minimal state. The first challenge is to show that the just minimal state does not violate moral rights when taxing people and when maintaining a monopoly on the use of force. I argue that this challenge (...) can be met. The second challenge is to show that the just min-imal state has political authority including, most importantly, the moral power to im-pose duties on citizens. I argue that both Nozick and Mack lack the resources to meet that challenge, and that political authority cannot be deflated. This is an important prob-lem because a lack of political authority also undermines a state’s justness. (shrink)

Andres Rosler's study looks at Aristotle and the question of political obligation and its limits. Rosler takes his exploration further, considering the ethical underpinning of Aristotle's political thought, the normativity of his ethical and political theory, and the concepts of political authority and obligation themselves"--Provided by publisher.

The nature and impact of authority have been central to social theory since antiquity, and most students of politics, culture and organizations have – in one manner or another – visited the topic. Theorists recognize that the exercise of authority is conditioned by the environment, but their work has not always integrated fundamental changes in communication infrastructure, and in particular the diffusion of mass media. With the daily evolution of telecommunications, this is a good historical moment to re-evaluate (...) the notion of authority. My goal is to assess ways to both preserve extraordinarily useful categories from the past, and at the same time, make those typologies more sensitive to contemporary mediated communication. Here I synthesize American research on media and political communication with recent theoretical approaches to authority, expanding current views of coercion and submission. (shrink)

Just war theory is currently dominated by two positions. According to the orthodox view, provided that jus in bello principles are respected, combatants have an equal right to fight, regardless of the justice of the cause pursued by their state. According to “revisionists” whenever combatants lack reasons to believe that the war they are ordered to fight is just, their duty is to disobey. I argue that when members of a legitimate state acting in good faith are ordered to fight, (...) they acquire a pro-tanto obligation to obey which does not depend for its validity on the justice of the cause being pursued. However, when the war is unjust, this obligation may be overridden, under certain conditions, by the obligation not to contribute to the unjustified killing of innocents. This is because the pro-tanto force of the duty to obey the law is best understood in terms of “presumptive”, rather than “exclusionary” reasons for action. This approach captures the insights of both the orthodox and the revisionist view, while avoiding the problems that afflict each of them. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Political AuthorityA Christian PerspectiveMichael von BrückGeneral Reflection: Apocalyptic and Utopian Models of Progress and ReligionEuropean tradition of thought is shaped by two different mythical imaginations of time structure: apocalyptic thought and the concept of utopia.Jewish apocalyptical thinking culminated in the expectation that God would finally complete the processes of history at the end of time. In conjunction with Iranian dualism this expectation was interpreted metaphysically: After the collapse (...) of the existing order God would create a messianic kingdom of peace and justice, that is, a kingdom under the direct rule of God. This was not “political progress” in the modern sense of the term, for the subject of these final events was God himself or God alone. Human beings might participate in accelerating or slowing down these divine actions by lawful or unlawful behavior—measured according to the Mosaic Law, but human historical acting itself would not lead to a betterment in this sense. Nevertheless, this form of thought gave history a direction, and this is what inspired later Jewish and Christian intentionality. Early Christianity was shaped by the expectation of the coming end of time in the immediate future; however, at the same time it added a remarkable tension to the traditional apocalyptic idea: the tension of fulfillment of time, which had happened already in the advent of Jesus as the Christ (messiah) and an expectation of the imminent completion of time (the return of Christ, which would finally end history and start the new kingdom). Since the second century ad this myth of future time became ontologized or platonized—that is, the future was transferred into an “other world.” This means that the new quality would not be a dimension of the future (only) but graspable in the ecclesiastical mediation of the sacraments. The eucharist was the pharmakon athanasias (medicine of immortality). At the same time there was a mystical dimension that holds that in a specific spiritual experience this dimension might be experienced by any person who would be prepared to receive it as divine grace. The paradigm of early Christianity failed: Christ did not return. There was no new kingdom that would have ended known history. In order to cope with this disappointment, two forms of life emerged that shaped the [End Page 159] spirit of Christianity throughout the Middle Ages, so to speak, until the end of the eighteenth century: ecclesiastical mediation of the saving reality and mystical participation in a transtemporal Beyondness.Utopia develops on the basis of difference between imagination and reality. At least structurally utopian thinking can be found in all cultures; usually it is expressed in the power of myths. This marks a difference between utopia and apocalyptics. There are three different types of utopian thinking: spatial, temporal, and in terms of different states of consciousness. Spatial utopia expects the final accomplishment or climax of history, that is, the essence of hope, in spatial terms, in different regions of the world, faraway, behind oceans or mountains (Atlantis, the country flowing with milk and honey, El Dorado, Shambhala, the islands of the blessed, etc.). These spaces lost their power of inspiring imagination because there are no more white spots on the map, and that is why this utopia had to emigrate into extraterrestrial spaces of the universe (the contemporary myths of ET, Star Wars, etc.)Temporal utopia transfers the field of expectation to the beginning of the world (paradise, Golden Age) or to the end of history (millennialistic thought, communistic utopia). These temporal expectations lost their power of inspiring imagination because the fulfillment was heralded time and again but never happened.Utopia in terms of a different state of consciousness transfers the catastrophe (the turning point of time and history) into the consciousness of human beings (the prophets of Israel, Buddha, Jesus, in a certain way Confucius, modern New Age movements, etc.). An individual or even collective awakening of consciousness in humans would transform the world from within into a new paradise. The credibility of this model is challenged by the actual suffering in the world, which does not seem to diminish.In actual history these three types occur in mixed forms. The Western idea of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Giles of Rome on Political AuthorityGraham McAleerDabo tibi regem in furore meo“I will give you a king in my rage” 1It is a commonplace among historians of medieval political theory that two great systems of thought dominate the period. Augustine’s City of God held the field until Thomas Aquinas absorbed Aristotle’s political thought largely culled from the latter’s Politics and Nicomachean Ethics. Aquinas stands as a (...) watershed, a moment when both sources meet and a synthesis is worked out in which Augustine loses ground to Aristotle. Indeed, Augustine’s thought loses such a hold on the political theory of the age that R. A. Markus has spoken of a “comfortable obliviousness” in the minds of theorists subsequent to Aquinas that “a profound cleavage” had been wrought by Thomas in the tradition of Christian political thought. 2 Ptolemy of Lucca and Giles of Rome, both of whom were students of Thomas, are picked out by Markus as typical of those theorists who are oblivious to the definitive break that Aquinas makes with Augustine.Although modern commentators of medieval political theory speak of an Augustinian tradition after Aquinas they are only referring to a series of thinkers who defended papal authority over and above monarchical authority. This tradition is said to be Augustinian because the thinkers defending papal authority, who included Giles, James of Viterbo and Augustinus Triumphus, were members of the Order of Hermits of St. Augustine. Nevertheless, these Augustinians are said to have absorbed Thomas’s Aristotelianism: convinced by his argument that since coercive power is intrinsic to political authority and since political authority is natural to the human condition, it must have been the case that coercive power existed in the state of innocence. These Augustinians, [End Page 21] modern scholarship maintains, did not then defend Augustine’s thesis that coercive political authority is unnatural to human society and was only introduced (albeit necessarily) into post-lapsarian society so that the worst excesses of our sinful condition might be controlled. Markus is by no means alone in identifying Giles as a follower of Thomas whose theory of dominium marks a radical break with Augustine. 3 Recently, J. M. Blythe has cited Markus when concurring with him that Giles simply adopts Thomas’s position which, as he puts it, “was to become ubiquitous in late medieval political discourse.” 4Perhaps this consensus has its origin in a most peculiar fact about twentieth-century scholarship on Giles’s political thought: none of it is based on a wide reading of his philosophical and theological corpus. Admittedly, an extensive reading of Giles is a daunting task. The editors-in-chief of the project to provide critical editions of Giles’s works catalogue sixty-seven titles and this vast array of writings match those of the other “greats” of the period in their scope, variety, complexity, and influence. 5 The hope of this essay is to show that a reading of Giles’s Sentences-commentary reveals him to be far more Augustinian than previously acknowledged this century.Although it is well recognized that Giles was one of the most original and influential political theorists of the Middle Ages, the pages dedicated to his political ideas amount to a few pages here and there, and sometimes as little as a few isolated comments, in the standard works on medieval political theory. 6 Moreover, these works unanimously consider only Giles’s explicitly political works. This limitation began with Otto Gierke, who single-handedly demonstrated the depth and richness of medieval political theory. At the beginning of his classic work, Political Theory of the Middle Age, Gierke provides a fifteen-page list of sources. For Thomas’s political thought Gierke directs us not only to Thomas’s explicitly political treatises such as his commentary on Aristotle’s Politics and the opusculum, De regimine principum, but also to the Summa theologiae, Summa contra gentiles, Thomas’s Disputed and Quodlibetal questions, [End Page 22] his exposition of the Psalms, and commentaries on Paul’s Letters as well as his Sentences-commentary. Yet for Giles only his De regimine principum and De potestate ecclesiastica are cited. 7 Gierke’s selection is repeated... (shrink)

What gives some people the right to issue commands to everyone else and force everyone else to obey them? And why should people obey the commands of those with political power? These two key questions are the heart of the issue of political authority, and, in this volume, two philosophers debate the answers. Michael Huemer argues that political authority is an illusion and that no one is entitled to rule over anyone. He discusses and rebuts (...) the major theories supporting political authority's rightfulness: implicit social contract theory, hypothetical contract theories, democratic theories of authority, and utilitarian theories. Daniel Layman argues that democratic governments have authority because they are needed to protect our rights and because they are accountable to the people. Each author writes two replies directly addressing the arguments and ideas of the other. Key Features Covers a key foundational problem of political philosophy: the authority of government. Debate format ensures a full hearing of both sides. A Glossary includes key concepts in political philosophy related to the issue of authority. Annotated Further Reading sections point students to additional resources. Clear, concrete examples and arguments help students clearly see both sides of the argument. A Foreword by Matt Zwolinski describes a broader context for political authority and then traces the key points and turns in the authors' debate. (shrink)

Transnational corporations have become actors with significant political power and authority which should entail responsibility and liability, specifically direct liability for complicity in human rights violations. Holding TNCs liable for human rights violations is complicated by the discontinuity between the fragmented legal/political structure of the TNC and its integrated strategic reality and the international state system which privileges sovereignty and non-intervention over the protection of individual rights. However, the post-Westphalian transition—the emergence of multiple authorities, increasing ambiguity of (...) borders and jurisdiction and blurring of the line between the public and private spheres—should facilitate imposing direct responsibility on transnational firms. Mechanisms for imposing direct responsibility on TNCs are considered including voluntary agreements and international law. However, I conclude that a hybrid public-private regime which relies on non-hierarchical compliance mechanisms is likely to be both more effective and consistent with the structure of the emerging transnational order. (shrink)

Those who bear the burdens of injustice and oppression are entitled to act in ways contrary to existing laws and institutions to secure their own entitlements and those of others. This article aims to articulate a Confucian perspective on resistance against injustice. There are reasons for thinking that the notion of resistance is fundamentally at odds with Confucian political thought. In this article, I move beyond this simple conflict/compatibility model and explore the complex relationships between resistance and Confucianism. On (...) one hand, some of Confucianism’s core commitments can be better attained in contemporary societies by allowing resistance; on the other, a Confucian perspective can offer insights into current discussions on the ethics of resistance. (shrink)

Three concepts—authority, obedience and obligation—are central to understanding law and political institutions. The three are also involved in the legitimation of the state: an apology for the state has to make a normative case for the state’s authority, for its right to command obedience, and for the citizen’s obligation to obey the state’s commands. Recent discussions manifest a cumulative scepticism about the apologist’s task. Getting clear about the three concepts is, of..

Fear and deference, and very little else, are the basis of political authority everywhere, in democracies and despotisms alike. The symbol of the first is the sword, and its actual instrument armed men. The symbol of the second is the clerical gown, and its actual instrument a priestly class or, more common now, a judicial class retaining the trappings of a priesthood.

States are believed to be the paradigmatic instances of legitimate political authority. But is their prominence justified? The classic concept of state sovereignty predicts the danger of a fatal deadlock among conflicting authorities unless there is an ultimate authority within a given jurisdiction. This scenario is misguided because the notion of an ultimate authority is conceptually unclear. The exercise of authority is multidimensional and multiattributive, and to understand the relations among authorities we need to analyse (...) this complexity into its different aspects. Instead of ultimate authorities we can have actors endowed with superior authority over others in one regard, but not necessarily in another. And this limited superiority is sufficient for resolving conflicts. There is no need for ultimate authorities. Having discarded the notion of sovereignty we can embrace a different conception of legitimate authority, one that is not interested in the pedigree of actors, but in their capacity to serve its subjects. If states wish to retain their central role in the domain of political authority, they will have to earn it. (shrink)

In this article, I sketch a Kant-inspired liberal account of human rights: the freedom-centred view. This account conceptualizes human rights as entitlements that any political authority—any state in the first instance—must secure to qualify as a guarantor of its subjects' innate right to freedom. On this picture, when a state (or state-like institution) protects human rights, it reasonably qualifies as a moral agent to be treated with respect. By contrast, when a state (or state-like institution) fails to protect (...) human rights, it loses its moral status and becomes liable to both internal and external interference. I argue that this account not only steers a middle course between so-called natural-law and political approaches to human rights but also satisfies three important theoretical desiderata— explanatory power, functional specificity, and critical capacity. (shrink)

I begin this essay with a notion of "authority" that makes a sharp distinction between authority and power, and grant that such authority is not only legitimate, but perhaps even necessary in human affairs. I then trace the devaluation of this idea through varying degrees of institutionalization, culminating in its political cooptation. I argue, finally, that what goes by the name of political authority is the very antithesis of the legitimate and necessary element that (...) we began with. (shrink)

It is not unusual for Aristotelian scholars to claim that Aristotle does not have a notion of authority. The argument that insurmountable conceptual-historical barriers make it impossible for a Greek thinker to have something even similar to authority is usually put forward to deny the existence of such a concept in Aristotle. This chapter argues that this type of objection often mistakes the existence of a concept for the existence of a single word or expression used to convey (...) such concept and that Aristotle’s texts are no stranger to a discernible concept of political authority. The claim that Aristotle does not have the notion of political authority is often tied in with a misunderstanding of the concept of authority itself. Once we get to the bottom of the concept of authority as employed by contemporary jurisprudence, it is fairly clear that Aristotle does accommodate such notion. Special consideration is given to the bearing of Hobbesian and Lockean accounts of authority upon Aristotle’s politics. (shrink)

The central purpose of this paper is to examine the case for political authority, i.e., the argument for having political authority rather than for having none. Thus, the case for political authority is the case against anarchism. My construction of that case owes much, no doubt, to observations made long ago by Thomas Hobbes and john locke. Nevertheless, these observations have never been stated in a satisfactory and systematic fashion, not even by Hobbes and (...) locke themselves. Hobbes’ observations have, more often than not, been misunderstood, and those of locke have generally been overlooked. However, this paper is not intended to be an exercise in the history of political philosophy. Rather, it is an assessment of a philosophical thesis, namely, that political authority is essential to man's survival and well-being. Although this thesis is rarely contested and, in fact, borders on the commonplace, it is contestable. Moreover, since disenchantment with authority and how it is exercised is growing, an examination of how men are likely to fare in its absence is appropriate. Such an examination is complex, but it is not impossible. (shrink)

I propose to discuss here a much-celebrated objection to the concept of political authority. The authority of the state, this objection goes, cannot be justified because it demands of persons that they compromise their moral autonomy. The argument supporting this objection is usually advanced in conceptual terms; political authority is said to be inconsistent with moral autonomy in its very concept. For reasons to be discussed shortly, I think this argument is mistaken. More importantly, however, (...) I think it misrepresents the nature of the conflict which is likely to arise between the authority of the state and the autonomous moral agent. By getting clear on the problems with the conceptual argument, we will be in a better position to appreciate the actual character of this conflict. My discussion of the conceptual argument is intended to serve as a vehicle for the pursuit of this larger goal. It should become apparent that the conflict between the moral agent and the state, as it will be critiqued here, is an inescapable dimension of political life. But I shall offer some reasons to think that this point does not require us to question the legitimacy of political authority as is frequently supposed. (shrink)

From a left-libertarian perspective, it seems almost impossible for states to acquire political authority. For that reason, left-libertarians like Peter Vallentyne understandably hope that states without political authority could nonetheless implement left-libertarian justice. Vallentyne has argued that one can indeed assess a state’s justness without assessing its political authority. Against Vallentyne, I try to show that states without political authority have to be judged unjust even if they successfully promote justice. The reason (...) is that institutions can be unjust independently from what they achieve or do: they can be ‘intrinsically unjust’. Institutions, I argue, are intrinsically unjust when they have legal liberties and powers without having the corresponding moral liberties and powers. States without political authority are intrinsically unjust in that sense. Hence the issues of a state’s justness and a state’s political authority cannot be dealt with separately. This is a problem not only for left-libertarians but for ‘philosophical anarchism’ more generally. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Basic Human Rights: Rawls's List Basic Human Rights: Their Nature and Function Basic Human Rights: A Rawlsian Justification Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes.

Allen Buchanan argues that it doesn’t matter whether a state has authority in the sense of being able to create binding obligations for its citizens, so long as it is morally justified in wielding political power. In this paper, I look at this issue from a slightly different angle. I argue that it matters a great deal whether citizens relate to their state in an obligatory fashion. This is for two reasons. First, a fully morally justified state must (...) be an efficacious state; it must be able to realise its values and make its rules stick. My contention will be that enduring stability can only be secured when citizens, or at least a significant proportion of citizens, are tangibly bound to regulate their conduct in accordance with a principle of obedience to just states. Second, it is only when individuals interact in the right way with the justification for state power that the state itself as a pervasive and coercive entity does not pose a problem for them as reason-responsive agents. In fac.. (shrink)

This essay seeks to provide a justification for the ‘egalitarian authority claim’, according to which citizens of democratic states have a moral duty to obey (at least some) democratically made laws because they are the outcome of an egalitarian procedure. It begins by considering two prominent arguments that link democratic authority to a concern for equality. Both are ultimately unsuccessful; but their failures are instructive, and help identify the conditions that a plausible defense of the egalitarian authority (...) claim must meet. The first argument (discussed in Section II, after Section I clarifies what authority and democracy are taken to consist in) appeals to the simple idea that fairness disallows granting ourselves special privileges that we deny to others; and it suggests that fairness thus requires obeying democratic decisions rather than acting on our own judgment of the right policy. I show that this argument fails; and its failure indicates that we must invoke a less formal, more substantive understanding of equality to justify democratic authority. The second argument, recently suggested by Thomas Christiano, does just that. Democratic authority is, on this account, not justified by the formal demand for equal treatment but by the distinctive value of showing public equal respect to our fellow citizens. Such public equal respect requires treating as authoritative the democratic decisions in which citizens had an equal say. This argument does not, however, succeed in its goal either. While it plausibly establishes the value of democratic institutions, it does not provide grounds for a duty to obey democratic decisions (Section III). This essay thus develops an alternative argument, according to which egalitarian procedures have authority because, by obeying them, we can avoid acting on certain considerations that must be excluded from our intrinsically valuable egalitarian relationships. The authority of democratic decisions rests on the egalitarian fact that none of us has more of a say than any other, not on the further fact (crucial to the previous argument) that each of us has a positive say (Sections IV and V). The argument in turn helps us understand the limits of democratic authority: it is constrained not only by a demand for equality, and by considerations of justice, but also by a requirement of mutual concern without which our egalitarian relationships lack their distinctive value (Section VI). (shrink)

This article argues that the formally similar conceptions of political authority provided in Oliver O’Donovan’s Resurrection and Moral Order and The Desire of the Nations appear to assume different ontologies of political authority. The former account conceives political authority as a special use of natural authorities found in the created order, where ‘authority’ is defined as what it is that evokes free and intelligible human action. The latter account, however, appears to attribute the (...) existence of political authority exclusively to divine providence. I contend that these two accounts of political authority are ostensibly in tension. I also argue that O’Donovan’s subsequent ‘providentialist’ account of political authority is unable to explain how political authority can evoke free and intelligible action in political communities. I maintain that O’Donovan can remove this apparent tension by returning the essence of political authority to creation, as he did in Resurrection and Moral Order, and then regard the Christ-event as redeeming political authority rather than merely restricting its historical function to judgment, as he argues in The Desire of the Nations. The emergence of O’Donovan’s ‘Christian liberalism’ could then be regarded as the ‘work of divine providence in history’ facilitated by the redemption of the natural authorities in the created order. (shrink)

According to William Edmundson, a legitimatepolitical authority is one that claims tocreate in its subjects a general duty ofobedience to the law, and that succeeds increating in its subjects a duty to obey stateofficials when they apply the law in particularcases. His argument that legitimate politicalauthority does not require the state''s claim tobe true rests on his analysis of legitimatetheoretical authority, and the assumption thattheoretical and practical authority are thesame in the relevant respects, both of whichare challenged (...) here. In addition, Edmundsonfails to demonstrate that a general,content-independent, duty to obey officials whoadminister the law avoids the criticismsphilosophical anarchists pose to a general,content-independent duty to obey the law. Finally, Edmundson requires a legitimate stateto sincerely claim to create a generalduty to obey the law, yet he also argues thatin some cases the state ought to make literallyfalse claims regarding the particular dutiesincumbent upon its subjects. DespiteEdmundson''s recent efforts to reconcile thesetwo claims, the conflict remains. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

One of the most common arguments in favour of the state's authority is that without the coordinating hand of political institutions, we could not achieve important moral benefits. I argue that if we understand authority correctly, then coordination cannot even in principle establish that coordinators have political authority.

The events of September 11, 2001 have prompted significant concern to protect against future terror attacks, especially attacks that would involve the use of biological weapons - the most dangerous weapons of massdestruction considered accessible to terrorist groups and organizations. This concern, in turn, has led to a re-evaluation of the public health system and its preparedness to meet the challenges of treating a large number of people in circumstances of public fear and significant demand for resources. One important result (...) of this re-evaluation has been the development of a Model State Emergency Health Powers Act that is designed to grant state officials the authority necessary to coordinate an effective response to biological tenor. The Model Act was first publicized in late October, 2001,and a revised version was publicized December21, 2001.As of October 1,2002,legislation based on the Act had been introduced in thirty-six states, and versions of the Act had been enacted in twenty states and the District of Columbia. (shrink)

This essay reevaluates the Weimar writings of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, specifically, their intellectual efforts to replace the political authority of Kantian liberalism with, respectively, a ‘political theology’ and ‘Biblical atheism’ derived from the thought of early-modern state theorists like Hobbes and Spinoza. Schmitt and Strauss each insisted that post-Kantian Enlightenment rationality was unraveling into a way of thinking that violently rejected ‘form’ of any kind, fixated myopically on material things and lacked any conception of the (...) external constraints that invariably condition the possibilities of philosophy, morality and politics. They considered Kantian reason and liberal politics to pose serious threats to ‘genuine’ expressions of rationality and as dangerous obfuscations of the necessity of political order—of the brute fact that human beings stand in need of ‘being ruled,’ as such. (shrink)

The state is often ascribed a special sort of authority, one that obliges citizens to obey its commands and entitles the state to enforce those commands through threats of violence. This book argues that this notion is a moral illusion: no one has ever possessed that sort of authority.

Most contemporary political philosophers take justice—rather than legitimacy—to be the fundamental virtue of political institutions vis-à-vis the challenges of ethical diversity. Justice-driven theorists are primarily concerned with finding mutually acceptable terms to arbitrate the claims of conflicting individuals and groups. Legitimacy-driven theorists, instead, focus on the conditions under which those exercising political authority on an ethically heterogeneous polity are entitled to do so. But what difference would it make to the management of ethical diversity in liberal (...) democratic societies if legitimacy were prior to or independent from justice? -/- This question identifies a widely underexplored issue whose theoretical salience shows how the understanding of what constitutes the primary question of political philosophy has a deep impact on how practical political questions are interpreted and addressed. What difference would it make, for example, whether the difficulties concerning the safeguard of human rights were couched in terms of the justice or of the legitimacy of the documents and treaties sanctioning their implementation. How should the issue of the quality of democracies be addressed whether one assigned priority to the justice or legitimacy of democratic institutions? Addressing these and other topical questions, the book offers a new theoretical angle from which to consider a number of pressing social and political issues. (shrink)

The problem of political authority concerns whether the institutions, practices, and activities we commonly find governments comprised of have sound moral foundations. The question is whether even the best of human communities, with their myriad of official elements, possess moral underpinnings so that what they require of their members may be enforced by some of their members. Political authority is expected to lend moral support to giving orders or issuing commands or handing down directives to people, (...) which they may be made to follow by some officials in the name of the public interest or as requirements of good community life. (shrink)

The legitimacy of political authority may be philosophically defended in a number of ways. It may be argued that the lineage, biological or otherwise, of a society's rulers confers upon them an entitlement to be obeyed. Or it may be contended that the body of law to which a polity's citizens are subject is just and, therefore, whatever group of governmental officials executes it does so legitimately. Alternatively, it may be maintained that the consensual genesis of a society's (...) political institutions can serve as its warrant. And finally, no one of the above justifications may provide, by itself, a sufficient ground for the exercise of political authority. Rather, some combination of them may be required to affirm the legitimacy of governmental institutions. (shrink)

Confucian political authority is often assumed illegitimate and it is regarded as meritocratic rather than democratic. However, I disagree with such an assumption, because from my perspective, Confucian political authority actually has a potential legitimacy which may contribute to establishing a responsive and harmonious state. Doing so, I argue that, since Confucian political authority is derived from the idea of “service” and “reciprocity,” it therefore advocates non-coercive moral persuasion and reciprocal obligations. In the following (...) discussion, I will point out that certain modern democratic theories on political authority, such as those concerning “general acceptability,” “consent,” “autonomy,” and “paternalism,” are inadequate to refute the legitimacy of Confucian political authority. Accordingly, I will propose that our contemplation over whether Confucian political authority is legitimate or not ought to be furthermore widened and deepened. (shrink)