Since Socrates, and through Descartes to the present day, the problems of self-knowledge have been central to philosophy's understanding of itself. Today the idea of ''first-person authority''--the claim of a distinctive relation each person has toward his or her own mental life--has been challenged from a number of directions, to the point where many doubt the person bears any distinctive relation to his or her own mental life, let alone a privileged one. In Authority and Estrangement, Richard Moran (...) argues for a reconception of the first-person and its claims. Indeed, he writes, a more thorough repudiation of the idea of privileged inner observation leads to a deeper appreciation of the systematic differences between self-knowledge and the knowledge of others, differences that are both irreducible and constitutive of the very concept and life of the person.Masterfully blending philosophy of mind and moral psychology, Moran develops a view of self-knowledge that concentrates on the self as agent rather than spectator. He argues that while each person does speak for his own thought and feeling with a distinctive authority, that very authority is tied just as much to the disprivileging of the first-person, to its specific possibilities of alienation. Drawing on certain themes from Wittgenstein, Sartre, and others, the book explores the extent to which what we say about ourselves is a matter of discovery or of creation, the difficulties and limitations in being ''objective'' toward ourselves, and the conflicting demands of realism about oneself and responsibility for oneself. What emerges is a strikingly original and psychologically nuanced exploration of the contrasting ideals of relations to oneself and relations to others. (shrink)

Democracy is not naturally plausible. Why turn such important matters over to masses of people who have no expertise? Many theories of democracy answer by appealing to the intrinsic value of democratic procedure, leaving aside whether it makes good decisions. In Democratic Authority, David Estlund offers a groundbreaking alternative based on the idea that democratic authority and legitimacy must depend partly on democracy's tendency to make good decisions.Just as with verdicts in jury trials, Estlund argues, the authority (...) and legitimacy of a political decision does not depend on the particular decision being good or correct. But the "epistemic value" of the procedure--the degree to which it can generally be accepted as tending toward a good decision--is nevertheless crucial. Yet if good decisions were all that mattered, one might wonder why those who know best shouldn't simply rule.Estlund's theory--which he calls "epistemic proceduralism"--avoids epistocracy, or the rule of those who know. He argues that while some few people probably do know best, this can be used in political justification only if their expertise is acceptable from all reasonable points of view. If we seek the best epistemic arrangement in this respect, it will be recognizably democratic--with laws and policies actually authorized by the people subject to them. (shrink)

In this book Zagzebski gives an extended argument that the self-reflective person is committed to belief on authority. Epistemic authority is compatible with autonomy, but epistemic self-reliance is incoherent. She argues that epistemic and emotional self-trust are rational and inescapable, that consistent self-trust commits us to trust in others, and that among those we are committed to trusting are some whom we ought to treat as epistemic authorities, modeled on the well-known principles of authority of Joseph Raz. (...) These principles apply to authority in the moral and religious domains. (shrink)

Legitimate authority -- The claims of law -- Legal positivism and the sources of law -- Legal reasons, sources, and gaps -- The identity of legal systems -- The institutional nature of law -- Kelsen's theory of the basic norm -- Legal validity -- The functions of law -- Law and value in adjudication -- The rule of law and its virtue -- The obligation to obey the law -- Respect for law -- A right to dissent? : civil (...) disobedience -- A right to dissent? : conscientious objection --The purity of the pure theory -- The argument from justice, or how not to reply to legal positivism. (shrink)

One of the key tenets of Linda Zagzebski’s book " Epistemic Authority" is the Preemption Thesis. It says that, when an agent learns that an epistemic authority believes that p, the rational response for her is to adopt that belief and to replace all of her previous reasons relevant to whether p by the reason that the authority believes that p. I argue that such a “Hobbesian approach” to epistemic authority yields problematic results. This becomes especially (...) virulent when we apply Preemption to cases in which the agent and the authority share their belief, maybe even for the same reasons, or in which both have either a positive or a negative graded doxastic attitude toward a given proposition. As an alternative I propose a “Socratic account”, according to which the authority will not only motivate us to adopt her belief, but also provide us with higher-order reasons for re-assigning our own considerations their proper place in the web of reasons for and against the view in question. (shrink)

This challenging and provocative book argues against much contemporary orthodoxy in philosophy and the social sciences by showing why objectivity in the domain of ethics is really no different from the objectivity of scientific knowledge. Many philosophers and social scientists have challenged the idea that we act for objectively authoritative reasons. Jean Hampton takes up the challenge by undermining two central assumptions of this contemporary orthodoxy: that one can understand instrumental reasons without appeal to objective authority, and that the (...) adoption of the scientific world view requires no such appeal. In the course of the book Jean Hampton examines moral realism, the general nature of reason and norms, internalism and externalism, instrumental reasoning, and the expected utility model of practical reasoning. The book is sure to prove to be a seminal work in the theory of rationality that will be read by a broad swathe of philosophers and social scientists. (shrink)

The modern state claims supreme authority over the lives of all its citizens. Drawing together political philosophy, jurisprudence, and public choice theory, this book forces the reader to reconsider some basic assumptions about the authority of the state. Various popular and influential theories - conventionalism, contractarianism, and communitarianism - are assessed by the author and found to fail. Leslie Green argues that only the consent of the governed can justify the state's claims to authority. While he denies (...) that there is a general obligation to obey the law, he nonetheless rejects philosophical anarchism and defends civility - the willingness to tolerate some imperfection in institutions - as a political virtue. (shrink)

The Aristotelian dictum that desire is the starting point of practical reasoning that ends in action can of course be denied. Its denial is a commonplace of moral theory in the tradition of Kant. But in this essay I am concerned with that issue only indirectly. I shall not contend that rational action always or necessarily does involve desire as its starting point; nor shall I deny it. My question concerns instead the possibility of its ever beginning in desire. For (...) there is a question whether it is even possible for reasoning to begin in desire, a question arising from the nature of desire and its objects, which to my knowledge has not been articulated. If we can see how desire can provide the arche of action, then we can consider later, and from that vantage point, whether it is necessary that it should do so. It will, I think, be possible eventually to argue that if practical reasoning has the character it must have, if it can begin in desire, then its starting point can be nothing but desire. (shrink)

Etiquette and other merely formal normative standards like legality, honor, and rules of games are taken less seriously than they should be. While these standards are not intrinsically reason-providing in the way morality is often taken to be, they also play an important role in our practical lives: we collectively treat them as important for assessing the behavior of ourselves and others and as licensing particular forms of sanction for violations. This chapter develops a novel account of the normativity of (...) formal standards where the role they play in our practical lives explains a distinctive kind of reason to obey them. We have this kind of reason to be polite because etiquette is important to us. We also have this kind of reason to be moral because morality is important to us. This parallel suggests that the importance we assign to morality is insufficient to justify it being substantive. (shrink)

Sometimes it is epistemically beneficial to form a belief on authority. When you do, what happens to other reasons you have for that belief? Linda Zagzebski’s total-preemption view says that these reasons are “preempted”: you still have them, but you do not use them to support your belief. I argue that this situation is problematic, because having reasons for a belief while not using them forfeits you doxastic justification. I present an alternative account of belief on authority, the (...) proper-basing view, which enables the agent to base her belief on as many reasons as she has. A salient result is that the notion of a preemptive reason, useful though it may be in accounting for acting on authority, does not have any place in an account of believing on authority or in epistemology more generally. (shrink)

Contemporary defenders of autonomy and traditional defenders of authority generally assume that they have so little in common as to make it hopeless to attempt a dialogue on the defensibility of epistemic, moral, or religious authority. In this paper I argue that they are mistaken. Under the assumption that the ultimate authority over the self is the self, I defend authority in the realm of belief on the same grounds as Joseph Raz uses in his well-known (...) defense of political authority in the tradition of political liberalism. The acceptance of authority over certain beliefs extends to moral and religious beliefs and is not only consistent with autonomy, but is entailed by rational self-governance. (shrink)

Can there be a theory of law? -- Two views of the nature of the theory of law : a partial comparison -- On the nature of law -- The problem of authority : revisiting the service conception -- About morality and the nature of law -- Incorporation by law -- Reasoning with rules -- Why interpret? -- Interpretation without retrieval -- Intention in interpretation -- Interpretation : pluralism and innovation -- On the authority and interpretation of constitutions (...) : some preliminaries -- Postema on law's autonomy and public practical reasons : a critical comment. (shrink)

Call “epistocracy” a political regime in which the experts, those who know best, rule; and call “the epistocratic claim” the assertion that the experts’ superior knowledge or reliability is “a warrant for their having political authority over others.” Most of us oppose epistocracy and think the epistocratic claim is false. But why is it mistaken? Contemporary discussions of this question focus on two answers. According to the first, expertise could, in principle, be a warrant for authority. What bars (...) the successful justification of epistocracy is that the relevant kind of expertise does not exist in politics (either because there are no procedure-independent standards of right or wrong in politics, or because, though such standards exist, no one knows better than anyone else what they require). This skeptical position comes, however, at a significant cost: Without the assumption that some political decisions are better than others, and that some people know better than others what these decisions are, it is difficult to make sense of much of our political practice, including how we criticize politicians and choose among candidates for office. The second answer accepts that there is expertise of the relevant sort in politics. It argues, however, that such expertise does not justify political authority because political justifications are subject to special “acceptability requirements.” Since claims to expertise are normally not acceptable to all qualified (reasonable etc.) points of view, they cannot function as premises in the justification of political authority, and the epistocratic claim fails. Yet as a number of critics have pointed out, this (broadly Rawlsian) strategy faces significant problems: it is at least unclear whether the strategy in fact bars all epistocratic conclusions whether there is any principled way to draw the distinction between qualified and non-qualified points of views on which it depends; and whether principled defenses for it are available and internally consistent. This article outlines a third and previously largely overlooked answer, which resists the epistocratic claim without either denying the existence of expertise in politics or invoking special acceptability requirements for political justifications. The only plausible argument for the epistocratic claim, this article argues, focuses on the compensatory role that the expert’s authority plays in correcting the subject’s relative unreliability or other agential shortcomings. The expert’s authority is thus justified only if the subject, by adopting a policy of obeying the expert’s directives, does not face problems that are very similar to the ones that the expert’s authority was meant to solve in the first place. If, for instance, the subject finds it no easier to reliably identify what the expert’s directives require of him than to reliably assess and act on the reasons with which the expert is meant to help him, then the expert’s directives lack the compensatory value that would justify her authority. But if some widely accepted empirical conjectures about politics in a pluralistic political community are correct, then citizens normally either have no reason to adopt a policy of obeying experts, or the experts with regard to whom they have reason to adopt such a policy differ, so that no expert has the kind of general authority over the polity that we associate with political rule. (We may call this the “non-compensation argument” against epistocracy.) The argument is important both because it helps shed light on the proper relation between authority and expertise in general, and because it shows that we can normally reject the epistocratic claim without adopting either the skeptical or the Rawlsian strategy, thus undercutting whatever support these views derive from the mistaken perception that they are necessary for resisting the threat of epistocracy. Finally, because the anti-epistocratic constraints it introduces apply only to justifications of the subjects’ duty to obey, but not to the existence or activities of political institutions as such, the compensation argument can accommodate our anti-epistocratic intuitions without excluding epistemic considerations from the design of political institutions more generally. (shrink)

I present an account of what it is to trust a speaker, and argue that the account can explain the common intuitions which structure the debate about the transmission view of testimony. According to the suggested account, to trust a speaker is to grant her epistemic authority on the asserted proposition, and hence to see her opinion as issuing a second order, preemptive reason for believing the proposition. The account explains the intuitive appeal of the basic principle associated with (...) the transmission view of testimony: the principle according to which, a listener can normally obtain testimonial knowledge that p by believing a speaker who testifies that p only if the speaker knows that p. It also explains a common response to counterexamples to this principle: that these counterexamples do not involve normal cases of testimonial knowledge. (shrink)

The very rules of our language games contain mechanisms of disregard. Philosophy of language tends to treat speakers as peers with equal discursive authority, but this is rare in real, lived speech situations. This paper explores the mechanisms of discursive inclusion and exclusion governing our speech practices, with a special focus on the role of gender attribution in undermining women’s authority as speakers. Taking seriously the metaphor of language games, we must ask who gets in the game and (...) whose moves can score. To do this, I develop an eclectic analysis of language games using basic inferential role theory and the concept of a semantic index, and develop the distinction between positional authority and expertise authority, which often conflict for members of oppressed groups. Introducing the concepts of master switches and sub-switches that attach to the index and change scorekeeping practices, I argue that women’s gender status conflicts with our status as authoritative speakers because sex marking in semantics functions as a master switch—“the F-switch”—on the semantic index, which, once thrown, changes the very game. An advantage of using inferentialism for understanding disregard of women’s discursive authority is that it locates the problem in the sanctioned moves, in the deontic structure of norms and practices of scorekeeping, and not primarily in the individual intentions of particular people. (shrink)

Modern societies are characterized by a division of epistemic labor between laypeople and epistemic authorities. Authorities are often far more competent than laypeople and can thus, ideally, inform their beliefs. But how should laypeople rationally respond to an authority’s beliefs if they already have beliefs and reasons of their own concerning some subject matter? According to the standard view, the beliefs of epistemic authorities are just further, albeit weighty, pieces of evidence. In contrast, the Preemption View claims that, when (...) one discovers what an authority believes, it is not permissible to rely on any of one’s own reasons concerning the subject matter. The original version of this view, as proposed by Linda Zagzebski, has recently been severely criticized for recommending blind trust and for abandoning even minimal standards for critical thinking. In our paper, we defend a new version of the Preemption View—Defeatist Preemptionism—in a way that differs radically from Zagzebski’s. We argue that our view can be derived from certain widely accepted general epistemic principles. In particular, we claim that preemption can be identified as a special case of source sensitive defeat. Moreover, we argue that Defeatist Preemptionism does not lead to the undesirable consequences that critics ascribe to the Preemption View. The paper thus articulates the foundations and refinements of the Preemption View, such that it adequately captures the phenomenon of epistemic authority and the rational requirements related to it. (shrink)

This paper explores the relation between rational authority and social power, proceeding by way of a philosophical genealogy derived from Edward Craig's Knowledge and the State of Nature. The position advocated avoids the errors both of the 'traditionalist' (who regards the socio-political as irrelevant to epistemology) and of the 'reductivist' (who regards reason as just another form of social power). The argument is that a norm of credibility governs epistemic practice in the state of nature, which, when socially manifested, (...) is likely to imitate the structures of social power. A phenomenon of epistemic injustice is explained, and the politicizing implication for epistemology educed. (shrink)

This paper takes a novel approach to the active bioethical debate over whether advance medical directives have moral authority in dementia cases. Many have assumed that advance directives would lack moral authority if dementia truly produced a complete discontinuity in personal identity, such that the predementia individual is a separate individual from the postdementia individual. I argue that even if dementia were to undermine personal identity, the continuity of the body and the predementia individual’s rights over that body (...) can support the moral authority of advance directives. I propose that the predementia individual retains posthumous rights over her body that she acquired through historical embodiment in that body, and further argue that claims grounded in historical embodiment can sometimes override or exclude moral claims grounded in current embodiment. I close by considering how advance directives grounded in historical embodiment might be employed in practice and what they would and would not justify. (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)

A while ago I pulled the short straw, and became chair of my department. One nice part of the job is to praise people I work with, which I can do sincerely because they are very praiseworthy. I also have to read a lot of praise by others; the familiar things—project evaluations, letters of recommendation, promotion dossiers, and so on and so forth. As a result, I have learnt to attend to praise a little more closely.

Stephen Darwall presents a series of essays that explore the view that morality is second-personal, entailing mutual accountability and the authority to address demands. He illustrates the power of the second-personal framework to illuminate a wide variety of issues in moral, political, and legal philosophy.

I am grateful to Donald Ainslie, Lisa Austin, Michael Blake, Abraham Drassinower, David Dyzenhaus, George Fletcher, Robert Gibbs, Louis-Philippe Hodgson, Sari Kisilevsky, Dennis Klimchuk, Christopher Morris, Scott Shapiro, Horacio Spector, Sergio Tenenbaum, Malcolm Thorburn, Ernest Weinrib, Karen Weisman, and the Editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs for comments, and audiences in the UCLA Philosophy Department and Columbia Law School for their questions.

H. L. A. Hart is heir and torch-bearer of a great tradition in the philosophy of law which is realist and unromantic in outlook. It regards the existence and content of the law as a matter of social fact whose connection with moral or any other values is contingent and precarious. His analysis of the concept of law is part of the enterprise of demythologising the law, of instilling rational critical attitudes to it. Right from his inaugural lecture in Oxford (...) he was anxious to dispel the philosophical mist which he found in both legal culture and legal theory. In recent years he has shown time and again how much the rejection of the moralizing myths which accumulated around the law is central to his whole outlook. His essays on “Bentham and the Demystification of the Law” and on “The Nightmare and the Noble Dream” showed him to be consciously sharing the Benthamite sense of the excessive veneration in which the law is held in Common Law countries, and its deleterious moral consequences. His fear that in recent years legal theory has lurched back in that direction, and his view that a major part of its role is to lay the conceptual foundation for a cool and potentially critical assessment of the law are evident. (shrink)

From citizens paying taxes to employees following their bosses’ orders and kids obeying their parents, we take it for granted that a whole range of authorities have the power to impose duties on others. However, although authority is often accepted in practice, it looks philosophically problematic if we conceive persons as free and as equals. -/- In this short and accessible book, Fabian Wendt examines the basis of authority, discussing five prominent theories that try to explain how claims (...) to authority can be vindicated. Focusing in particular on the issue of how states can rightfully claim authority, he rigorously analyses the theories’ arguments and evaluates their strengths and weaknesses. He also debates anarchism as an alternative that should be taken seriously if no theory ultimately succeeds in explaining state authority. -/- This clear and engaging book will be essential reading for anyone grappling with the most fundamental questions of authority and obligation in political theory and political philosophy. (shrink)

This paper attempts a conceptualisation of authority intended to be useful across all areas where the concept is relevant. It begins by setting off authority against power, on the one hand, and respect, on the other, and then spells out S1’s authority as consisting in S2’s voluntary action performed in the belief that S1 would approve of it. While this definition should hold for authority generally, a distinction is made between three different kinds of authority (...) according to what grounds them: personal, acquired and bestowed authority. Authority thus defined is then used as an example to argue that there is a kind of property that is response-dependent , but, consisting in all and only a response, is ontologically different from both secondary qualities and value judgments. While secondary qualities are interactive in that they depend on both the object and the perceiver and on what they are like, genuinely R-D qualities depend ontologically and metaphysically only on the responder. And whil.. (shrink)

One of the main challenges faced by realists in political philosophy is that of offering an account of authority that is genuinely normative and yet does not consist of a moralistic application of general, abstract ethical principles to the practice of politics. Political moralists typically start by devising a conception of justice based on their pre-political moral commitments; authority would then be legitimate only if political power is exercised in accordance with justice. As an alternative to that dominant (...) approach I put forward the idea that upturning the relationship between justice and legitimacy affords a normative notion of authority that does not depend on a pre-political account of morality, and thus avoids some serious problems faced by mainstream theories of justice. I then argue that the appropriate purpose of justice is simply to specify the implementation of an independently grounded conception of legitimacy, which in turn rests on a context- and practice-sensitive understanding of the purpose of political power. (shrink)

Recently, several philosophers have recast feminist arguments against pornography in terms of Speech Act Theory. In particular, they have considered the ways in which the illocutionary force of pornographic speech serves to set the conventions of sexual discourse while simultaneously silencing the speech of women, especially during unwanted sexual encounters. Yet, this raises serious questions as to how pornographers could (i) be authorities in the language game of sex, and (ii) set the conventions for sexual discourse - questions which these (...) speech act-theoretic arguments against pornography have thus far failed to adequately answer. I fill in this gap of the argumentation by demonstrating that there are fairly weak standards for who counts as an authority or convention-setter in sexual discourse. With this analysis of the underpinnings of a speech act analysis of pornography in mind, I discuss a range of possible objections. I conclude that (i) the endorsement of censorship by a speech act analysis of pornography competes with its commitment to the conventionality of speech acts, and, more damningly, that (ii), recasting anti-pornography arguments in terms of linguistic conventions risks an unwitting defence of a rapist's lack of mens rea - an intolerable result; and yet resisting this conclusion requires that one back away from the original claim to women's voices being 'silenced'. (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)

Popular textbook treatments of the fallacies approach to argument evaluation employ the Adversary Method identified by Janice Moulton (1983) that takes the goal of argumentation to be the defeat of other arguments and that narrows the terms of discourse in order to facilitate such defeat. My analysis of the textbooks shows that the Adversary Method operates as a Kuhnian paradigm in philosophy, and demonstrates that the popular fallacies pedagogy is authoritarian in being unresponsive to the scholarly developments in informal logic (...) and argumentation theory. A progressive evolution for the fallacies approach is offered as an authoritative alternative. (shrink)

Theories of political authority divide naturally into those that locate the source of states' authority in the history of states' interactions with their subjects and those that locate it in structural (or functional) features of states (such as the justice of their basic institutions). This paper argues that purely structuralist theories of political authority (such as those defended by Kant, Rawls, and contemporary “democratic Kantians”) must fail because of their inability to solve the boundary problem—namely, the problem (...) of locating the boundaries between different states' domains of authority in the natural or intuitive places. (shrink)

Soldiers sign contracts to obey lawful orders; they also swear oaths to this end. The enlistment contract for the Armed Forces of the United States combines both elements: -/- '9a. My enlistment is more than an employment agreement. As a member of the Armed Forces of the United States, I will be: (1) Required to obey all lawful orders and perform all assigned duties … (4) Required upon order to serve in combat or other hazardous situations.' -/- We standardly think (...) that these oaths and contracts give soldiers new moral reasons to fight. Many also think that soldiers who are ordered to fight by legitimate states have moral reasons to obey those orders, just in virtue of their provenance. -/- We generate these reasons through our voluntary decisions—to sign the contract or swear the oath; to form the institutions and give the orders. They are therefore additional moral reasons, on top of the reasons that we have prior to those voluntary decisions. Simply because they are additional, these reasons seem limited in force and scope. In particular, they arguably cannot override pre-existing commitments. For example, if I already have a duty not to kill an innocent person, my promising to breach that duty seems irrelevant to whether doing so is permissible. Similarly for orders issued by legitimate states: the citizens of a legitimate state have pre-existing moral reasons not to kill the innocent; by what alchemy could their state's orders allow combatants to override those reasons? If additional reasons could make prohibited acts permissible, as Sidgwick observed, ‘we could evade any moral obligation by promising not to fulfil it, which is clearly absurd’ (Sidgwick 1981). -/- We might conclude that the contracts soldiers sign, the oaths they take and the orders they receive have weight only when they pertain to acts that soldiers are already allowed to do. Perhaps these additional reasons can require actions that would otherwise be merely permissible, but they cannot license otherwise prohibited actions. If this is right, then it radically limits the relevance of contracts, oaths and authority to the ethics of war, since almost all conflicts involve soldiers breaching some pre-existing moral duties. -/- This is obviously true for soldiers fighting on the unjust side in a war, since almost all the killing they do is unjust. But in all actual wars soldiers on the just side also kill at least some innocent victims, whether as part of an unjust subordinate aim, as ‘collateral damage’, or simply because their adversaries are not sufficiently responsible for unjustified threats to be liable to be killed. If additional reasons cannot make otherwise prohibited acts permissible, then they are practically irrelevant to the ethics of killing in war, at least in this sense: if fighting is impermissible without regard to the contract, oath and authority of their state, then fighting is simply impermissible. -/- This is a tempting conclusion. In this paper, however, I argue that even if it is true at the level of objective permissibility, it is false for subjective permissibility. And since subjective permissibility is where (at least some of) the action is in the ethics of war, this is a significant result. I explain first why additional reasons can make otherwise subjectively prohibited acts permissible, then why just war theorists should care more than they seem to about subjective permissibility. Although I focus throughout on the ethics of war, my arguments generalise to all kinds of additional reasons. (shrink)

Shared activity is often simply willed into existence by individuals. This poses a problem. Philosophical reflection suggests that shared activity involves a distinctive, interlocking structure of intentions. But it is not obvious how one can form the intention necessary for shared activity without settling what fellow participants will do and thereby compromising their agency and autonomy. One response to this problem suggests that an individual can have the requisite intention if she makes the appropriate predictions about fellow participants. I argue (...) that implementing this predictive strategy risks derailing practical reasoning and preventing one from forming the intention. My alternative proposal for reconciling shared activity with autonomy appeals to the idea of acting directly on another's intention. In particular, I appeal to the entitlement one sometimes has to another's practical judgment, and the corresponding authority the other sometimes has to settle what one is to do. (shrink)

In the 60 years since IRAS was founded, and the 50 years since Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science started, science has developed enormously. More important, though less obvious, the character of religion has changed, at least in Western countries. Church membership has gone down considerably. This is not due to arguments, for example, about science and atheism, but reflects a change in sources of authority. Rather than the traditional and communal authority, an individualism that emphasizes “authenticity” characterizes (...) religion and spirituality in our time. Less extensive but similar is the loss of authority with respect to science. As a consequence, “religion and science” might seek to provide attractive constructive proposals for visions that integrate an ethos and a worldview. IRAS might contribute by providing a platform for information and the exchange of proposals for a particular audience, while Zygon serves a global and diverse audience with well-researched articles. (shrink)

In Testimony, Trust, and Authority, Benjamin McMyler argues that philosophers have failed to appreciate the nature and significance of our epistemic dependence ...

I present an account of what it is to trust a speaker, and argue that the account can explain the common intuitions which structure the debate about the transmission view of testimony. According to the suggested account, to trust a speaker is to grant her epistemic authority on the asserted proposition, and hence to see her opinion as issuing a second order, preemptive reason for believing the proposition. The account explains the intuitive appeal of the basic principle associated with (...) the transmission view of testimony: the principle according to which, a listener can normally obtain testimonial knowledge that p by believing a speaker who testifies that p only if the speaker knows that p. It also explains a common response to counterexamples to this principle: that these counterexamples do not involve normal cases of testimonial knowledge. (shrink)

In the third and subsequent editions of Principles of Biomedical Ethics, Tom Beauchamp and James Childress articulate a series of ethical norms that they regard as “derived” from, and hence carrying, the “authority” of the common morality. Although Beauchamp and Childress do not claim that biomedical norms they derive from the common morality automatically become constituents of the common morality, or that every detail of their account carries the authority of the common morality, they regard these derived norms (...) as provisionally binding in a way that does not apply to the norms of mere “particular” moralities. Whereas particular moralities “do not bind other persons or communities,” Beauchamp and Childress have designed the norms of Principles of Biomedical Ethics to be “extensions” of the common morality that universally binds other persons and communities. Beauchamp and Childress seem to hold that the norms they articulate in Principles of Biomedical Ethics are derived in an objective way from the common morality, and also that by virtue of being so derived they carry a moral authority that objectively exceeds the authority of norms constituting particular moralities. My thesis in this essay is that both of these claims are false. (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)

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..

The aim of the paper is to reassess the prospects of a widely neglected affective conception of the aesthetic evaluation and appreciation of art. On the proposed picture, the aesthetic evaluation and appreciation of art are non-contingently constituted by a particular kind of pleasure. Artworks that are valuable qua artworks merit, deserve, and call for a certain pleasure, the same pleasure that reveals (or at least purports to reveal) them to be valuable in the way that they are, and constitutes (...) their aesthetic evaluation and appreciation. This is why and how art is non-contingently related to pleasure. Call this, the Affective View. While I don’t advance conclusive arguments for the Affective View in this paper, I aim to reassess its prospects by (1) undermining central objections against it, (2) dissociating it from hedonism about the value of artworks (the view that this value is grounded in, and explained by, its possessors’ power to please), and (3) introducing some observations on the practice of art in support of it. Given that the objections I discuss miss their target, and given the observations in support of it, I conclude that the Affective View is worth serious reconsideration. (shrink)

At the time of her death in 1996, Jean Hampton was working on a book on practical reason she had tentatively titled, A Theory of Reasons. The above volume consists of the materials she left, together with useful editorial clues to the state of their relative completeness. Computer file dates make it clear that Hampton was engaged in a significant revision of the text and had gotten as far as Chapter 3 of a nine-chapter book. Revisions of two-thirds of the (...) text lay before her, and, as Richard Healey adds, it is “very likely” that even this draft would not have been final. (shrink)