Volume 26, Number 1
November 2023
ARTICLE

Against Deference to Authority

Volume 26, Number 1, November 2023, Pages 99–125
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v26i1.2602
PDFPDF

Abstract

Joseph Raz’s service conception of law remains one of the best known theories of political authority. Setting aside ongoing debates about the nature of authority, I locate a problem in the basic justificatory structure of the service conception. I show that the service justification of the state does not yield the conclusion that the law generates exclusionary reasons, which are meant to be the key hallmark of authority. An automatic but defeasible habit of obeying the state is likely to lead to better outcomes than exclusionary deference to the state. Given the instrumental justification of the service conception, this means that exclusionary reasons to defer do not obtain. Habituation and automaticity have been developed in other contexts and are here extended to the context of political authority. The possibility of habitual obedience undercuts Raz’s theory while suggesting a new approach to the question of political authority
Copyright © 2023 Travis Quigley
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
|

Liberty, Equality, Authority

David Owens

The Weight of Authority in War: Comments on Renzo

David Estlund

Must States Do It Themselves? A Rights-Based Theory of Delegating State Coercion

Vincent Chiao

Soldiers and Moral Tragedy: Comments on Renzo

Christopher Kutz

Who Do You Speak For? And How? Online Abuse as Collective Subordinating Speech Acts

Michael Randall Barnes

The Limits of Instrumental Proceduralism

Jake Monaghan

Positive Rights: Two-Person Cases

David Alm

Disagreement, Unilateral Judgment, and Kant’s Argument for Rule by Law

Daniel Koltonski

Is There Value in Keeping a Promise? A Response to Joseph Raz

Crescente Molina

The Enforcement Approach to Coercion

Scott A. Anderson

Well-Being and Virtue

Daniel M. Haybron

First Force

William A. Edmundson

Portico