Justice and disagreement at the foundations of political authority

Ethics

Volumn 110, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 165-187

  Christiano, Thomas ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0033211994     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/233208     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), p. 70.
2. A. John Simmons in Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980) and in "Justification and Legitimacy" (Ethics 109 [1999]: 739-71) defends a similar claim, namely, that we may have duties not to interfere with justified or just states but we do not have obligations to comply with their directives when we are members.
3. A. John Simmons in Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980) and in "Justification and Legitimacy" (Ethics 109 [1999]: 739-71) defends a similar claim, namely, that we may have duties not to interfere with justified or just states but we do not have obligations to comply with their directives when we are members.
4. Morris's historical discussion here is somewhat muddled. He attributes the same doctrines to Hobbes and Rousseau. While both argue that the sovereignty is indivisible and unlimited, they mean quite different things by this. Hobbes means that all state activities must come under a single decision-making authority and that the sovereign can and may do anything he or she or it wants to do to its subjects. Rousseau merely argues that the sovereign is indivisible because he thinks that executive and judicial functions are conceptually speaking not part of the sovereign at all. The sovereign is and can only be a legislative entity and this, for Rousseau, precludes it acting as an executive or as a judicial branch (see Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 2). Furthermore, though Rousseau says that the sovereign is unlimited he means this too in a special sense. For Rousseau, anything that attempts to treat individuals in a way that is inconsistent with the freedom and equality of the subjects or in a way that is not necessary to advance the common good is not the sovereign (see Rousseau, The Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 4). What most people would call the moral limits to sovereignty are all contained in the conceptual limits of the notion of sovereignty for Rousseau.
5. More cautiously, Morris does not ever quite come out and say that the state lacks authority. For the most part, he says that it does not have as much authority as it claims. But his argument, as we shall see below, entails that the state has very little, if any, authority.
6. For a view of this sort, see Simmons, "Justification and Legitimacy."
7. See Leslie Green, The Authority of the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 73, for a related argument.
8. See John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), p. 396. "For though the Law of Nature be plain and intelligible to all rational Creatures; yet Man being biassed by their Interest, as well as ignorant for want of study of it, are not apt to allow of it as a Law binding to them in the application of it to their particular Cases."
9. For views that emphasize the central ty of fundamental disagreements to our understanding of even legitimate and just states, see my The Rule of the Many (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996), esp. chap. 2; and more recently, Jeremy Waldron's Law and Disagreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
10. For views that emphasize the central ty of fundamental disagreements to our understanding of even legitimate and just states, see my The Rule of the Many (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996), esp. chap. 2; and more recently, Jeremy Waldron's Law and Disagreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
11. As Raz puts it, morality underdetermines the law; see his "On the Authority and Interpretation of Constitutions," in Constitutionalism: Philosophical Foundations, ed. Larry Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
12. For deeper and more detailed treatment of some of these issues, see Allen Buchanan, "Theories of Secession," Philosophy and Public Affairs 26 (1998): 31-61.
13. The term does not show up at all in the index to An Essay on the Modern State and is used only as part of the general description of many modern states as "liberal democracies." Joseph Raz in The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), pt. 1, doesn't entertain the possibility that there might be a special connection between democracy and authority, and Leslie Green does not consider democracy as a source of authority beyond a discussion of the ill-fated consent-based approaches to democracy and authority.
14. Leslie Green, The Authority of the State, pp. 56-59, gives a qualified endorsement of this approach and Raz, in The Morality of Freedom, seems entirely instrumentalist regarding political authority.
15. It need not imply a commitment to consequentialism however. A legitimate authority, on this account, may enable me to improve my compliance with reasons that derive from deontological considerations.
16. John Rawls, in Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), offers a highly nuanced version of this approach when he says that a political conception of justice is to be grounded in ideas in the public political culture of the society as well as when he argues that the principles of justice for a society can be the subject of a reasonable overlapping consensus or that a family of such principles can be. Even these views do not take sufficient account of the incidence of disagreement in modern societies.
17. I defend this view in more detail in chapter 2 of my book The Rule of the Many. It is the subject of a much longer and deeper treatment in my forthcoming work titled Democratic Equality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
18. I argue, in chap. 2 of The Rule of the Many, that the account of democracy offered by Peter Singer in his Democracy and Disobedience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974) does suffer from this kind of incoherence.
19. For extreme forms of skepticism about the authority of modern democratic states, see F. H. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); and more recently, Danilo Zolo, Democracy and Complexity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993).
20. For extreme forms of skepticism about the authority of modern democratic states, see F. H. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); and more recently, Danilo Zolo, Democracy and Complexity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993).