Authority

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AUTHORITY

Three topics have dominated philosophical discussion of authority: the nature of authority, the point of authority, and the sources of authority.

The Nature of Authority

In providing an account of the nature of authority, the focus in this entry will be on de jure practical authority, though the differences between de facto and de jure authority and between theoretical and practical authority will also be briefly considered at the end of this section.

What is authority? Authority is a relational matter: A has authority over B with respect to some domain D. What follows is first a consideration of items A, B, and D that enter into this relationship, and then of the nature of the relationship among them.

With respect to A: while A need not be a person, it must be something that can have a say-so—that is, it must be the sort of thing about which one can truly assert "A says that B must ϕ." So, A can be a natural person, or a corporate person, or an institution, or a text. With respect to B: while B need not be a natural person, B must be the sort of thing that exhibits agency. B must, that is, be able to act on reasons: B must be capable of ϕ-ing because B has good reason to ϕ. In a relationship of practical authority, then, the authority-bearer must be a speaker, and the person under authority must be an agent.

With respect to D: Authority relationships are characteristically limited to a specific context and are characteristically limited by certain constraints within that context. An employer may have authority over an employee with respect to job-related matters, but may have no authority at all outside that context. And, further, it is not as if an employer has unlimited authority over an employee within the domain of job-related matters: if the employer told the employee to work until the employee dies of exhaustion, one would not take that to be within the range of the employer's authority. With each purported authority relationship there is assumed a domain for that authority, even though that domain is often poorly defined.

What, then, is the relationship between speaker A and agent B that makes for practical authority within a given domain D? Surely it is at least that the speaker has some control over the agent's reasons for action, and control of a specific kind: A's say-so makes a difference to the reasons that the agent B has by giving B a good reason to act a certain way. This good reason is, either in whole or in part, A's say-so—A's say-so produces a reason for action for B not merely causally but constitutively. So if A has authority over B, then A's telling B to ϕ is itself a reason for B to ϕ. If, for example, parents have authority over their children with respect to household chores, then a parent's telling the child to clean his or her room is itself a reason for the child to clean the room. By telling the child to clean the room, the parent has added to the child's reasons to clean the room; aside from the fact that the current condition of the room may be aesthetically displeasing—and even a health risk to the child—one reason for the child to clean the room is that the parent told him or her to do so.

In de jure practical authority a speaker has constitutive control over an agent's reasons for action. But it is not enough for authority simply that the speaker's say-so constitutes a reason for action for the agent; the speaker's say-so must constitute a particular kind of reason. Reasons of authority play a certain role in the proper decision making of the agent under authority: where there is practical authority, and in the domain in which that authority is effective, the authority's say-so is decisive with respect to the agent's rational action. Authoritative dictates have the function of bringing deliberation to a close by fixing the action selected by the authoritative dictate as the reasonable choice to make.

One prominent way of expressing this idea has been offered by Joseph Raz, whose work has been the most important in explicating the nature and justification of authority. Raz says that the way that authoritative norms fulfill this function is by providing what he calls "protected reasons" (Raz 1979, p. 29). A protected reason to ϕ is both a reason to ϕ and a reason to disregard reasons not to ϕ. Raz claims that the way that authoritative norms fulfill their function of decisively terminating deliberation is not by providing enormously weighty reasons, reasons that compete with and always best any reasons that militate in favor of rival options; rather, authoritative dictates fulfill their function by giving reasons that insulate a course of action from competition. When an authority tells one to ϕ, that is a reason not only to ϕ but also to disregard in deliberation courses of action that preclude ϕ-ing. One might dispute Raz's claim that authoritative norms are always protected reasons, but the more fundamental point is that where there is authority, there is a speaker whose say-so the agent has reason to treat as setting the rationally preferable course of action within some domain.

In sum: if A is a genuine practical authority over B in some domain, then in that domain A's telling B to ϕ is a decisive reason for B to ϕ. Whereas in practical authority, speakers have authority over what agents do, in theoretical authority, speakers have authority over what agents believe. There are, nonetheless, striking similarities between genuine practical authority and genuine theoretical authority. If A has theoretical authority over B in some domain, then A must be a speaker and B must be one who can believe things for reasons; and if A tells B that it is the case that p, then A's telling B that it is the case that p is a reason to B to believe that p, a reason that is decisive from B's point of view. If an accomplished chef tells a novice that this is not the best way to make a roux, then the novice has decisive reason to believe that this is not the best way to make a roux. Practical authority, being concerned with reasons for action, is an object of investigation within the province of moral philosophy (and political and legal philosophy as well); theoretical authority, being concerned with reasons for belief, is an object of investigation within the province of epistemology.

One can also distinguish between de facto and de jure authority. People often ascribe authority (practical and theoretical) to speakers even without holding that their assertions or commands are reasons for believing or doing anything. Authority is sometimes used as a term of classification and explanation in both the social sciences and in everyday talk without any attempt to evaluate the claims of these putative authorities to give reasons for action. Authority in this sense is de facto, as opposed to de jure, authority. But there is nevertheless a tight connection between them: no speaker can be correctly described as a de facto authority without that speaker's either claiming to be or being widely regarded as a de jure authority.

Here is why. Suppose that one wants to argue that A is a de facto authority over some group simply because as a matter of observable behavior, if A tells members of that group to ϕ, then members of that group, by and large, ϕ. But that would surely be an insufficient basis for ascribing de facto authority; if it were a mere accident that the behavior of the group fell in line with the commands issued by A, one would not say that A bears de facto authority. One might try to complete the case for de facto authority by adding a causal condition: that it is A's commanding the members of that group to ϕ that results in those members' ϕ-ing. But this addition would be insufficient; if it were simply a quirky feature of the individual psychologies of the group's members that believing that A told them to ϕ caused them to ϕ, then one would ascribe a nervous disorder to the group members rather than de facto authority to A. The moral here is that if one wants to appeal to agents' responses to a speaker to establish that the speaker is a de facto authority, one will have to argue that those agents act in accordance with A's say-so because they take A's say-so to be a reason for them to comply—that is, because they believe A to be a de jure authority.

One can make a similar argument from the side of the speaker: it is not sufficient to treat a speaker as a de facto authority that the speaker can (for example) have people locked up if they fail to obey. What makes the difference between effective kidnappers and de facto state authorities is, inter alia, that only the latter claim that their commands are binding standards, the violation of which justify locking people up—that is, that they are de jure practical authorities. Although there is no doubt a difference between de jure and de facto practical authority, de facto practical authority must be understood in terms of de jure practical authority.

The remainder of the entry will focus on genuine, de jure practical authority. Under what circumstances is it desirable for authority relationships of this sort of exist? And how are such authority relationships to be explained?

The Point of Authority

What is the point of authority? Is there anything of value realized through such relationships?

Raz has written that the normal way of justifying authority is to show that those subject to it act better on their other reasons for action under authority than they would in the absence of authority. He calls this the "normal justification thesis." Practical authority provides a service—that is, the service of enabling persons to act more reasonably (Raz 1986).

There are several distinct contexts in which practical authority might provide this service. Practical authority might enable one to act more in accordance with what reason—prior to and apart from any authoritative imposition—determinately requires. It may be that a certain regimen of drug treatment is necessary for a person to regain her health. This is just a fact about the world, and given the value of this person's health, it would be unreasonable for her not to follow that regimen. But even if it is perfectly clear to her that this is the regimen to follow—because her doctor prescribes it, and her doctor's views are in line with the consensus of the medical community—she may fail to be motivated adequately by the doctor's theoretical authority alone. She might do better in acting in accordance with what reason requires if she had further reason to go along with the doctor's prescription—perhaps by placing herself under the doctor's authority. Some people do this sort of thing with personal trainers (or career mentors, or spiritual directors): they treat the trainer's (or mentor's or director's) prescriptions not as pieces of advice but as authoritative dictates, and they better reach their health-(or career-, or sanctification-) related goals by having trainers (or mentors or directors) that are not merely dispensers of advice but practical authorities.

Another context in which practical authorities can help persons to act on their other reasons for action is that in which their reasons for action require actions that are, to a significant degree, vague or otherwise indeterminate. The most pressing of such cases are those in which persons need to act in a coordinated way. The standard example is the rule of the road: While there is strong reason for persons to drive on the same side of the road, it is indeterminate which side they should drive on. Although a solution may be reached through trial and error, it would be helpful if there were a party that could set the rule of the road in a clear and determinate way prior to the disasters that can occur on the way to a convention established by trial and error.

There are several ways in which such indeterminacy presents itself. In some cases, there are a number of instrumental means to a single well-defined goal—for example, keeping people from driving into each other—and practical authority's job is to select one such means as a common plan of action. In some cases, there are a number of ways to fill in a vague rule. For example: one should not drive an automobile if one is intoxicated. But: What counts as "intoxicated"? Is it to be fixed by actual level of impairment? By blood alcohol level? And, in either case, at what levels? This is a matter that can be resolved by authoritative imposition: a practical authority can set what counts as intoxication, thus helping persons act in a coordinated way both with respect to their driving behavior and with respect to the claims that they make on one another with respect to their driving behavior. For the rule about drunk driving matters not only when one is deciding whether to drive; it is also important both in deciding whether to make claims on another for the damages that the other has done while driving with alcohol in his or her system and in deciding whether to accept claims made on one by others for damages that one has done while driving with alcohol in one's system.

Raz's normal justification thesis brings out the points that practical authority calls for justification (and thus can fail with respect to this call) and that the usual way that practical authority is justified is by showing that our other reasons are better served by adding reasons of authority into the mix. Whereas this may indeed be the normal way of establishing the point of authority, it is not the only way. Here is another: Practical authority is not just an ability to change others' reasons for action, it is also a (typically) positive status. Because practical authority is a (typically) positive status, placing someone in a position of practical authority can be a way to honor that person, or a way to give that person what he or she deserves. So one justification for practical authority might make reference not to the ways in which those subject to authority are served by it but by reference to the way that the bearer of authority is appropriately honored or rewarded by it. There may, for example, be in some group no particularly pressing reason to institute structures of authority for decision making, but in light of the need to honor a person who has made great contributions to that group's aims, it would make sense to confer authority on that person.

There are also more tedious reasons for being in an authority relationship. Employers often have limited authority over their employees, and employees enter those authority relationships by contract. From the employer's point of view, the salient reason for the authority relationship is to bind the employee to performance of duties; from the employee's point of view, the salient reason for the authority relationship is that, unless he or she is willing to enter it, he or she will have no job, and no paycheck. This is a far cry from authority's helping an agent to act on his or her preexisting reasons or from authority's being conferred on someone in order to do him or her honor, but it cannot be denied that a number of more-or-less limited authority relationships in which people find themselves are justified in this way.

It is important to note, though, that practical authority has its drawbacks. Recall that what distinguishes the reasons of practical authority is their decisive role in deliberation. If reasons of authority are absent, then something else will have to fill the role that brings deliberation to its conclusion in these cases—often, the agent's own free, rationally underdetermined decision. If one takes the making of free, underdetermined decisions to be a good, then there is something lost by persons who are under practical authority (see Wolff 1970). So it is not as if practical authority is costless. And, furthermore, it should be noted that there may be bad psychological tendencies associated with certain sorts of otherwise worthwhile authority relationships, at least in certain classes of people. Even if practical authority is, properly circumscribed, necessary and valuable, there may be broad types of person who tend to act worse when placed either in such positions of authority or under such authority (see Milgram 1974).

The Sources of Authority

Suppose that person X claims to have practical authority over person Y, and Y is rightly curious about the correctness of this claim. When Y challenges X, X's response is: "You are under my authority because I am I, and you are you. You are under my authority because I am X, and you are not." X's case is poor; not only is it unconvincing, but it borders on incoherent. It borders on incoherence because authority relationships are normative matters, and whether a normative fact obtains depends not on irreducibly particular facts but on general ones. So just as claims about one's duties and rights are correct not in virtue of the particular identity of the person to whom those duties and rights are ascribed but in virtue of the general properties instantiated by that person, claims about who holds authority depend on the general properties instantiated by that person. It might fundamentally matter with respect to the presence of authority whether one is a parent, or is morally good, or is powerful, or has a loud voice; it cannot fundamentally matter whether one is Bill Clinton, Bob Dylan, or Bozo the Clown.

How, then, does it come to be the case that one individual is a practical authority over another individual, given that it is not simply as that individual that one is an authority bearer or a person under authority? There are two ways to try to answer this question. The first is to begin with general practical principles, and to show that in certain circumstances those practical principles imply that one party has authority over another. It is crucial that one select a practical principle that stands a chance of generating the crucial features of authority, that is, that at least under some possible set of circumstances it implies that one party's say-so is in some domain a decisive reason for action for another party.

Here is one principle that has been invoked in a number of contexts to explain practical authority: the principle of promising. The principle of promising, stated loosely, is that if one promises to perform an act of ϕ-ing, then one is morally bound to ϕ. One's valid promise is, in standard cases, a reason for the promisor to perform the action promised, and it is a reason of a certain kind: that one validly promised to perform an action is characteristically decisive, again, at least in standard cases. But one can promise to act in accordance with another party's commands: one can promise to obey the personal trainer's commands with respect to one's exercise regimen, or to follow the policies of one's immediate superior in the performance of job duties, or to do the bidding of the king. If one has validly promised to act on another person's commands in some domain, then it seems that there is good reason to suppose that authority has been generated.

This way of accounting for practical authority can be called the "top-down" approach. It begins with practical principles of broader application and proceeds to show that in some circumstances the application of that general principle yields a relationship that bears all of the defining conditions of genuine authority. A rival approach, the "bottom-up" approach, takes authority relationships as basic, not to be explained as implications of other practical principles. The guiding idea of this way of proceeding is that relationships of practical authority are no less familiar than—and perhaps may be more familiar than—the general practical principles that users of the top-down approach have employed. The task for the user of the bottom-up approach is simply to describe the general features of the various relationships of genuine practical authority with which we are familiar, and so far as possible to exhibit the unity among them (either the precise features they share, or analogies between them). So, the bottom-up theorist might note (for example) that people commonsensically accept that parents have authority over children, and thus take his or her task to be to define more precisely what counts as the parent/child relationship in which authority exists (is it biological? social? legal? some combination of these?) and what defines the scope of the parent's practical authority (is it over all domestic matters? does it extend beyond that? does the size of its domain remain constant, or not?). He or she may wish to answer similar questions about the authority of the state and of God, and to draw the appropriate connections and disanalogies between these cases of authority.

There are potential drawbacks to both of these approaches. The bottom-up approach seems to be extremely deferential to de facto authorities, offering them the presumption of de jure status. As such, employment of the bottom-up approach is unable to ease the suspicions of the authority skeptic, who is concerned either in particular cases or in a more global way about the existence of de jure practical authority. The top-down approach, by contrast, runs the real risk of failing to hook up with de facto authority relationships in any straightforward way. If there is a clear lesson to be drawn from the history of uses of the top-down approach in investigating questions of practical authority—most attention has been paid to parental, political, and divine authority—it is that it is extraordinarily difficult to generate plausible accounts of the de jure authority of common social institutions from standard applications of widely held general practical principles.

parental authority

It is commonly thought, especially among parents, that parents are practical authorities over their children. But employing the top-down approach to explain parents' status as authorities over their children has proven to be a difficult undertaking.

A preliminary difficulty for this undertaking is specifying the window in which this authority is supposed to obtain: at what age does a parent's authority over children begin (babies are not under authority, as they cannot yet act for reasons), and at what age does it cease? Suppose, though, that the time frame in which parents are to be authoritative over children is settled; how is one to explain why parents are authoritative during this stretch of time? A child's requirement of obedience to his or her parents cannot be a matter of voluntary undertaking, as Hobbes erroneously (and even inconsistently with his own view) supposed it to be (Hobbes 1651, ch. 20). So no principles of moral obligation founded on consent or voluntary acceptance of benefits will do. One might appeal to the requirements of gratitude, but this suggestion is rife with difficulties: Why does gratitude, which typically does not require obedience, generate such a requirement in this case? If it is a parent's duty to care for children, why is gratitude owed as a consequence of a mere doing of one's duty? Isn't gratitude characteristically conditioned on free acceptance of benefits, whereas children are typically not free to refuse such benefits from their parents or to seek the benefits elsewhere?

Locke argues, plausibly, that a parent's authority over children is due to the child's deficiencies in reason and choice, and it is only so long as those deficiencies remain that the parent has authority, for it is as a help to remedying those deficiencies that the parent has authority (Locke 1690, §55). These claims seem to be true, but this argument concerns the point, or value, of parental authority, not the explanation of how parents come to be authoritative over children. These are distinct questions. Even those who grant the value of parental authority can find its existence and explanation mysterious indeed. Little progress has been made in providing a top-down account of the authority of parents over their children.

political authority

Political authority—its desirability, its scope, and its explanation—is one of the few truly perennial problems of political philosophy. The most familiar explanation for political authority is the consent account. On this view, most fully elaborated during the early modern period, citizens characteristically make an agreement, either explicitly or tacitly (Hobbes 1651, ch. 18; Locke 1690, §119; Rousseau 1762, bk. 4, ch. 2), to obey their rulers. It is in virtue of this original agreement that subjects are duty-bound to obey their political authorities. Whereas this view has been tremendously popular, it is subject to overwhelming objections, which are catalogued in David Hume's influential "Of the Original Contract" (1753). Hume convincingly argues that there is little evidence that explicit agreements have generally taken place, and that the tacit agreements that consent theorists find themselves forced to posit to explain state authority are in fact no more than a myth.

Hume's recommended account of political authority is a utilitarian one—that is, that it is simply in virtue of the public benefit brought about by having a political authority in place that the de jure authority of the state is established. As Hume puts it, public authority is necessary for the public good, and public authority cannot be sustained unless subjects pay "exact obedience" to their rulers. But this is unpersuasive: states maintain de facto authority in the face of quite a bit of disobedience, and so Hume has not explained why the need for de facto authority yields the conclusion that states have de jure authority over their subjects.

During the latter half of the twentieth century there was a revival of attempts to provide an account of state authority. Some were attempts to retrieve the old consent view, offering new accounts of the tacit consent that was necessary to bind that vast majority of persons who never explicitly consent. Some were attempts to revive Hume's utilitarian-style argument. H. L. A. Hart (1955) and John Rawls (1964) offered arguments from fairness, holding that the authority of law is based on the fact that those who accept the benefits of legally ordered cooperation would be unfairly free riding on the efforts of others were they not to obey as well. Others appealed to an argument that appears as early as Plato's Crito —the idea that citizens owe a debt of gratitude to their political authorities for the goods that they receive through them, and this debt is to be repaid through obedience.

Despite the ingenuity of writers attempting to provide top-down accounts of political authority, the most important writers on political authority at the end of the twentieth century were "philosophical anarchists"—they held, that is, that none of these attempts to account for genuine, de jure political authority is successful, and thus people have reason to reject the view that modern states are genuinely authoritative. Some of these writers, such as Robert Paul Wolff (1970), hold that this is a necessary truth: there cannot be a genuinely authoritative state. But most of them—most prominently, A. John Simmons (1979), Joseph Raz (1979), and Leslie Green (1990)—argue simply that under current political conditions no state holds the wide-ranging authority that it claims for itself.

divine authority

Recent scholarship employing the top-down approach has had difficulty exhibiting the sources of authority of the two likeliest bearers of wide-ranging authority: parents and political institutions. One might think that even if such human institutions were bound to fall short in this respect, surely divine authority would be an easier matter. After all, whereas God's existence remains a philosophically controverted matter, it is widely accepted by both theists and nontheists that if there is such a being as God then that being is practically authoritative over human beings.

It turns out that accounting for divine authority using a top-down approach raises difficulties that are just as pressing as the difficulties that attend accounting for parental or political authority in the top-down way. One might think that being a practical authority is a logical consequence of traditional divine attributes, such as omniscience, omnipotence, or perfect moral goodness, but this is wrong: omniscience and perfect moral goodness give us reasons only to think of God as a theoretical authority, not a practical authority; and whereas omnipotence of course enables God to control the circumstances in which our reasons for action have application, it does not of itself entail that God's commands constitute reasons for action for humans. One might think that traditional moral principles concerning gratitude for benefits or property in what one has created would yield a moral obligation to obey God, but it turns out that there are severe difficulties in demonstrating that the conditions of application for these principles generate such an obligation of obedience (Murphy 2002). The top-down approach has fared no better in the case of divine authority than in the cases of parental and political authority.

It is unclear what moral should be drawn from the failure of top-down philosophical investigation to generate plausible accounts of parental, political, and divine authority. On the one hand, one might take it simply to be an indication that, given the nature of authority, it is bound to be hard to show that one party has genuine authority over another in nonstylized contexts—that is, contexts that are not created for the purpose of generating authority relationships (e.g., employer-employee contracts). On the other hand, one might take it to be a reductio ad absurdum of reliance on the top-down approach. One might claim that among people's sturdiest considered moral judgments are the judgments that these authority relationships are genuine. To the extent that distinct general moral principles fail to illuminate the authority present there, this failure gives people reason not to jettison the view that these authority relationships are genuine but only to insist on a bottom-up approach, taking practical authority as a basic feature of the moral world.

Bibliography

For considerations of the nature and justification of authority, see Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1979) and The Morality of Freedom (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1986). Several important discussions are collected in Authority, edited by Joseph Raz (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1990). For philosophical skepticism concerning the possibility of de jure authority, see Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). For some discussion of the deleterious effects of submission to authority, see Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).

There is a vast literature on the sources of de jure authority, almost all of it focused on political authority. The classic contract account may be found in Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by Edwin Curley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994; first published 1651), John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1690), reprinted in Two Treatises of Government, edited by Peter Laslett (Cambridge, U.K.; Cambridge University Press, 1988), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, in The Basic Political Writings, translated by Donald Cress (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987; first published 1762). David Hume's skeptical treatment of contract views may be found in his "Of the Original Contract" (1753), reprinted in Political Essays, and edited by Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Accounts justifying political authority in terms of fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of rule following are to be found in H. L. A. Hart, "Are There Any Natural Rights?" (Philosophical Review 64 (1955): 175–191), and John Rawls, "Legal Obligation and the Duty of Fair Play," in Law and Philosophy, edited by Sidney Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1964). A gratitude view is suggested in Plato's Crito, in The Trial and Death of Socrates, translated by G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1975). Recent accounts skeptical of all extant theories of political authority may be found in A. John Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), Raz's The Authority of Law and Leslie Green, The Authority of the State (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1990). There has been less recent work on parental and divine authority. For a discussion of parental authority, see Michael Slote, "Obedience and Illusions," in Having Children, edited by Onora O'Neill and William Ruddick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); for a discussion of divine authority, see Mark C. Murphy, An Essay on Divine Authority (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).