Autonomy seems to require that we engage in practical deliberation and come to our own decisions regarding how we will act. Deference to authority, by contrast, seems to require that we suspend deliberation and do what the authority commands precisely because he or she commands it. How, then, could autonomy be compatible with deference to authority? In his critique of Razian instrumentalism, Stephen Darwall lays the groundwork for a distinctively contractualist answer to this question: the normative force of an authoritative (...) directive depends, he argues, on the addressee's free and rational acceptance of the reason addressed to her. But how are we to make sense of free and rational acceptance, when deference to authority requires that one relinquish deliberative discretion? I attempt to resolve this puzzle by outlining a conception of reasonable trust in authority, which, while contractualist in spirit, makes room for a core element of Raz's instrumentalist account. (shrink)

One of the distinctive features of the obligation to obey the law is its content-independence. We ought to do what the law commands because the law commands it, and not because of the law's content—i.e., the independent merits of the actions it prescribes. Despite its popularity, the notion of content-independence is marked by ambiguity. In this paper, I first clarify what content-independence is. I then develop a simple test—the “content-independence test”—which allows us to establish whether any candidate justification of the (...) obligation to obey the law delivers genuine content-independence. I apply this test to prominent such justifications and conclude that several of them, surprisingly, fail it. (shrink)

Joseph Raz’s much discussed service conception of practical authority has recently come under attack from Stephen Darwall, who proposes that we instead adopt a second- personal conception of practical authority.1 We believe that the best place to start understanding practical authority is with a pared back conception of it, as simply a species of normative authority more generally, where this species is picked out merely by the fact that the normative authority in question is authority in relation to action, rather (...) than belief. We do not wish to deny that there might be properties of practical authority (as distinct from the species of authority that is concerned with belief) that are peculiar to it, but, unlike both Raz and Darwall, we do not believe that such features play a role in defining or delimiting practical authority. (shrink)

This is a canvass to the critical reaction to Joseph Raz’s service conception of authority, as well as actual or possible replies by Raz. Familiarity is assumed with the theory itself, covered in a previous article. The article focuses primarily on direct criticisms of Raz’s theory, rather than replies developed in the context of a theorist’s wider project.

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.