Kindle Notes & Highlights
A proponent of a community-based argument for political authority need not deny that citizens should be conceived as autonomous beings and that this sets limits to what states may legitimately do.
The third worry is that the community-based argument for political authority confuses felt obligations with real obligations
In reply, one can insist that – just like in the case of parental authority – we should take people’s intuitions at face value, at least as long as there is no reason for doubt.
But now the objector can respond that indeed there are good reasons to doubt that there are moral bonds and authority relations in political communities. Christopher Wellman describes a cosmopolitan who feels no special connection to his compatriots and cares for people far abroad as much as he does for people at home.
Maybe, then, the moral bonds in political communities including authority relations turn out to be a mere prejudice that should be overcome?
second reason to doubt that there are legitimate relations of authority in political communities is that they constitute relations of inequality
Note that the inequality between parents and children looks much less problematic, since children are not yet fully rational humans. They are unequal in the relevant sense. Thus political authority (and moral bonds in political community in general) looks morally problematic in a way that parental authority (and moral bonds in families) does not.
Moreover, we know about people’s willingness to accept illegitimate de facto authorities and should therefore be reluctant to treat people’s acceptance of state authority as clear evidence that the state actually has legitimate political authority
The strategy of just relying on our conviction that there are moral bonds in political communities including relations of authority is in the end unconvincing; one cannot circumvent the explanation condition when it comes to political authority.
Acceptance certainly looks similar to consent, at first sight. When people accept the state, they have some kind of positive attitude toward the state; when they give consent to the state, they express that attitude.
Acceptance is a mental state, not a performance or public act. And as such it cannot create new rights. But a theory of authority must explain how the state could come to have rights that the governed lack. Acceptance cannot help with that task; only proper consent can.
Justice is often conceived as the main virtue of social institutions, and so one might well be inclined to think that states that help to secure or promote justice thereby acquire political authority. But this line of thought would be a bit too simple.
The simple fact that an institution helps with the cause of justice is not sufficient to bring political authority into the world.
A promising way to find a bridge from a state’s justice to its authority is to appeal to people’s “natural duties of justice.” As explained, natural duties are duties one has simply as a human being, i.e. independently of community- or consent-based obligations. An example of a natural duty is our duty not to kill others. Some think that there also is a natural duty of justice “to support and to further just institutions.”
That we have such a duty is not sufficient to show that political institutions have authority. But when we add the assumption that we do not have “a right not to be coerced to do what we have an obligation of justice to do” (Buchanan 2002: 703), then we already have an argument why just states at least have a liberty-right to enact and coercively enforce laws.
If the natural duty of justice account succeeds, it seems that it will probably have no problem in accounting for the holistic nature of political authority
There are two objections to the story so far. The first objection is that it is not of much interest whether we have a duty to comply with and do our share in just states, since no actual states are truly just, and none will ever be.
This objection is important, but the easy answer is to concede its point and downgrade the natural duty of justice a little bit.
Because there is reasonable disagreement about justice, the natural duty of justice already applies when institutions are “reasonably just”
The second objection is that the natural duty of justice cannot explain why we are bound to particular states, i.e. why a citizen of Ghana is bound to the Ghanaian state, while a citizen of France is bound to the state of France (presupposing, of course, that both Ghana and France are reasonably just states).
When we start with a universal natural duty of justice, we cannot end up with particularized duties to particular states, just because the very point of natural duties is that they apply independently of special roles or acts of consent that could constitute particularist connections.
One reply by defenders of a natural duty of justice-based account is to simply drop the idea of particularized moral bonds between states and citizens and to endorse a globalist, transnational duty to support just institutions
A better answer to the particularity objection is to claim that some institutions – namely states – are necessary for establishing justice and, second, that they require territorial jurisdiction in order to be able to establish justice
Political authority implies a very general power to impose duties on all matters, and it is hard to see how this can be understood as necessary for giving direction to a pre-existing duty of justice.
A third natural duty-based argument has been devised by Christopher Wellman. Wellman does not invoke natural duties of justice, but what he calls “samaritan duties.”
Now what he calls “state legitimacy” – the liberty-right of the state to enact and coercively enforce laws – can be understood as based on people’s samaritan duties, says Wellman.
the state is necessary to establish peace, security, and law and order; without the police, military, and courts, we would have civil war and instability, basically like the Hobbesian state of nature. Because this is so, we have a samaritan duty to save all of us from the perils of the Hobbesian state of nature by allowing the state to do its job of establishing peace, security, and law and order.
Wellman goes on to argue that everyone has to do his or her fair share in the societal rescuing enterprise, and that this means that everyone has a general duty to obey the law
But there are several worries about his argument (besides the obvious anarchist objection that the state is not necessary to achieve peace; see Chapter 7). First, like other natural duty-based accounts (see pp. 73, 78), Wellman’s attempt to overcome the particularity objection does not fully solve the problem.
Second, one may doubt that the Hobbesian state of nature is an actual danger lurking in the background of our daily lives
Third, it can be quite costly to comply with the state. One may have to go into the military, one has to pay taxes, etc. Since samaritan duties only apply when there are no “unreasonable costs” to bear, they can arguably not ground a very robust duty to obey
one can well insist that individual compliance is simply not necessary to achieve peace, security, and law and order, and in light of this fact the costs may indeed be “unreasonable.”
Fourth, and most importantly, Wellman does not attempt to take the second step from people’s natural duties and the state’s liberty-right to enact and enforce laws to the state’s power to impose duties (i.e. political authority).
There are two main problems for all natural duty-based accounts. One is to answer the particularity objection; the other is to explain the step from people’s natural duties to the state’s power to impose duties on them.
Most people agree that the state does not have the consent of the greatest part of the citizenry. But maybe there are other ways to voluntarily incur obligations and establish relations of authority. The most prominent candidate is fairness obligations.
One necessary condition for incurring fairness obligations is that one voluntarily accepts the benefits that are provided through a cooperative enterprise. Because some people do not voluntarily accept the benefits of the state, they cannot be said to have fairness-based political obligations.
Some have argued, though, that people can incur fairness obligations without voluntarily accepting the benefits, when indispensable goods like law and order are at stake. The worry about this idea is that real fairness concerns only seem to come up when people try to free ride on other people’s efforts, and this usually requires voluntary acceptance of the benefits.
There have certainly been no last words, and so of course you may think that one of the five theories is on the right track when it comes to political authority as well. In my view, though, the prospects of success are not very good.
If we cannot show that states have political authority, then maybe we should simply turn our minds to something weaker that is easier to justify and still sufficient to reconcile us to the state.
There are two basic ways to construe a weaker conception of political legitimacy. One is to replace the power to impose duties with a claim-right against interference with the state’s exercise of political power. Another is to go with liberty-rights only, and to simply claim that legitimate states have the liberty-right to enact and enforce (certain kinds of) laws.
Both weaker notions of political legitimacy are describing a specific status of states, one that is weaker than the status of having legitimate political authority.
The justifiable exercise of political power need not be based on the permanent status of either being (weakly) legitimate or having political authority. Conversely, one can imagine states that are (weakly) legitimate or have political authority, but try to exercise their political power in an unjustifiable way.
If states are to have the moral right to do what they are doing, then they need the moral power to impose duties.
A legitimate state arguably has the moral right to do what states do, and so it needs to have the moral right to impose duties. In other words, it needs political authority in the full sense used throughout this book.
A state without the power to impose duties does not simply make a false claim, it just does not have the right to do what it does.
If states impose legal duties, and if legitimate states have the moral right to do what they do, then a legitimate state needs the moral right to impose legal duties on people, and this moral right seems to be a moral power.
Therefore, we should not speak of legitimate states when they do not have political authority including, most importantly, the moral power to impose duties.
If we were ready to accept that states could have authority over only some citizens and some people in their territory, all these theories would have an easier job.
This would mean changing our conception of states and citizenship, but not in a way that would undermine our understanding of what states essentially are. On the other hand, this way of deviating from holism would not rescue any of the theories we have discussed.
To have the right to do what states do, states need holistic authority at least over their territory (if not over all citizens).
