On the Social Ontology of Authority

210 Pages·2016·0.78 MB·English

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The Authority of Us:

On the Concept of Legitimacy and the Social Ontology of Authority
by
Adam Robert Arnold
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree
of
Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy
University of Warwick, Department of Philosophy
October, 2015
Contents
Acknowledgements................................................................................................................iii
Declaration.............................................................................................................................iv
Abstract...................................................................................................................................v
Introduction: Social Institutions, Social Standpoints and Social Reasons..............................1
Part I: On the Concept of Legitimacy: Two Questions for Authority...................................11
One: The Concept of Authority.........................................................................................12
1. Reformulating the Question of Authority.................................................................15
2. The Question of Standing and the Question of Content............................................21
3. Having Authority: Epistemic vs. Practical Authority................................................26
4. Normative Magic and the Mystical Foundations of Authority.................................32
Two: Two Individualist Conceptions of Authority............................................................36
1. The Service Conception of Authority: An Answer to the Question of Content........36
2. Does the Normal Justification Thesis Deliver Command Based Pre-Emptive
Reasons?........................................................................................................................41
3. The Second-Person Standpoint in General................................................................46
4. Second-Person Standpoint and Practical Authority: An Answer to the Question of
Standing.........................................................................................................................50
5. Coercion, Accountability and the Right to Rule.......................................................55
6. Radicalising the Question of Standing: A Critique of Darwall's Second Person
Standpoint.....................................................................................................................64
Three: Authority as Social Practice...................................................................................72
1. Modest Sociality and Social Practices: The Inadequacy of Sociality Based on
Content..........................................................................................................................73
2. The persistence Interdependence of Shared Agency and the Problem of Instability77
3. Normative Construction of Agency, Practical Identity and the Bindingness of
Commitments................................................................................................................89
4. Own-Action Condition and the Mineness of Intentions.........................................100
5. Robust Sociality: Grounding Authority in Social Practice.....................................104
Part II: Governing Together: On the Social Ontology of Authority....................................106
Four: On the Bindingness of Social Ontology................................................................107
1. The Social Ontology of Institutions........................................................................108
2. The Problem of Collectivity: The Necessity for a Social Ontology of Institutions 111
3. The Bindingness of Institutions...............................................................................117
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4. The Constitution of Social Practices: We-Mode Accounts and Subject Accounts..123
Five: Social Ontology and the Question of Standing: The Owing Account...................126
1. Standing and Authority as Owing Relation.............................................................129
2. The Social Ontology of Authority: Joint Commitment as Foundation...................131
3. The Authority of Us.................................................................................................145
Six: Social Ontology and the Question of Content: Unity through Social Reason.........148
1. Constitutive Commitments......................................................................................151
2. What are Social Reasons?.......................................................................................160
3. Proceduralism and Content.....................................................................................165
4. Directed Obligations: Social Standpoints and the Tragedy of the Social...............175
Bibliography........................................................................................................................193
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Acknowledgements
First and foremost I need to express my deepest gratitude to Fabienne Peter. Without her
guidance and support throughout the writing of this thesis it would have never been
completed. I would also like to express my gratitude to my examiners: Margaret Gilbert
and Peter Poellner. Their thoughtful, challenging and deep questioning of my work was a
deeply edifying experience. Kimberly Brownlee is owed a lot for arranging and chairing
my viva. I owe a large part of my intellectual and philosophical development to the
academic staff of the Warwick Philosophy Department both past and present. Particularly I
would like to thank: Professor Keith Ansell-Pearson, Professor Stephen Butterfill, Professor
Christoph Hoerl, Professor Stephen Houlgate, Professor Massimo Renzo, Dr. Robert
Cowan. The graduate community of the philosophy department was a hugely stimulating
environment and I must thank the following members for many challenging and thoughtful
conversations about my work in particular and philosophical topics in general: Jamie
Abernethy, Alfonso Anaya Ruiz Esparza, Benjamin Berger, Wesley Chai Sam Clarke,
Joesph Cunningham, Matthew Dennis, Juan Camilo Espejo-Serna, Peter Fossey, Tania
Ganitsky, Ivan Ivanov, Dino Jakušić, Richard Lambert, Justin Neville-Kaushall, Bethany
Parsons, David Rowthorn, Roberta Locatelli, Irina Schumski, William Stafford, Florence
Sunnen, Nicola Spinelli, Daniel Vanello, Barnaby Walker, Graham Wetherall. A thank you
is also deserved by all members of Warwick's Centre for Ethics, Law and Public Affairs.
This work has also been greatly improved by the audiences at the following conferences:
Collective Intentionality IX, Collectivity Conference, and Thinking (about) Groups. A
special thank you is owed to Professor Amos Nascimento whose support and
encouragement throughout the years has been deeply important to me. Finally, I would like
to thank my friends without whose support I could have never made it this far. This work is
dedicated to my mother, Niki Olson.
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Declaration
This thesis is my own work and contains no material submitted before for any other
degree.
iv
Abstract
Authority figures permeate our daily lives, particularly, our political lives. What makes
authority legitimate? The current debates about the legitimacy of authority are characterised
by two opposing strategies. The first establish the legitimacy of authority on the basis of the
content of the authority’s command. That is, if the content of the commands meet some
independent normative standard then they are legitimate. However, there have been many
recent criticisms of this strategy which focus on a particular shortcoming – namely, its
seeming inability to account for who can legitimately command whom. This is the basis of
the second strategy, which attempts to characterize the normative relationship that underlies
and makes possible authoritative commands. The central point of Part I is that these two
strategies are, in fact, not opposed and both raise questions which a theory of legitimacy
must answer. If this is the case, then we need to ask: how ought we to determine the
legitimacy both of the content of commands as well as who can command whom? Part II
will answer this question. Starting with the question of standing, I argue that we ought not
to look for normative principles outside of the institutions in which authority is embedded.
Rather, one ought to start by elaborating the ontology of institutions in which a sui generis
form of normativity arises. A joint commitment account of social ontology provides the
tools necessary to see how the direction obligations emerge concurrently with the formation
of institutions. Similarly, the question of content can be answered by paying close attention
to the social ontology of institutions. We need not look beyond the internal constitutive
standards of the institution itself. The constitutive standards provide an internal criterion by
which the legitimacy of commands can be established.
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Introduction: Social Institutions, Social Standpoints and Social
Reasons
Authority figures permeate our daily lives and, in particular, our political lives.
Political offices are paradigm cases of practical authority. These authorities claim to have
the ability to command us to act in a certain way. They are practical authorities because
they are concerned with action, as opposed to epistemic authorities who are concerned with
what we ought to believe. When practical authorities issue commands, it is normally
presumed that they have the right to issue these commands; that is, authorities have a right
to rule even if it is in a limited domain. Concurrently, it is ordinarily presumed that the
addressees ought to defer to this authority and that there is, internal to the command itself, a
demand on the addressees to conform.
These types of political office are both prominent and troubling for two particular
reasons. First, we seem not to have much of a choice in being part of a political society, or a
state (Hume 1985, pp. 475-476 and Dunn 1996, p. 66). Even if we are fortunate enough to
have the means to leave the particular state into which we are thrown at birth, we would
most likely leave it only for another state. Second, the authoritative commands of states are
backed by coercive power – they claim a “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force
in the enforcement of [their] order[s]” (Weber 1968, p. 54; cf. Weber 1946, p. 78).
What makes these authorities legitimate, and when are authoritative commands
justified? The term ‘authoritative commands’ may seem pleonastic, and in a sense it is.
However, I will use the term 'authoritative commands' to denote 'commands which are
given by a legitimate authority', as opposed to 'commands given by a purported authority'.
The term ‘authoritative commands’ is then to be taken as a success term.
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In the following work, I will argue that the best way to understand the legitimacy of
authority is to understand how authorities are embedded in institutions. The idea to be
explored is that when authorities command their addressees, they give the addressees new
reasons for action (this will be further discussed in Chapter One). However, these reasons
for action are not moral reasons for actions but social reasons for action. They are social
reasons because, unlike moral reasons, these reasons are limited only to those who belong
to the institution in which the authority is embedded.
How will an institutional model of authority help with the question of legitimacy?
The validity of the social reasons given by the commands is determined by the role that the
authority plays in the institution and what role the authority is empowered by the
institution. In order to see how this works, we need to understand better what an institution
is. In particular, we need to understand how the structure of an institution contains its own
form of normativity internal to the institution.
“Two Concepts of Rules”, an early essay by John Rawls, points clearly to this form
of normativity insofar as he defines ‘practice’ as:
a sort of technical term meaning any form of activity specified by a system of rules
which defines offices, roles, moves, penalties, defenses, and so on, and which gives
the activity its structure (Rawls 1999b, p. 20n1).
In later works, Rawls favours the word ‘institution’ over that of ‘practice’:
Now by an institution I shall understand a public system of rules which defines
offices and positions with their rights and duties, powers and immunities, and the
like. These rules specify certain forms of action as permissible, others as forbidden;
and they provide for certain penalties and defenses, and so on, when violations occur
(Rawls 1999a, pp. 47-78; cf. Thompson 2012, p. 193)
In turn, I too will favour the term ‘institution’. Rawls deploys this idea of institution in
order to show the importance of the distinction between justifying an institution and
justifying a particular act falling under the institution. On the one hand, justifying an
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institution involves answering questions such as: Why this is institution important? Why is
it structured the way it is? Why these rules and not some other rules? On the other hand, to
justifying a particular act falling under an institution, we would ask: Does this act count as
an appropriate act or move? The latter question clearly points to a form of normativity.
Hence, an inappropriate move is a move that is not allowed within a particular institution.
One of the examples that Rawls uses to highlight this distinction is baseball (Rawls
1999b, pp. 37f). As he describes the game, there are several actions one could perform
alone or with others, such as hitting, running and throwing. However, these actions do not
count as playing baseball unless they occur during or inside of a game. There really is no
sense to 'striking out' or 'stealing a base' outside of or before one is involved in a game; that
is, in the institution of baseball.
We can call this Rawls's priority claim: the institution is logically prior to a
particular move. The reason we refer to priority here is that what counts as an appropriate
or justified move in the game of baseball necessitates the rules of the game being
established prior to the acts involved in the game. For example, in order for stealing a base
to be a legitimate move in the game of baseball, there must be rules which establish such a
move as a legal possibility. Understanding the logical priority of rules to acts is what
grounds Rawls's distinction.
In justifying the institution of baseball we could ask questions such as, 'Why should
a player only be allowed three strikes?' These types of questions need to be asked outside of
or external to the institution; the reason for this should be easy to understand. If we were
trying to play a game of baseball and one raised such a question, then the game would have
to be stopped until the question was settled. We would not know how to continue the game
without such questions being settled first. Hence, questions about the justification of
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