Political Authority and the Common Good
| Published date | 01 December 2017 |
| Date | 01 December 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717690767 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
690767PSX0010.1177/0032321717690767Political StudiesDuke
research-article2017
Article
Political Studies
2017, Vol. 65(4) 877 –892
Political Authority and the
© The Author(s) 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717690767
DOI: 10.1177/0032321717690767
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George Duke
Abstract
This article argues that the natural law common good is the best candidate value to ground a
direct justification of political authority. The common good is better placed than rival values to
ground a direct justification for three related reasons. First, the common good is the right kind
of value to serve in a justification of political authority insofar as it is a reason for action which
provides a convincing answer to the fundamental question ‘why have authority at all?’ Second,
the common good allows for a justification of political authority that pertains to a complete
political community rather than subjects taken individually. Third, the common good allows for
a reconciliation of two apparently conflicting features of political authority: (1) its ultimate role
is to promote the good of individuals and (2) it can require the subordination of the good of the
individual to the good of the community.
Keywords
common good, political authority, natural law
Accepted: 28 October 2016
Within natural law theories of jurisprudence and politics, the common good serves as a
shared normative reason that guides political deliberation and the acceptance of its out-
comes. In the current article, I argue that this conception of the common good is the most
suitable value to ground a direct justification of political authority. The common good is
better placed than rival moral and political values to ground a direct justification, I claim,
for three related reasons. First, the common good is the right kind of value to serve in a
justification of political authority insofar as it is a reason for action which provides a con-
vincing answer to the fundamental normative question ‘why have authority at all?’ Second,
the common good allows for a justification of political authority that pertains to a complete
political community – paradigmatically, but not necessarily, a nation state – rather than
subjects taken individually. Third, and perhaps most decisively, the common good allows
for a reconciliation of two apparently conflicting features of political authority, namely,
Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC,
Australia
Corresponding author:
George Duke, Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University,
Melbourne Campus at Burwood, 221 Burwood Highway, Melbourne, VIC 3125, Australia.
Email: george.duke@deakin.edu.au
878
Political Studies 65 (4)
that (1) its ultimate role is to promote the good of individuals and (2) it can require the
subordination of the good of the individual to the good of the community.
My argument proceeds in two stages. In the first section below, I first provide a brief
exposition and defence of Stephen Perry’s view that it is necessary to provide a direct
justification of political authority. A direct justification is one that begins with a demon-
stration of the value or good that is served by political authority, regarded as a Hohfeldian
power, and accounts for the normative force of particular directives on that basis. I then
elaborate on some implications of this claim for the normative force of legal directives. In
the following section, I demonstrate why the common good is the best candidate to play
the central normative role in a direct justification. I also argue that the most plausible rival
value – justice – is a constituent of the common good.
The Standard Model
My initial concern in the current section is to demonstrate some problems besetting the
indirect conceptual model employed in most contemporary assessments of legitimate
political authority. An indirect approach to political authority assumes that it is necessary
to determine whether there are duty to obey (DTO) authoritative directives as a way of
proving or disproving the existence of a moral right to impose duties and hence the exist-
ence of legitimate political authority. The view – which is not restricted to philosophical
anarchists – that no compelling indirect justification of political authority has yet been
provided is difficult to resist (Edmundson, 2004). Joseph Raz’s service conception of
authority offers a cogent response to the paradoxes of autonomy and rationality generated
by philosophical anarchist arguments, but is self-consciously piecemeal in its approach
and does not seek to provide a general justification of political authorities (although, as I
argue below, it does not necessarily rule out such a justification in principle). Consideration
of this impasse suggests the need for an explanatory model that proceeds through a direct
argument demonstrating the good or value that is served by political authority, considered
as a moral power to change the normative situation of another. In setting out this argu-
ment, I explore some implications of a direct justification for the normativity of legal
directives. The arguments in favour of a direct justification of political authority also
frame my contention in the second section of the article that the common good is the
central value served by political authority.
As AJ Simmons has observed, talk of justified and legitimate political authority is
frequently ambiguous. Simmons attempts to clarify this ambiguity by differentiating
between the conditions under which a state would be morally defensible and the condi-
tions under which it would have a moral right to rule (RTR). For Simmons, a justification
of the state involves showing ‘that one or more specific kinds of state are morally defen-
sible’, and this in turn requires establishing that ‘some realizable type of state is on bal-
ance morally permissible (or ideal) and that it is rationally preferable to all feasible
nonstate alternatives’ (Simmons, 2001: 125–126). By contrast, ‘a state’s (or govern-
ment’s) legitimacy is the complex moral right it possesses to be the exclusive imposer of
binding duties on its subjects, to have its subjects comply with these duties, and to use
coercion to enforce these duties’ (Simmons, 2001: 130). Simmons’ characterisation of the
central feature of this complex moral right – the moral right to impose a general moral
DTO – exemplifies what I will refer to as the ‘standard model’ of legitimate political
authority. My claim is not that the ‘standard model’ is a self-conscious methodological
Duke
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commitment of all theorists in the field (although see Buchanan, 2010: 81–82), but rather
that it is implicitly assumed in most contemporary discussions.
The standard model (SM) for an assessment of legitimate political authority has the
following form:
SM: A political authority is legitimate only if that authority possesses a moral RTR that
is logically correlative with a general moral DTO.
Two features of the SM stand out. The first is that the SM sets a necessary condition
for legitimate political authority. Second, on the SM, the existence of a general moral
DTO is logically correlated with the existence of a moral RTR. A legitimate state, for
example, would possess a moral RTR, and the correlate of that moral right would be a
general moral duty on the part of the citizens of that state to obey those directives. This
necessary correlation can be read as a bi-conditional:
RTR-DTO: There is a moral RTR iff there is a general moral DTO.
The primary task of the theorist of legitimate political authority on the SM model is to
investigate whether a political authority has a moral RTR based on those subject to the
authority having a general DTO. One works backward, as it were, through the SM, first
assuming the RTR and DTO logical correlation and then generating an affirmative or
negative answer to the possibility of legitimate political authority on the basis of the
satisfaction, or otherwise, of the bi-conditional. If one accepts that the satisfaction of the
SM is dispositive for legitimate political authority, then a disproof of a general moral
DTO and the RTR-DTO more generally would leave a necessary condition for legitimate
political authority unsatisfied, thus disproving the very possibility of legitimate political
authority. The bi-conditional RTR-DTO nested within SM is thus centre stage in most
contemporary treatments of political authority, which generally play themselves out as
discussions of the closely related problem of political obligation.
The SM sets a high benchmark for legitimate political authority. And this would only
seem appropriate, given that political authority entails constraints on personal autonomy,
directs people to comply, or at least conform (Hershovitz, 2012), with directives that may
‘pre-empt’ their own reasoning about what it would be prudentially or morally best to do,
and is associated with coercion, sanctions and unequal power relationships. It is one thing
to set a high benchmark for legitimate political authority, however, and another to assess
its possibility on the basis of a conceptual model that necessitates a negative outcome.
As stated above, the SM promotes an indirect route to the justification of political
authority. It suggests that it is necessary to determine...
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