Professor Kenneth Ehrenberg - Forms of authority

Overview

One very popular conception of authority among theorists is the service conception, developed by Joseph Raz. This says that practical authority is legitimate when it helps those subject to it to comply better with reasons they already have. But there are two problems with this view that have not yet seen adequate replies: the idea that obedience is owed to the person in authority (whereas the service conception seems to suggest we merely owe it to ourselves to comply), and the idea that legitimate authority gives us a moral obligation to obey (whereas the service conception says we have good reason to obey even when the reasons we already have are not moral ones).

The lecture will be a precis of a book-length project where I aim to show that these problems can be answered by comparing legal authority to other areas of practical authority we encounter in our daily lives. In particular, in some forms of authority, our relationship to the person giving the directives gives us strong preexisting moral reasons to do as they wish and the directive informs us of that wish. In other forms, our obligation is not owed to the person giving the directive at all, but to others who may be impacted by our behaviour.