JOURNAL OF journal of moral philosophy 13 (2016) 475-505 MORAL PHILOSOPHY
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Book Reviews ∵
Michael Huemer The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 365 pp. isbn 9781137281654 (pbk). $44.00.
Philosophical anarchism is, roughly, the view that the sorts of authority as- sumed by States and their laws cannot be justified. Consequently, there is no duty to obey it or them. Robert Paul Wolff’s In Defense of Anarchism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) is perhaps the most famous and persuasive defense – in part for the substance of the argument and in part because of its elegance. Wolff’s book brilliantly compresses the problem of political author- ity into a fairly simple formula. Either there is political authority or there is individual autonomy of persons, but there cannot be both; and the moral prin- ciple of autonomy is fundamental. Michael Huemer’s more recent defense of philosophical (and political) an- archism, The Problem of Political Authority, lacks the elegance of Wolff’s apol- ogy. Its brilliance – and a great deal of its tedium – lies in a critical engagement with virtually every major line of reasoning individually brought to bear in authority’s favor. Like Wolff’s argument, its rejection of authority is not based upon an error theory of morality. Unlike Wolff, however, it is preoccupied with the harmful consequences of authority and our belief in it, not its logical rela- tion to autonomy. “Literally millions” Huemer writes, “have died because of the widespread disposition to obey unjust commands” (p. 174). If any interesting judgments issue from claims like these, we would have to establish how many have been saved on its account. Yet here, I mean only to suggest how this type of moral emphasis is connected to the structure of the book’s argument and why this might be problematic. The book neatly divides into two parts. The first part analyzes and critiques the major and best arguments on behalf of authority. The second part lays out a “workable” vision of an anarcho-capitalist society. The problem of authority is set up in the following way:
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(1) Some coercive acts exercised by one person upon another one are mor- ally wrong. (2) Governments are typically permitted to act in ways that are identical to the coercive acts forbidden individual persons (p. 5). (3) Some fact about political entities, e.g. its tendency to be guided by cor- rect moral principles, its wisdom, its efficiency, its being the object of universal consent, justifies coercion for governments, but not for persons individually or in other types of groups. (4) Therefore, political authority is justified.
Of course, Huemer argues that (3) is false. Thus, there is no way to explain the moral difference between a State’s general right to coerce and that of an indi- vidual person – particularly if the range of cases in which the latter might be justified is extremely narrow. Huemer’s conception of authority here seems problematic. Political author- ity, he writes, “is the hypothesized moral property in virtue of which govern- ments may coerce people in certain ways not permitted anyone else…” (p. 5). Moreover, it has two aspects – legitimacy (a right to coerce) and obligation (a duty by citizens to obey). If one of the justifying alternatives stood up to philosophical scrutiny, then, both political coercion and a duty to obey could be justified on those grounds. Yet, it is hard to find cases in which there is both a right to coerce by one par- ty and a duty to obey by the other one. Suppose that I am your psychiatrist and you are about to jump out of my window. I tell you to get down, and then drag you from the ledge kicking and screaming. I could reasonably enough have a right to coerce you in this way. You are in my office and my professional ethical code requires that I help you; but it is less clear that you have a duty to do what I say. You do not subscribe to my professional ethics; and there may or may not be a universal moral injunction against suicide. Moreover, insofar as I have a duty to do anything, that might be explained by other moral principles, not by my commands even when correct. But other accounts of authority are readily available, e.g. in David Estlund’s Democratic Authority (Princeton University Press, 2008). Here Estlund treats authority simply as the moral power to create obligations through commands. Once authority and a right to coerce are treated as logically distinct the way in which one might analyze and criticize authority will be different. Perhaps Estlund and others who conceive of authority in this way are wrong. But given the centrality of the concept and the ease of discovering counter-examples showing that even an occasional right to coercion does not entail a duty to
journal of moral philosophy 13 (2016) 475-505