The Possibility of Legitimate States, and the Threat of Philosophical Anarchism

Abstract: Philosophical Anarchism holds that actual states do not have legitimate political authority, nor are states with such authority even conceptually possible. While many find this thesis hard to swallow, it logically follows, however, from two relatively plausible premises, namely, the Legitimacy Thesis and the Denial Thesis. The aim of this paper is to resist the claim of the philosophical anarchist. I do so by undermining the various arguments put in favour for the Legitimacy Thesis and the Denial Thesis. In place of the Legitimacy Thesis, I recommend that we adopt what I call the Respect Thesis. This thesis, it will be argued, escapes some of the problems facing the Legitimacy Thesis, and benefits from capturing the very motivations for the latter. Crucially, if my arguments are successful, one then has reasons not to succumb to the position of the philosophical anarchist.

Introduction1 Although many in our world today continue to live in military regimes, while others labour under so-called benevolent dictatorships, it appears intuitive, self-evident even, that states with legitimate political authorities are possible. Indeed one wants to go further and claim that actual states fulfil this criterion. This widespread view—held, almost invariably, by those living in, as well as those contemplating, liberal democracies—is challenged by the following set of propositions:2 (Legitimacy Thesis) A state, X, has legitimate political authority only if those subjected to its jurisdiction have a moral obligation to obey the law. (Denial Thesis) It is not the case that we have a moral obligation to obey the law. (Philosophical Anarchism) So, no actual states have legitimate political authority, nor are such states even possible. There exist two notable arguments in favour of the Legitimacy Thesis, namely what I'll call the non-instrumental argument, and the instrumental argument. The non-instrumental argument, very roughly, says that if to have legitimate political authority is to have the right to rule those who are under one’s jurisdiction (Simmons 1979: 195-196), and given the correlativity between rights and obligations (Hohfeld 1917), then the proposition that a state possesses legitimate political authority would entail the proposition that its subjects have a corresponding moral obligation to obey its demands. The instrumental argument, on the other hand, holds that if the essential function of a legal order is to regulate human behaviour

1 ∗ This paper has benefited from the close supervision I received from Dr Elinor Mason and Dr Campbell Brown (both from the University of Edinburgh). I must also thank Brian Pollex, the editor of Arete, for the many insightful comments he has very generously provided on an earlier draft of this essay. Due to my own limitations, I regret not being able to answer all of Brian’s worries in a more robust manner. 2 See also Edmundson 2004: 218. Arete

(Kelsen 1967: 31), and if a legitimate political authority must in fact be successful at regulating human behaviour, then such a function could not be successfully carried out unless legal subjects possess the moral obligation to obey the law. For centuries, philosophers have assumed that we have a moral obligation to obey the law; and that the intellectual focus should instead be on how one might justify such an obligation (i.e. the “problem of political obligation”). However, a number of contemporary academics, impelled, perhaps, by the political turmoil in America during the 1960s and ‘70s, have come to deny that we possess such an obligation. Indeed, these writers make the stronger claim that we owe no such moral obligations regardless of how just a state might in fact be. Their sceptical stance constitutes what I call the Denial Thesis. Given both theses, one is led to a conclusion that denies the possibility of legitimate political authorities, or what has come to be known as “philosophical anarchism”. The aim of this paper is to resist the thesis of the philosophical anarchist. I do this by arguing against both the Legitimacy Thesis and the Denial Thesis. In section 1, I begin by first considering the Denial Thesis. While subsection 1.1 is devoted solely to explicating the concept of an obligation to obey the law, the remaining subsections will critically consider the numerous arguments for the Denial Thesis. It is important to note that my aim in section 1 is to merely present a defence of the claim that we have a moral obligation to obey the law. It is beyond the scope of this essay to adjudicate between the various positive attempts at justifying why it might be the case that subjects of a state have such an obligation (e.g. consent theories, theories of natural duties, etc.). Considering the ubiquity of the intuition that we do have an obligation to obey the law,3 (Tyler 1990; Klosko 2005: 181-222), the burden of proof falls squarely on the sceptic. If the sceptic’sal arguments can be compromised, then I will have shown that we have better reason to at least withhold from, rather than assent to, the Denial Thesis. Section 2 is devoted to demonstrating the falsity of two arguments for the Legitimacy Thesis. I begin my critique, in subsection 2.1, by first showing that the instrumental argument for the Legitimacy Thesis is not cogent. Moving on, I note that the Legitimacy Thesis appears to manifest itself more as a received doctrine than a claim that has been robustly argued for. Of the many authors who seem to treat the thesis as self-evident—Anscombe, Wolff, Smith, Simmons, Green, Soper, among others—Raz has provided what appears to be the best non- instrumental argument for the Legitimacy Thesis.4 His account of the Legitimacy Thesis, then, will be treated in subsection 2.2. There, I will try to show that even the best extant argument for the thesis, i.e. Raz’s, fails to be fully convincing. Finally, in subsection 2.3, I will offer a suggestion on how the Legitimacy Thesis might be modified so as to not only escape the problem besetting Raz’s argument, but to also capture the motivations behind the doctrine as originally conceived.

3 In his research, social psychologist Tom Tyler reports that 82% of 1,575 people interviewed agreed that we should even obey laws with which we might disagree (1990: 46). But cf. Green ([1996]1999). 4 Other less plausible non-instrumental arguments for the Legitimacy Thesis were proposed by Carnes (1960) and Pitkin (1966). The Possibility of Legitimate States, and the Threat of Philosophical Anarchism

§1 §1.1 The obligation to obey the law bears the following features. First, the obligation is a “prima facie”5 one, in that the reasons it generateare not conclusive. Reasons generated by “prima facie” obligations are liable to being overridden by countervailing reasons. Second, the obligation to obey the law is “general,” that is, the obligation applies to all legal norms, including those that do not impose obligations, such as norms that confer powers, liabilities, and so forth. Admittedly, it may seem unnatural to speak of an obligation with regards to the latter set of legal norms; but insofar as one cannot understand, say, the significance of the power to contract without understanding that it gives rise to an obligation to perform some act, the obligation to obey the law, then, does not merely undergird only those norms which impose obligations. Third, the obligation is “content-independent,” in that the existence of the obligation is not dependent on the merit of the particular law in question (Edmundson 2004: 216). This aspect is often expressed as the “obligation to obey the law qua law”. The content- independent obligation pre-empts the subject’s own assessment of the moral merits of the action required by the law. In what follows, whenever I write of the obligation to obey the law, readers should assume that this phrase makes reference to the three characteristics of such an obligation that I’ve outlined above. Finally, I assume that there exists an obligation to obey the law only if that specific legal institution, and the state that it serves, are sufficiently just.6 Should this requirement not obtain, then, “all bets are off”.

§1.2 The first objection to the existence of a moral obligation to obey the law can be framed in terms of a dilemma: P1. Either law L conflicts with morality or it does not. P2. If L does not conflict with morality, then the obligation to obey L would be redundant. P3. If L conflicts with morality, then there is no obligation to obey L. C. So, the obligation to obey L is either redundant or there is simply no such obligation [P1;P2;P3]. The above dilemma may be resisted may objecting to both P2 and P3. Let us first show P2 to be false. Among the law’s numerous functions is its instrumentality in solving co-ordination problems (Finnis 1980, 1989; Coleman 1989; Raz 1994: 247). Given that practical reasoning reveals a number of equally worthy courses of action to undertake (e.g. whether to drive on the left or right hand side of the road) there arise coordination problems, which “the law solves by making authoritative selections from among them [courses of action] for the community to adopt” (Aiyar 2000: 478). While practical reasoning may provide no reason as to whether or not I should drive on the left or right hand side of the road, the law intervenes by making it the case that all road users should stick to the left hand side of the road, such that I'm now obliged to comply with the law’s dictate. Additionally, the law is useful in

5 I regard the term “prima facie” as somewhat misleading (as opposed to the term “pro tanto”), but I will continue to use it in order to keep my terminology consistent with that of the literature. 6 It is immaterial to this essay as to what the justness of a state consists in. Arete regulating domains that require expert knowledge.7 Take for instance the regulation of pharmaceutical products. Here we defer to legal authorities for guidance. For, it may be the case that individual attempts to reach conclusions on whether certain drugs are safe for consumption would involve great financial expenditure. Therefore, it is not redundant to speak of an obligation to obey the law. In cases where co-ordination problems might arise, or where expert knowledge is required, whether or not the law sanctions a certain course of action does makes a difference to what I'm obligated to do.8 Let us turn next to P3, the claim that there is no obligation to obey a law, L, which conflicts with morality. P3 can be read in two ways: (1) the process by which L came to be law is immoral, or (2) acting in accord with L would require citizens to take immoral actions. Start first with interpretation (1) of P3. It is well established in American law that no one may be punished for conduct that was not deemed criminal at the time it occurred (US Constitution, Art. I, §§9, 10). This seems to be a clear instance where there is no obligation to obey a law which conflicts with morality in sense (1). Turn now to interpretation (2) of P3. Two observations here suggest that there is no obligation to obey sufficiently immoral laws. First, some verdicts decided on constitutional grounds are instances of a putative legal obligation overturned as a result of conflicting with morality. An example here is Brown v. Topeka Board of Education [347 U.S. 483 (1954)] where the court held that racial segregation in American public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Second, if we believe some acts of civil disobedience to be morally justified, then it must be the case that the obligation to obey some sufficiently immoral law may be overridden on moral grounds. Since these two considerations show that there is no obligation to obey at least some laws which conflict with morality, so P3 understood in interpretation (2) seems to be false. Given that P3 is problematic in both senses (1) and (2), and that P2 is clearly false, the supposed dilemma generated by the obligation to obey the law can be resolved.

§1.3 Malcolm Smith ([1973]1999) argues that there is no prima facie obligation to obey the law. He first assumes that if there exist such an obligation to obey the law, then this obligation must possess “moral weight,” or be a “serious one” vis-à-vis other moral

7 See Raz (1986): 75. 8 It bears remembering that the dilemma is not set up as an argument for the claim that there exists a moral obligation to obey the law. Rather, the dilemma is a potential argument that a proponent of the Denial Thesis might forward. Hence, when I make the claim that some laws function to solve co-ordination problems or to provide expert advice, I do not claim that it is in virtue of this fact that we have a moral obligation to obey the law qua law. As I'd remarked in the introductory section, a claim to the effect that we do have a moral obligation to obey the law qua law is precisely the task of theorists of political obligation. While this article is neutral about views of political obligation, I must again stress that I assume that at least one of these theories can account for the intuition that we do have an obligation to obey the law qua law (see footnote 2). Now it may be pressed against me: Doesn’t this commit me to saying that driving on the side of the road which the law has (contingently) prescribed a moral matter? But how can this be a moral matter when driving on the prescribed side of the road is, to be sure, a morally neutral matter? To this riposte I would add that nothing I have said thus far commits me to saying that the very act of driving on the left per se is a moral matter. Rather, it is the act of driving on the left insofar as the law has decreed so that is a moral matter. Driving on the left, then, is a matter both of prudence (on the assumption that everyone drives on the same side of the road) and of morality (insofar as the law has decreed so). The Possibility of Legitimate States, and the Threat of Philosophical Anarchism obligations.9 According to Smith, to show that a moral obligation possesses moral weight or is a serious obligation, such an obligation must satisfy either one of two criterion which he formulates as follow (Ibid.: 93-94):

“A prima facie obligation is a serious one if, and only if, an act which violates that obligation and fulfils no other is seriously wrong...”

“[A] prima facie obligation is a serious one if, and only if, violation of it will make considerably worse an act which on other grounds is already wrong.”

The two criteria provided by Smith are defective given his use of the biconditional. For this would mean that the analysans of both criteria equivalent. But this is surely mistaken. To remedy this I recommend that we simply revisethe biconditional in both criteria to that of an implicature. Call the first revised criterion “Test-1” and the second “Test-2”. Now, Smith argues that the putative obligation to obey the law fails Test-1:

Let us assume that while driving home at two o’clock in the morning I run a stop sign. There is no danger, for I can see clearly that there was no one approaching the intersection, nor is there any impressionable youth nearby to be inspired to a life of crime by my flouting of the traffic code... [If] my prima facie obligation to obey the law is of substantial moral weight, my action must have been a fairly serious instance of wrongdoing. But clearly it was not (Ibid.: 94).

Smith then goes on to argue that the putative obligation to obey the law also fails Test-2:

[W]e may observe that acts which are otherwise wrong are not made more so—if they are made worse at all—by being illegal. If I defraud someone my act is hardly worse morally by being illegal than it would have been were it protected by some legal loophole. (Ibid.: 94).

Given that the putative moral obligation to obey the law flunks both tests, Smith then concludes that “if there is a prima facie obligation to obey the law, it is at most of trifling weight”. To be sure, Smith’s remarks can be read as suggesting that although the obligation to obey the law is not a moral obligation (since it is of “trifling weight”), it may nonetheless be a prudential obligation.10 While I disagree with the former claim (see below) I can fully accept the latter claim. There may be purely prudential considerations for obeying the law,

9 It is important to note that the locutions Smith introduces—such as obligations bearing a certain “moral weight”—are strictly terms of art, and should not be understood according to how we use such terms in our everyday linguistic practice. This point is worth stressing because if we interpret the notion of an obligation which bears “moral weight” or is “serious” according to their everyday senses we would be left with the implausible conclusion that all our moral obligation must be non-trivial or not serious—a position which I cannot honestly ascribe to Smith. 10 This sentence may suggest the claim that all prudential obligations are in some sense trivial. This claim is highly implausible because there also exist non-trivial prudential obligations. For instance, considerations of prudence suggest that I ought not to drink the bottle of rat poison in front of me; but surely such a consideration is far from trivial! Arete but this is not inconsistent with our also possessing a moral obligation to obey the law qua law. 11 Let me first consider Smith’s argument to the effect that an obligation to obey the law fails Test-1. According to the first passage quoted from Smith, the agent infers that since her act of flouting a traffic regulation is not serious moral wrongdoing, the obligation to obey traffic regulations must not be a moral one. Now while it does seem that running the red-light at two in the morning is not an instance of serious moral wrongdoing, why should this imply that there is no general moral obligation to obey traffic rules? The consequences of my disposing a leaky lithium battery into a river may be meagre, but this wouldn’t be true if everyone did the same. So it seems that whether or not some putative obligation is a moral one does not imply the claim that a single violation of it constitutes serious moral wrongdoing.12 In other words, the motivations leading us to class an obligation as a moral obligation is not wholly exhausted by our considerations of how serious a single transgression of that putative obligation is. But insofar as Smith’s Test-1 assumes otherwise, it fails to provide us with the correct criterion for when some putative obligation is a moral obligation. I now turn to Smith’s second argument against the existence of a moral obligation to obey the law. Recall Smith’s Test-2, which roughly holds that an obligation is a moral one only if “violation of it will make considerably worse an act which on other grounds is already wrong”. Test-2, I believe, also fails to provide us with the correct criterion for when some putative obligation is a moral obligation. In the second passage quoted from Smith, Smith’s agent regards her fraudulent act as being “hardly worse morally by being illegal than it would have been were it protected by some legal loophole”. Therefore, given Test-2, the legal obligation to not defraud others cannot possibly be a moral obligation (even though fraudulent acts in general are morally wrongful). Admittedly, I too share the intuition that illegality doesn’t seem to add anything relevant to our moral deliberations over whether we ought to do a morally wrong act. However, this in no way precludes the claim that illegality makes a difference to our practical deliberations when an act is not otherwise morally wrong. But the analysans of Smith’s Test- 2, which only entertains morally wrong acts, seems to crowd out acts that only violate the law and not any other requirements of morality. But since the issue—i.e. of whether acts which violate the obligation to obey the law are morally wrong acts—is the very claim that Smith wishes to deny, Test-2 has tilted the playing field against those of the opinion that acts of legal violation are also acts of (prima facie) wrongdoing. The same point can be made in another way. Many acts which are morally wrong are wrong simply in virtue of having flouted a moral obligation, and not wrong in virtue of having flouted numerous moral obligations. Here’s an example: when I deceive you by getting you to believe a false yet inconsequential proposition—say, that my late grandfather loved the colour red—such that your believing such a proposition would not in any way undermine your interests, my act of deception is simply wrong in virtue of having transgressed a moral obligation, namely the obligation not to tell lies. Now, analogously, some of our legal transgressions are morally wrong simply in virtue of our having flouted the, and only the, moral obligation to obey those legal requirements. An example here might be a

11 It is of course an open question as to what my specific motivation(s) is for obeying the law. See my discussion in section 2.1. 12 Now even if my intentional disposing of a single leaky battery into the river is a morally unworthy action, this is no way entails that I am to be blamed should others follow suit. The Possibility of Legitimate States, and the Threat of Philosophical Anarchism case where I fail to pay my parking charges in full. Now when Smith’s Test-2 seems to say “Look, since your act of fraud is not made morally worse by also breaking the law, legal obligations cannot be moral obligations,” what Smith has surreptitiously assumed here is the claim that all of our legal transgressions must already be wrong in virtue of having flouted some relevant moral obligation. But this supposition, as I’ve remarked, is clearly false: some acts are morally wrong simply by being legal transgressions; and denying this claim is simply to beg the question. In sum, both of Smith’s arguments against the existence of a moral obligation to obey the law remain unconvincing.

§1.4 A. John Simmons (1979) argues that we do not have a moral obligation to obey the law. He begins his discussion by first distinguishing the notion of a “positional duty” from that of a “moral duty” or “natural duty”. Positional duties, for Simmons, generate:

[T]asks or performances which are intimately connected with some particular office, station, or role which an individual can fill. This role may be part of an institutional framework, but need not be. Thus, we speak of the duties of the citizen, a teacher, or the president, but also the duties of the father (Ibid.: 12).

“Moral duties,” or “natural duties”, on the other hand, are simply duties “independent of any institutional setting or special role which the duty-bound individual is supposed to be playing” (Ibid.: 12). The duty to obey the law, according to Simmons, consists in our specific legal duties as well as those duties conferred upon by our status as citizens of a state. Insofar as both kinds of duties are positional duties, the duty to obey the law is a positional duty (Ibid.: 16). Finally, Simmons argues that positional duties are not sufficient in and of themselves to generate moral requirements. One of the examples Simmons uses to support his claim is that of an army medic who, with a tent full of wounded patients, wanders off to spend the afternoon in a Saigon bar. Additionally, Simmons informs us that this medic was conscripted into the service against his will. While Simmons agrees that the army medic’s behaviour violates both his moral as well as his positional duties, Simmons believes, however, that the duties are independent of each other:

In this case, the army medic has a moral duty to perform the same acts he has a positional duty to perform. But this former duty [i.e. the moral duty] is not a duty “to perform his positional duties.” For anyone, not just an army medic, has precisely the same duty to help those in need... The [moral] duty here is completely independent of the position and the scheme or institution which defines it. The existence of the positional duty in no way establishes the moral requirement, but rather only happens to coincide with it (Ibid.: 19-20).

With that, Simmons concludes that the duty to obey the law, insofar as it is a positional duty, “do[es] not have any moral weight,” and “impose[s] no moral constraints on my action” (Ibid.: 17). I understand Simmons to be making the following claims: Arete

(Claim-1) There is a conceptual distinction between a positional duty and a moral duty.

(Claim-2) The obligation to obey the law is a positional duty.

(Claim-3) Positional duties do not constitute nor do they entail moral duties.

Simmons’ argument for Claim-1 is unconvincing. Simmons claims that a positional duty is one defined by “a role which an individual can fill,” that may or may not be provided by some institutional setting. An example Simmons gives of a role not provided for by an institutional setting is that of the “duties of a father”. Now this set of supposedly non- institutional positional duties seem to bear striking resemblance to what we would intuitively deem as moral duties. Take the example of a pet-owner who goes on a holiday such that her pet starves at home. Here, I find myself more inclined to judge her action based on moral grounds, rather than on the fact that she has not fulfilled her non-institutional positional duty of “being a responsible pet-owner”. Of course I might blame her by remarking that pet-owners ought not to behave as irresponsibly as she had; but what seems to be doing the work here is the judgment that “she ought to dispose of her duties as a pet-owner responsibly”. This seems to be a moral judgment. Now, recall Simmons puzzlement over why the army medic should have a moral duty “to perform his positional duties”. If my example of the irresponsible pet-owner is at all plausible, there ought to be nothing puzzling about having moral duties to perform positional duties. We make judgments to that effect all the time. But Simmons might reply that I’ve under-appreciated the nature of his thought-experiment. The army medic, Simmons reminds us, was conscripted against his will. The inclusion of this detail would seem to imply that we should not think that the medic has a moral duty to perform his positional duties. It would seem that if the army medic was forcibly conscripted, then there is no justification in requiring him to perform the positional duties of an army medic. If so, then the nominal army medic does not violate his positional duty to tend to the sickly when he decides to spend the afternoon at a bar instead. This is so because he—the particular medic in question—does not have such a positional duty to begin with. He is only an army medic in the trivial sense of nominally occupying such a position. To be sure, the ‘medic’ might do wrong if he could very easily have saved a patient’s life, but chose not to. (This intuition is often fleshed out by so-called “duties of easy-rescue”). Now even if we believe that the medic has a duty to aid his patients when doing so requires little effort, this belief is nonetheless consistent with our earlier claim that the medic (qua conscript) does not have a moral duty to perform all his positional duties. I have tried to show that the conceptual distinction Simmons draws between non- institutional positional duties and moral duties is theoretically, if not practically, unhelpful. Yet Simmons might concede this, and argue that I’ve not hit the heart of his argument since the distinction between institutional positional duties and moral duties remains sound. But is it? A lot depends, I think, on what Simmons’ actually means by the term “institutional”. Unfortunately, Simmons’ comments on this matter are scant. Regardless, I do believe that we’ve certain fixed intuitions about the concept of an “institution” to guide us along. Here I have gathered a few (c.f. Scruton 2007: 333ff.): The Possibility of Legitimate States, and the Threat of Philosophical Anarchism

1. It is an abstract, non-propositional object. 2. It contains members (or contains a member), but is not identical to them (her). 3. It may or may not possess agency, that is, the ability to form decisions, intentions, etc., and to act on these. If it possesses agency, then it may or may not have rights and obligations. 4. It endures beyond the life of its particular members. 5. Its members are usually governed by rules, laws, conventions, etc. 6. The clearest manifestation of an institution is through the intentional actions of its members as governed by those institutional rules, laws, etc.

This list is certainly non-exhaustive, but I'm fairly confident that whatever else an institution may possess, it should have the properties I’ve listed. The point of this slight detour is this: it seems that given features 1 through 6, morality itself can be considered an institution in its own right. Indeed, philosophers such as Bernard Williams (1985) and Thomas Scanlon (1998) often speak of the “institution of morality”. All this, I think, should not be surprising. But if we accept that morality itself can suffice as an institution, then it seems arbitrary for Simmons to draw the line between institutional positional duties on the one hand, and moral duties on the other. Yet Simmons might reply that we often speak of encountering conflicts between, say, our legal or religious duties as opposed to our moral duties. And this is strong evidence that there is normative import between our institutional positional duties and our moral duties. But the potential objection assumes that our moral duties cannot conflict amongst themselves; but this seems false. Indeed I would venture to assert that a putative conflict between a legal duty and a moral one is simply a conflict within morality.13 My objections to Simmons’ claim that there is a conceptual distinction between a positional duty and a moral duty is this: either a positional duty is an institutional positional duty or a non-institutional positional duty. If we take the former, then the distinction between an institutional positional duty and a moral duty rests on arbitrary grounds. If we take the latter, then there exists little normative difference between a non-institutional positional duty and a moral duty. Now, since Simmons fails to draw a coherent distinction between positional and moral duties, his argument cannot even get started.

§2 §2.1 In the preceding section, I presented and objected to the numerous arguments in favour of the Denial Thesis, which denies that we have a moral obligation to obey the law. Throughout the rest of this article, I will focus on the Legitimacy Thesis, which holds that states with legitimate political authority are those whose subjects have a corresponding moral obligation to obey the law. The first argument for such a thesis, or what I’ve called the Instrumental Argument, may be reconstructed as follows:

P1. It is an essential function of the law that it regulates human behaviour.

P2. If it is an essential function of the law that it regulates human behaviour, then a state, X, which possesses legitimate political authority, must be successful at regulating human behaviour, whatever else X may possess.

13 This claim is, of course, much in keeping with the position I am endeavouring to defend in this section of the paper, namely, that we do have a moral obligation to obey the law. Arete

P3. So, a state, X, which possesses legitimate political authority, must be successful at regulating human behaviour. [P1;P2]. P4. If a state, X, which possesses legitimate political authority, must be successful at regulating human behaviour, then X has legitimate political authority only if those subjected to its jurisdiction have a moral obligation to obey the law. P5. So, X has legitimate political authority only if those subjected to its jurisdiction have a moral obligation to obey the law [P3;P4]. As I think that above argument for the Legitimacy Thesis is fundamentally misguided, my critique of it will be brief. P4, I believe, is simply false, because it confuses the notion of a “duty to comply with the law” for the notion of a “duty to obey the law”. Unlike the latter duty, my duty to comply with the law need not evoke the notion of a moral obligation to obey the law. This is so because I may comply with the law on the grounds of prudence (that it is likely that I would be punished for non-compliance), or on religious grounds (that God frowns upon those who live in discord with their brethren), or even on other moral grounds which do not depend on the idea of a moral obligation to obey the law (that the law codifies sound moral principles that prohibit killing, theft, etc.). At this juncture one may fault my introduction of the above distinction for being merely an ad-hoc attempt at undermining the instrumental argument for the Legitimacy Thesis. In order to pre-empt such a potential objection I recommend the following definitions to make the distinction between “complying with the law” as opposed to “obeying the law” in more principled grounds: S complies with the law =def S’s actions are not in contravention to legal norms.

S obeys the law =def (i) S’s actions are not in contravention to legal norms; and (ii) clause (i) is explained by that fact that S believes that she ought to obey the law because it is the law. Given the preceding definitions, all instances of obedience to the law are instances of compliance; the converse, however, does not hold. More importantly, that the general populace of a state complies with the law on religious or prudential grounds is more than sufficient for such a state to be in fact successful at regulating human behaviour. And since not all instances of compliance are instances of obedience, therefore the explanation why some state is successful in regulating its citizenry’s behaviour need not necessarily evoke something as strong as its citizens having to possess a moral obligation to obey the law. For example, a state with a disproportionately harsh system of punitive laws may successfully regulate its citizenry’s behaviour without inspiring in them a moral obligation to obey its laws. P4, therefore, is unsound. The instrumental argument for the Legitimacy Thesis is, then, indefensible.

§2.2 In this section, I intend to construct and critique what I’ve called the non-instrumental version of the argument for the Legitimacy Thesis. In constructing this argument, I intend to draw support from the extensive work done by Joseph Raz on the nature of authority. Most of the pertinent premises of the non-instrumental argument are Raz’s; where premises are lacking in order to render the argument valid, I will fill in such gaps accordingly. Given the sophistication of Raz’s analysis, I have decided to present his argument in sections with the sole intent of making clear its pertinent stages. This runs as follows: The Possibility of Legitimate States, and the Threat of Philosophical Anarchism

(1) The “Authority Thesis” states a conceptual truth about the law: it holds that, necessarily, every legal system “claims” that it possesses legitimate political authority, that is, it claims to possess the right to morally obligate those over whom it holds authority (Raz 1994: 215; 2004: 6). If the legal institution claims to possess the right to morally oblige those over whom it holds authority, and if it is in fact justified in having such a right (see Point 2, below), then those within a legal system’s jurisdiction must have a moral obligation to obey the law. Now what exactly does it mean for the law to “claim” legitimate political authority? Raz’s remarks on this matter are helpful:

The claims the law makes for itself are evident from the language it adopts and from the opinions expressed by its spokesman, i.e. by the institutions of the law. The law’s claim to authority is manifested by the fact that legal institutions are officially designated as ‘authorities,’ by the fact that they regard themselves as having the right to impose obligations on their subjects, by their claims that their subjects owe them allegiance, and that their subjects ought to obey the law as it requires to be obeyed... (Raz 1994: 199-200)

It is crucial to note that the Authority Thesis also applies to de facto political authorities, that is, authorities that do not necessarily possess moral legitimacy (Ibid.: 195). (2) Further, Raz writes, “the fact that the law claims authority for itself shows that it is capable of having authority” (1994: 201, emphasis added). To be “capable” of having authority, the law must function like an arbitrator for its subjects by issuing reasons for action. It must, in other words, carry out the mediating role that we expect from any practical authority (of which the law is but one species). Crucially, whether a de facto political authority is in fact a legitimate political authority (i.e. a de jure political authority) depends on how successfully such an authority carries out its role as an arbitrator for its subjects. The criterion of success is evoked by what Raz’s calls the “Service Conception of Authority,” which spells out the necessary and sufficient conditions satisfaction of which a de facto political authority suffices as a legitimate political authority.

(3) The Service Conception of Authority is constituted by the following two theses:

(The Normal Justification Thesis) The normal way to establish that a person has authority over another person involves showing that the alleged subject is likely to better comply with reasons which apply to her if she accepts the directives of the alleged authority as authoritatively binding and tries to follow them, rather than by trying to follow the reasons which apply to her directly (Raz 1986: 53).

(The Dependence Thesis) All authoritative directives should be based on reasons which already independently apply to the subjects of the directives and are relevant to their action in the circumstances covered by the directive (Ibid.: 47).

According to the “Normal Justification Thesis,” authorities are legitimate when their subjects are more likely to conform to the balance of reasons that apply to them if they comply with Arete legal directives. There exists, I think, a slight ambiguity in deciphering what Raz means when he speaks of “the balance of reasons”. The “Dependence Thesis,” I believe, clarifies the notion of “reasons” as employed by Raz in his formulation of the Normal Justification Thesis. This thesis holds that legal directives should be based on reasons which “already” apply, and which apply “independently” to its subjects. Raz is here referring to the so-called “agent-neutral” reasons (as opposed to “agent-relative” reasons) famously introduced by Thomas Nagel (1986). Agent-neutral reasons are reasons which do not refer to any particular individual. On this stipulation, a reason such as “To prevent global-warming” would count as an agent-neutral reason. If by “reasons” Raz is referring to agent-neutral reasons, then the locution “the balance of reasons” would simply refer to an all-things-considered agent-neutral reason. On this interpretation, the Normal Justification thesis would hold that the legitimacy of an authority is dependent on how well it gets its subjects to do what is best as prescribed by all-things-considered agent-neutral reasons. (4) Raz believes that the Normal Justification Thesis and the Dependence Thesis imply the following:

(The Pre-emptive Thesis) The fact that an authority requires performance of an action is a reason for its performance which is not to be added to all other relevant reasons when assessing what to do, but should exclude and take the place of some of them (Ibid.: 46).

The “Pre-emptive Thesis,” I believe, says that authoritative reasons, unlike ordinary reasons, are (i) not only reasons for a subject to act according to its contents, but also (ii) reasons that substitute other reasons for action. Raz illustrates the workings of the Pre-emptive Thesis using the example of the process of arbitration (Ibid.: 41-42). The arbitrator’s final decision is meant to be a product of all the relevant considerations of the case at hand. Subjects to the arbitration, then, are to accept the final decision insofar as this decision reflects the considerations of the case. If subjects were to deliberate about the merits of the case themselves, there would be no need for arbitration. With that, we may now construct the non-instrumental argument for the Legitimacy Thesis:

P1. Necessarily, the law claims legitimate political authority.

P2. If the law claims legitimate political authority, then it is a function of the law that it serves as a practical arbitrator for its subjects.

P3. If it is function of the law that it serves as a practical arbitrator for its subjects, then a state, X, possesses legitimate political authority only if X satisfies the Normal Justification Thesis and the Dependence Thesis.

P4. If a state, X, satisfies the Normal Justification Thesis and the Dependence Thesis, then the legal demands of X reflect the balance of reasons that apply to the subjects of X. The Possibility of Legitimate States, and the Threat of Philosophical Anarchism

The foregoing premises are Raz’s. To get a valid argument for the Legitimacy Thesis, I propose the following (c.f. Feldman 1986):

P5. We are obligated to do what is best. What is best is provided by the balance of reasons that apply to us.

Premises P2 through P5 entails:

P6. So, if the law claims legitimate political authority, then a state, X, possesses legitimate political authority only if X’s subjects have a moral obligation to obey the law.

Finally, P1 and P6 give us:

P7. So, a state, X, possesses legitimate political authority only if X’s subjects have a moral obligation to obey the law.

Clearly, P7 is a restatement of the Legitimacy Thesis. If the foregoing analysis is cogent, we will have a very lucid argument demonstrating it’s soundness.

Since I’ve assumed P5, I'm disallowed from objecting to it, as well as the conclusions which follow from it, namely P6 and P7. For now, let us focus on the consequent of P3:

(P3-Consequent) A state, X, possesses legitimate political authority only if X satisfies the Normal Justification Thesis and the Dependence Thesis.

Schematically, the conjunction of the Normal Justification Thesis and the Dependence Thesis may be rendered as follows:

A’s authority over B with respect to domain D is justified if B is more likely to act correctly in D by complying with A’s directives, than if B were to act by reasoning on her own; an agent acts correctly iff she acts in accordance with the balance of right reasons that apply to her.

To see how P3-Consequent is problematic, consider the following scenario. Suppose that D refers to the domain of Travis’ sexual behaviour. Suppose also that Travis is presently committing adultery, and the state that Travis resides in has a law which criminalises adultery. Clearly, Travis would be more likely to act correctly by complying with such a law since the balance of right reasons would more likely counsel against his adulterous liaisons. So given P3-Consequent, a necessary condition for the legitimacy of Travis’ state is that it has laws that illegalize adultery. But this seems counterintuitive. Indeed, the opposite seems to be true. That is, we would normally judge a certain state to be illegitimate when it Arete unnecessarily pries into our private lives (c.f. Copp 1999: 19). To the foregoing it might be objected that even if Travis’ state is illegitimate with respect to the specific domain that is its citizenry’s sexual behaviour, the state may nonetheless be all-things-considered legitimate. More generally, a state’s (all-things-considered) legitimacy need not be held hostage by specific occasions where it acts illegitimately. In reply, I would suggest that the foregoing claim is plausible but only with an important qualification. That is, it is implausible to suggest that a state’s (all-things-considered) legitimacy may tolerate occasional instances of specific illegitimacy, period. This is because we would not normally judge a state to be legitimate when it commits, say, occasional acts of genocide. Rather, it is more plausible to suggest that a state’s (all-things-considered) legitimacy may tolerate occasional instances of specific illegitimacy where those instances are few and far between and where the domain to which those instances belong is relatively unimportant. Admittedly, there is no hard and fast rule for determining whether a specific domain is a relatively unimportant one. But surely the domain that is a citizenry’s sexual behaviour cannot be a relatively unimportant one. And for Travis’ state to take a curious interest in regulating Travis’ behaviour in this domain surely counts against the state’s legitimacy. I am therefore inclined to think that P3-Consequent is problematic. In the foregoing paragraph, I have assumed that the balance of right reasons, or an all-things-considered agent-neutral reason, would not permit adultery.14 An objector might resist this assumption. She might argue that while an all-things-considered agent- neutral moral reason would disallow adultery, however, an all-things-considered agent- neutral reason would allow adultery. This is because agents might have a non-moral agent- neutral reason for everyone’s preferences to be satisfied. And since everyone would have a preference not to live in a state that criminalises adultery, an all-things-considered agent- neutral reason will permit adultery. The moral agent-neutral reason that disallows adultery would be trumped by the non-moral agent-neutral reason that everyone’s preferences ought to be satisfied. Hence, an all-things-considered agent-neutral reason would permit adultery. Hence a legitimate Razian state would not criminalise adultery, since a law that forbids adultery would not reflect the balance of right reasons, or an all-things-considered agent- neutral reason. This potential objection to my example involving Travis and his state is instructive. For, it shows how ambiguous Raz’s notion of “the balance of right reasons”—or, on my interpretation, an all-things-considered agent-neutral reason—is. Firstly, it remains to be seen whether the agent-neutral/agent-relative reason distinction is coherent. Secondly, even if an incontrovertible distinction between these two types of reasons can be drawn, the question of how one might arrive at an all-things-considered agent-neutral reason still remains unanswered. Do we assign more weight to moral agent-neutral reasons as opposed to non- moral agent-neutral reason, or vice versa? Say we proffer the most plausible normative ethical theory as an answer to the problem of aggregating agent-neutral reasons. If so, then the “balance of right reasons” will presumably track the conclusions of such a normative theory. But if we opt for this route, then it appears that Raz’s Normal Justification Thesis and his Dependence Thesis are rendered redundant. State legitimacy, then, would simply be determined by the normative ethical theory we had adopted. The debate surrounding Raz’s conception of authority is massive; and I cannot even begin to sketch an outline of this debate without running afoul of my present space

14 I should qualify this statement: I assumed that the balance of reason would not permit adultery in general, and, a fortiori, would not permit Travis’ adulterous behaviour. I am happy to allow that the balance of reasons may permit such behaviour under extenuating circumstances. The Possibility of Legitimate States, and the Threat of Philosophical Anarchism constraints. Whatever the overall merits of Raz’s conception of authority, it would be wrong- headed to build a non-instrumental argument for the Legitimacy Thesis on Razian foundations. Given the ambiguities surrounding Raz’s claims, an argument for the Legitimacy Thesis based on Razian premises would not look convincing. In any case, my aim in this section is not to discredit Raz’s conception of authority. Rather, I only to wish to suggest that a non-instrumental argument for the Legitimacy Thesis based on Razian premises would be problematic. At this juncture, we may either give up the Legitimacy Thesis, or defend the Razian non-instrumental argument for the thesis. While the former involves a sacrifice, the latter option looks set to be a difficult task. In what follows, I intend to tread a middle path by offering a reformulation of the Legitimacy Thesis. This reformulated thesis, I will demonstrate, not only accounts for the motivation behind the original, but also has the added virtue of not resting on problematic premises.

§2.3 The Legitimacy Thesis is often thought to be true because it captures an important intuition: that the laws of states with legitimate political authority possess normative significance. A legitimate political authority, in other words, is thought to be of practical relevance to its subjects. But we seem to be caught in a bind, since, as the preceding subsection demonstrated, it is untenable to cash out the “practical relevance” that a legitimate political authority is thought to possess in terms of a full-blown moral obligation on the part of its subjects to obey its laws. Fortunately, it seems to me that we need not be forced to choose between either accepting the above version of the Legitimacy Thesis or abandoning our intuition altogether.

In place of the Legitimacy Thesis, I recommend the following thesis:

(Respect Thesis) A state, X, has legitimate political authority only if those subjected to its jurisdiction have a moral obligation to respect X. In order to understand the motivations behind the Respect Thesis as well as to grasp what exactly goes into “respecting” a certain entity, let us briefly consider another form of authority, namely, the authority that experts are thought to possess in whatever field they may specialise in. Suppose that Ron is an expert in the nascent field of Scientology, a discourse whose principles I can only characterise as being somewhat far-fetched. Now, while I may be sceptical as to the value of the teachings of Scientology (as a means of furthering the welfare of its followers), the very fact that I justifiably believe Ron to be an expert in this field is a sufficient reason for me to adopt a certain attitude towards Ron. For example, I may not prevent Ron from preaching the teachings of Scientology, nor may I coerce the followers of Ron into abandoning their beliefs. In sum, while I may have a personal quibble with Ron’s religion, insofar as I recognise that he is a legitimate authority in his field, I ought to respect him. More importantly, that I have an obligation to respect Ron is no reason for me to be obliged to accept Ron’s teachings, or to act on any of Ron’s commands. By analogy, that I justifiably believe some state, X, to possess legitimate political authority is a sufficient reason for me to respect X. But what exactly does respecting a state (as opposed to respecting a person) consist in? Its bears noting that a state is merely an abstract entity constituted by its institutions of government; it’s judiciary, legislature, and executive and administrative bureaucracies. Further, these institutions of government are Arete sustained by the many officials that “run the show,” so to speak. So, while I deny that the mere fact that X has legitimate political authority is a sufficient reason for me to obey the legal prescriptions issued by X, I'm certainly obligated, whether directly or indirectly, to not prevent state officials from carrying out their official duties. Also, I would be acting impermissibly should I, whether directly or indirectly, causelessly sow dissent amongst the rule-abiding citizens of state X. While indeed much more can be said about what respect for a legitimate state constitutes, however it should be fairly obvious that a moral obligation to respect a legitimate state is far less compendious than a moral obligation to obey its laws. In this sense, the Respect Thesis is weaker than the Legitimacy Thesis. Finally, there exist two further advantages motivating the Respect Thesis. Firstly, defined as such, this thesis is neutral between so-called theories of political obligation—e.g. theories of natural duties, fair-play, etc—which attempt to account for the more burdensome obligations citizens may owe either to their state or to their fellow countrymen (say, the duty to serve in the army). The beneficial upshot here is that should one be a sceptic about political obligation, one need not be forced, as the original Legitimacy Thesis would have it, to abandon the intuition that an ideally legitimate state possesses a right to oblige her citizenry in at least some minimal manner. Secondly, the Respect Thesis helps to elevate the moral standing of justified acts of civil disobedience. Civil disobedients are often demonised by state apologists for having acted “against the interests of the state”. Such unwarranted brow-beating only serves to exaggerate the moral wrongness of one’s legal transgression, and to obscure the fact that disobedients may have an all-things-considered moral justification for having so acted. When one intentionally flouts certain immoral laws, say, segregation laws, in order to bring the issue of the evilness of such laws under public scrutiny, their so doing, according to the Respect Thesis, is fully consistent with the fact that the civil disobedient still retains respect for her state. While the civil disobedient of segregation laws may be flouting an immoral law, she may be entirely willing to be tried in court for her legal transgression. Also, she may be entirely sincere when she claims that others ought not to follow in her footsteps. The civil disobedient, in other words, is unwilling to disrupt state proceedings beyond what’s required to get her message across. More importantly, her act of civil disobedience is fully consistent with the fact that her state still possesses political legitimacy; adherents of the original Legitimacy Thesis, however, would be at great pains to explain how this could be so.

Conclusion The argument for philosophical anarchism runs as follows:

(Legitimacy Thesis) A state, X, has legitimate political authority only if those subjected to its jurisdiction have a moral obligation to obey the law. (Denial Thesis) It is not the case that we have a moral obligation to obey the law. (Philosophical Anarchism) So, no actual states have legitimate political authority, nor are such stateseven possible. There are, to wit, two main arguments—i.e. the instrumental and the non-instrumental arguments—for the Legitimacy Thesis; and three arguments for the Denial Thesis. In response to the anarchist, I argued that all the considerations canvassed for both theses cannot withstand critical scrutiny. Further, in place of the Legitimacy Thesis I proposed a weaker The Possibility of Legitimate States, and the Threat of Philosophical Anarchism principle—i.e. the Respect Thesis—as a means of accounting for the intuition that led to its original formulation. If my arguments thus far have been plausible, we may, then, have good grounds to reject the threat of philosophical anarchism, and to affirm the possibility of legitimate states. If however the arguments marshalled here are thought to be less than fully convincing, I would nonetheless rest content with having brought to the fore a potential argument for philosophical anarchism. A position which many, doubtless, would find disquieting.

Arete

Bibliography Aiyar, S. (2000) “The Problem of Law’s Authority: John Finnis and Joseph Raz on Legal Obligation,” Law and Philosophy, v. 19, no. 4 (July 2000) p. 465 -– 89.

Anscombe, G.E.M. ([1978]1990) “On the Source of the Authority of the State,” re-printed in Joseph Raz (ed.) Authority, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd.), pp. 142 – 173.

Buchanan, Allen (2002) “Political Legitimacy and Democracy,” Ethics, Vol. 112, No.4, pp. 689 - &19.

——— (2004) Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination: Moral Foundations for International Law, (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Carnes, John R. (1960) “Why Should I Obey the Law?” Ethics, Vol. 71, No. 1, pp. 14 – 26.

Christie, George C. (1990) “On the Moral Obligation to Obey the Law,” Duke Law Journal, pp. 1311 – 1336.

Copp, David (1999) “The Idea of a Legitimate State,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 3 – 45.

Coleman, Jules L. (1989) “On the Relationship Between Law and Morality,” Ratio Juris, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 66 – 78.

Durning, Patrick (2003) “Political Legitimacy and the Duty to Obey the Law,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 373 – 390.

Edmundson, William A. (2004) “State of the Art: The Duty to Obey the Law,” 10 Legal Theory, pp. 215 – 259.

(1999) “Introduction,” in William A. Edmundson (ed.) The Duty to Obey the Law: Selected Philosophical Readings, (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.), pp. 1 – 15.

Feldman, Fred (1986) Doing the Best We Can, (Dordrecht: D. Reidel).

Finnis, John (1980) Natural Law and Natural Rights, (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

——— (1985) “The Authority Of Law in the Predicament of Contemporary Social Theory,” 1 Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy, pp. 115 – 137.

——— (1989) “Law as Co-ordination,” Ratio Juris, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 97 – 104.

Flathman, Richard E. (1993) “Legitimacy,” in Robert E Goodin and Philip Petit (eds.) A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.), pp. 527 – 533.

Fried, Charles (1978) Right and Wrong, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).

Friedman, R.B. ([1973]1990) “On the Concept of Authority in Political Philosophy,” re-printed in Joseph Raz (ed.) Authority, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd.), pp. 56 – 91.

Fuller, Lon L. (1969) The Morality of Law, revised edn., (New Haven: Yale University Press). The Possibility of Legitimate States, and the Threat of Philosophical Anarchism

Green, Leslie ([1996]1999) “Who Believes in Political Obligation?” reprinted in William A. Edmundson (ed.) The Duty to Obey the Law: Selected Philosophical Readings, (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.), pp. 301 – 317. ——— (2008) "Legal Obligation and Authority," in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2008 Edition, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = . Greenawalt, Kent (1987) Conflicts of Law and Morality, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Inc.).

Harris, Paul (1990) “The Moral Obligation to Obey the Law,” in Paul Harris (ed.) On Political Obligation, (London; N.Y.: Routledge), pp. 151 – 183. Hart, H.L.A. (1994) The Concept of Law, 2nd edn., (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Himma, Kenneth Einar (1998) “Positivism, Naturalism and the Obligation to Obey Law,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 145 – 162. ——— (2001) “Law’s Claim of Legitimate Authority,” in Jules L. Coleman (ed.) Hart’s Postscript: Essays on the Postscript to the Concept of Law, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 271 – 309. ——— (2002) “Inclusive Legal Positivism,” in Jules Coleman and Scott Shapiro (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 125 – 165. ——— (2007) “Revisiting Raz: Inclusive Positivism and the Concept of Authority,” American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy and Law, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 20 – 27. Hohfeld, W.N. (1917) “Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning,” The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 26, No. 8, pp. 710 – 770. Holmes, Robert L. (1981) “State-Legitimacy and the Obligation to Obey the Law,” 67 Virginia Law Review, pp. 133 – 141.

Kagan, Shelly (1989) The Limits of Morality, (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Klosko, George (2005) Political Obligations, (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Ladenson, Robert F. (1972) “Legitimate Authority,” American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 335 – 341.

Marmor, Andrei (2001) "The Nature of Law," in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2008 Edition, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .

Nagel, Thomas (1986) The View from Nowhere, (N.Y.; Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Pitkin, Hanna (1966) “Obligation and Consent—II,” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 60, No. 1, pp. 39 – 52.

Raz, Joseph (1979) The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality, (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Arete

——— ([1984]1999) “The Obligation to Obey the Law: Revision and Tradition,” reprinted in William A. Edmundson (ed.) The Duty to Obey the Law: Selected Philosophical Readings, (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.), pp. 159 – 175.

——— (1985) “Authority and Justification,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 3 – 29.

——— (1986) The Morality of Freedom, (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

——— (1990a) “Introduction,” in Joseph Raz (ed.) Authority, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd.), pp. 1 – 19.

——— (1990b) Practical Reason and Norms, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press).

——— (1994) Ethics in the Public Domain: Essays in the Morality of Law and Politics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

——— (2004) “Incorporation By Law,” Legal Theory, Vol. 10, Is. 1, pp. 1 – 17.

Regan, Donald H. (1986) “Law’s Halo,” Social Philosophy and Policy 4, pp. 15 – 30.

Sartorius, Rolf (1981) “Political Authority and Political Obligation,” Virginia Law Review, Vol. 67, No. 1, pp. 3 – 17.

Scanlon, T.M. (1998) What We Owe to Each Other, (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press).

Scruton, Roger (2007) The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought, 3rd edn., (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).

Shapiro, Scott J. (2001) “On Hart’s Way Out,” in Jules Coleman (ed.) Hart’s Postscript: Essays on the Postscript to the Concept of Law, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 149 – 191.

Simmons, A. John (1979) Moral Principles and Political Obligation, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press).

——— (2001) Justification and Legitimacy: Essays on Rights and Obligations, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Smith, M.B.E. ([1973]1999) “Is There a Prima Facie Obligation to Obey the Law?” reprinted in William A. Edmundson (ed.) The Duty to Obey the Law: Selected Philosophical Readings, (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.), pp. 75 – 105.

Soper, Philip (1984) “Legal Theory and the Obligation to Obey,” Georgia Law Review, Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 891 – 909.

——— (2002) The Ethics of Deference: Learning From Law’s Morals, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Tyler, Tom R. (1990) Why People Obey the Law, (New Haven, C.T.: Yale University Press). The Possibility of Legitimate States, and the Threat of Philosophical Anarchism

Wasserstrom, Richard A. ([1963]1968) “The Obligation to Obey the Law,” reprinted in Robert S. Summers (ed.) Essays in Legal Philosophy, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), pp. 274 – 304.

Weber, Max ([1948]1958) “Bureaucracy,” re-printed in Hans Gerth and C.W. Mills (eds. & trans.) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 196 – 245.

Williams, Bernard (1985) Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, (London; N.Y.: Routledge).