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Political Authority and Democracy University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2016 Political Authority and Democracy Douglas M. Weck University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Weck, Douglas M., "Political Authority and Democracy" (2016). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2089. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2089 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2089 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Political Authority and Democracy Abstract Political institutions and actors have a moral responsibility to secure the equal freedom of those subject to their rule. It is in virtue of that responsibility that political authorities can possess certain moral rights to rule. Here, I argue that such political authorities can possess moral rights to create and employ the positive law to secure equal freedom. In doing so, I will address a number of common problems that theories of political authority face, including the subjection problem, the problem of consent, and the particularity problem, among other things. I also present an account of the role that democracy can play in an adequately framed theory of legitimate political authority. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Philosophy First Advisor Stephen R. Perry Subject Categories Philosophy This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2089 POLITICAL AUTHORITY AND DEMOCRACY Douglas M. Weck A DISSERTATION in Philosophy Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2016 Supervisor of Dissertation ______________________ Stephen R. Perry John J. O’Brien Professor of Law & Professor of Philosophy Graduate Group Chairperson ______________________ Samuel Freeman Avalon Professor of the Humanities Dissertation Committee: Kok-Chor Tan, Professor of Philosophy Samuel Freeman, Avalon Professor of the Humanities POLITICAL AUTHORITY AND DEMOCRACY COPYRIGHT 2016 Douglas M. Weck This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ny-sa/2.0/ For Heather iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My life has included a fair number of false starts. That is a good thing. As an undergraduate, I was bound for medical school only to end up in philosophy and law. It is not surprising then that this dissertation started out being about philosophical theories of tort law only to end up as a dissertation about the legitimacy of political authority. I have been interested in questions related to political authority for some time. As an undergraduate at Syracuse University, I took a course with Laurence Thomas titled, “Civic Duty.” It was a mix of communitarian texts, readings from John Rawls that no one else seemed to read (A Theory of Justice, Part III), and Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority. I am still not exactly sure why those items were taught together, although I hope to have the job security to teach such a class in the future. Nevertheless, the contrasting concerns about the importance of the state and abuses of power have remained in my mind since. Before that class, in high school, I wrote a thesis on the origins of national socialist ideology. That was the only thesis I have ever written prior to this dissertation. I was always interested in the history and power of ideas. At that time, I was especially interested in how ideas could be abused for the purposes of evil — in that case the evils of the Nazi regime. Thinking back, I cannot imagine that thesis was that good. While this dissertation is, in a way, on the same topic, I hope that it is of higher quality. The members of my committee have helped to ensure that is in fact the case. Stephen Perry’s influence on this dissertation should be evident. Stephen has been a brilliant mentor. He is always patient and kind when pushing my thinking in a better iv direction. Kok-Chor Tan has been an incredible source of insight and support. He always asks the right questions. Samuel Freeman can take credit for ensuring that some of the ideas here are less esoteric and for helping me to bridge the gap between the authority literature and the rest of political philosophy. I would also like to thank Samuel for being a great friend. Samuel, his wife Annette Lareau, and their son Dillon invited me to be a part of their family these past few years. Graduate school is hard enough without family, and I will always have fond memories of spending time with their family. For that I will be forever grateful. Graduate school is not a lucrative endeavor, but Penn as a whole has been very generous with its financial support of the J.D./Ph.D. Program in Law and Philosophy. I would especially like to thank the Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism Program, under the leadership of Rogers Smith, for supporting my dissertation work in the 2011-2012 academic year. Harrison College House, led by Frank Pellicone, housed and fed me for many of my years at Penn. In return, I was only required to participate in a really supportive community. Not a bad deal. Several parts of this dissertation have benefitted from feedback at various conferences. For helpful comments and encouragement, I especially thank David Estlund, Mark Murphy, Stefan Sciaraffa, Andrew I. Cohen, and commentators at McMaster University, Georgia State University, and Syracuse University. At an important time, Claire Finkelstein encouraged me to think more “big picture” when I was toiling away with nitty-gritty textual analysis. I’ve always believed that good philosophy is a balanced mix of both approaches, but I was tipping the scales early on. v Pete Kimchuk, my learning instructor at the Weingarten Learning Resources Center, deserves most of the credit for this dissertation being done. Pete met with me nearly every week during the 2012-2013 academic year to listen to me complain about writing my dissertation and to read rough drafts of chapters. I don’t imagine there is a dissertation student out there who should not meet with Pete each week to get the project done. I would also like to thank the Penn Philosophy community as a whole. Thank you to the graduate student body of the Department of Philosophy for support and collegiality. Several of my colleagues deserve special mention. I hope and expect that Brad Berman, Justin Bernstein, Paul Franco, Marcy Latta, Chris Melenovsky, Mike Nance, Doug Paletta, and Krisanna Scheiter will forever be my friends. Chris deserves specific mention for being my writing partner and sounding board for the good part of a year. Justin also deserves special thanks for reading penultimate drafts of chapters and giving the right amount of feedback and criticism. Matt Lister has been a regular source of good advice about navigating the J.D./Ph.D. program and the profession in general. Finally, Gerri Winters and Sandy Natson have been constant sources of warmth and entertainment. I hope that someday they get a real window. It is difficult to decipher the impact of one’s parents except to say that it is large. I don’t imagine that my parents have ever fully understood what makes me tick or why. Nevertheless, they have always provided a great deal of love and support. I am grateful to them for teaching me the value of hard work and the importance of always keeping in mind those who are most vulnerable. vi Finally, I would like to thank my other writing partner, Heather. I love you immensely. I am so lucky that we will be writing partners forever. Philosophy is more of a journey than a destination. This dissertation is certainly no destination. I anticipate that it will provide more questions than answers. vii ABSTRACT POLITICAL AUTHORITY AND DEMOCRACY Douglas M. Weck Supervisor: Stephen R. Perry Political institutions and actors have a moral responsibility to secure the equal freedom of those subject to their rule. It is in virtue of that responsibility that political authorities can possess certain moral rights to rule. Here, I argue that such political authorities can possess moral rights to create and employ the positive law to secure equal freedom. In doing so, I will address a number of common problems that theories of political authority face, including the subjection problem, the problem of consent, and the particularity problem, among other things. I also present an account of the role that democracy can play in an adequately framed theory of legitimate political authority. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iv ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... viii TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................... ix CHAPTER 1 - THE PROBLEMS OF POLITICAL LEGITIMACY ................................ 1 1.1 - The Moral Task Framework ................................................................................... 9 1.2 - The Forward-Entailment Problem, Coercion, and Legitimacy Light ................... 23 1.3 - A Threshold Model of Political Legitimacy ........................................................
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