Counsel and Command: An Address-Dependent Account of Authority

Abstract

In this dissertation I develop an account of the concept of authority and the distinction between theoretical and practical authority in terms of their proper forms of interpersonal address. I then exploit the difference in moral status between these forms of address in order to develop an account of the moral significance of the state. In Chapter 1, I discuss Stephen Darwall’s recent critique of Joseph Raz’s “service conception” of authority. I argue that Darwall’s argument suffers from a conflation of two forms of preemption, which I call “encompassing” and “determining” preemption. In Chapter 2, I argue that Darwall’s own, “second-personal” conception of moral obligation is best interpreted as conceiving of moral obligation in terms of the “normative felicity conditions” of what I call normatively “creative” acts of address. Normatively creative acts of address derive their normative force from the very act of address. Normatively “transmissive” acts of address on the other hand depend for their normative force on something external to the act of address itself. In Chapter 3, I defend an account of the distinction between theoretical and practical authority in terms of the two distinctions introduced in Chapters 1 and 2. These two distinctions give rise to four distinct categories of interpersonal address—counsel, testimony, request, and command—of which the first is proper to theoretical and the last proper to practical authority. In Chapter 4, I discuss the moral asymmetry between request and command and argue that command depends on what Kant calls a “rightful condition”—i.e. the state—for its normative felicity. In Chapter 5, I offer an interpretation of Kant’s account of right by way of a particular reading of his claim that the state of nature is morally defective.